In 2016, my business had the best year it had ever had. A year later I was sitting in a parking lot watching my phone buzz with calls from creditors, hoping each one would stop before I had to decide whether to answer it.
I've told that story from a lot of stages, and the part that still bothers me is how little happened in between. There was no crash, and there was no bad hire or bad bet I can point to. I stopped doing the things I did on the way up, one small thing at a time, because winning had convinced me I didn't need them anymore.
Nobody sent me a memo saying I'd started to slide. That's what makes it so dangerous.
I'm writing this for the leader whose team is having a strong year. Nothing looks wrong right now, and that is exactly the condition in which a good team starts drifting.
Victory creates the conditions for drift
When a team is struggling, everyone can feel the pressure. The scoreboard is loud, the gap is obvious, and people compete because they have to.
When a team is winning, all of that goes away. The pressure eases, the gap closes, and the urgency that made everyone sharp starts to feel unnecessary. Nobody decides to get comfortable. Comfort shows up on its own, and it shows up looking like a reward.
I call this drift. Drift is the slow, invisible backward movement that happens when a team stops actively competing forward. Picture a treadmill running in reverse at 0.00001 miles per hour. You would never feel it. You'd stand there for weeks believing you were holding your position, right up until the moment you fell off the back.
Complacency is the word leaders reach for when they sense something is off. Drift is how the team got there. After a big win, I see it get in three ways.
1. The scoreboard goes dark
Every team competes against something. In a hard year, that something is obvious. You're chasing the number, the competitor, the deadline, or the turnaround.
Then you hit it, and if nobody puts a new target in front of the team, there's nothing left to chase.
A VP of sales once told me her team had lost its hunger. She wanted a motivational talk to fire them back up. Before I agreed to anything, I asked her what her scoreboard measured. The answer was quarterly revenue against last year, and nothing else.
Her best reps were beating that number by the third week of a strong quarter, which left them ten weeks with nothing to compete against. They still cared. They had run out of scoreboard.
When a goal is met, and nothing replaces it, the team doesn't hold still. It starts moving backward, slowly enough that nobody notices for a quarter or two.
2. Last year becomes the standard
The second way winning teams drift is harder to see, because they keep competing. They just compete against the wrong thing.
After a great year, the natural question becomes, "Are we ahead of last year?" It sounds like accountability, and that's why it's a trap. Last year's result tells you nothing about whether your team is still doing the work that produced it. You can beat last year's number on momentum, on a strong market, or on two big accounts, while the daily habits underneath it erode. Think about the experience most companies had in 2023-24. Unparalleled highs in 2021 and 2022 led them to think it would naturally go up - yet the market reset in 2023 and 2024 (still growth from 2019, but well below the ‘blip’ of those 2-3 years).
That's the comparison problem. When you measure your team against a past result instead of a present standard, you can look like you're winning while you're drifting backward.
The answer I teach is Beat Yesterday. Instead of asking whether you're ahead of a number, ask whether today's work was better than yesterday's. Were the calls sharper? Was the prep tighter? Did we follow up faster? A team that competes against yesterday can't coast on last year, because yesterday resets every morning.
3. The ego starts whispering
The third way is the one I fell into in 2017. Winning tells a story about you, and the story is flattering. You figured it out. You've earned some breathing room. You're fine.
Your ego whispers "you're fine" right when you've started to slip. Mine whispered it for nine months before the parking lot.
I call the distance between how good you believe you are and how well you're performing right now the Ego Gap. After a big win, that gap widens fast, because the evidence of your success is everywhere and the evidence of your drift is nowhere yet. The trophy is on the shelf, and the missed follow-ups are invisible.
On a team, the Ego Gap sounds like "we know what we're doing," "we've always done it this way," and "let's not overthink it." Any one of those might be true. Heard together in the same month, they're the sound of a team that has stopped looking at itself honestly.
Where to look for drift on a winning team
Drift doesn't announce itself, so you have to go looking for it. These are the three places I'd check first.
Check the small standards. The meeting that used to start at 8:00 now starts at 8:07. The prep that used to happen the night before now happens in the car on the way in. None of it is a crisis, and that's the point. Drift always starts in the places that feel too small to address.
Listen to what the team talks about. A competing team talks about what's next. A drifting team talks about what already happened, and you'll notice the stories about last year's wins getting longer while the plans for next quarter get vaguer.
Watch your top performers. They feel a dark scoreboard first, because they hit every target earliest. If your best people seem restless or flat, check whether they have anything left to chase. Boredom in a high performer is usually drift in disguise.
Three drift interrupts for a team that's winning
You don't fix drift by adding pressure. A winning team doesn't need to be yelled at. It needs to be pointed at something worth competing for again. Each of these interrupts answers one of the three ways drift gets in.
Clarity: put a new shore in sight within 48 hours of a win. In June 1987, the Lakers had just won the NBA championship. At the victory parade, Pat Riley took the microphone and guaranteed the city they would win it again next year. No team had won back-to-back titles since the 1969 Celtics. The guarantee gave his players something to chase before the confetti was even swept up, and in 1988 they repeated. A finished goal leaves your team staring into fog. The day after you hit a big target, name the next standard: what the team will do better, how you’ll measure it each week, and when it starts.
Competition: move the team from last year to yesterday. Pick the one behavior that drove your success, the one you'd hate to lose. Track it daily, and make yesterday the only comparison. When that VP of sales changed what her reps competed against, they started chasing daily personal bests instead of a number they'd already beaten. Six weeks later she told me the floor felt different. It was the same people and the same product, with a new shore to swim toward.
Community: make drift everyone's job to call out. Ego hides drift from the person who is drifting, which is why nobody diagnoses it alone. The teams I've watched sustain a winning streak build the habit of naming drift out loud, before the numbers force the conversation. Accountability works best when it comes from the person sitting next to you, not only from the person you report to.
What to do this week
You don't need an offsite to deal with this. You need one honest conversation.
Pull your team together this week and ask each person one question: "What's one thing you did during our hardest stretch that you've stopped doing since we started winning?" Write the answers on a whiteboard. You'll recognize the drift the moment you see it, because every item on that board will be something small that nobody decided to drop.
Then have each person pick one thing from the board to restart this week, and pair them with a teammate who checks in on Friday.
Celebrate the win. Then, before the week is out, put a new shore in front of your team while you can still see it.
Go compete.
If your team is coming off a big year and you want help finding where drift is starting, that's exactly what my Compete Every Day keynote is built for. Learn more here.
