Match Point: How Executives Set the Conditions for Sustained Strategic Performance

January is crowded with competition in sports. College championships. NFL playoffs. Winter sports. For me, it’s tennis.

The Australian Open opens the season—and for the players who win it, something else becomes possible. A Grand Slam. Maybe even a Career or Golden Slam. The margin for error narrows immediately. The stakes compound.

The same is true for leadership.

Early moments set the tone. Not symbolically—structurally. The conditions executives establish at the start of a year, a strategy cycle, or a major pivot determine whether performance builds or quietly breaks down long before results show up on a dashboard.

This is match point.

Not because everything is on the line in one moment—but because what happens now makes everything that follows either easier or harder.

Match point leadership is not about effort. It’s about conditions.

When executives ask why performance stalls, the answers are often familiar:

• “We need people to step up.”

• “We need more urgency.”

• “We need tighter execution.”

Those diagnoses feel reasonable. They’re also incomplete.

Sustained strategic performance is rarely the result of effort alone. It is the result of conditions—the few structural and behavioral truths that shape how decisions get made, how teams respond under pressure, and whether strategy translates into action without constant executive intervention.

In other words: performance follows environment. The CEOs I advise know that when leaders get the conditions right, momentum builds. When they don’t, even strong teams struggle to convert intent into results.

Three conditions skilled executives create to make their strategy real and drive performance:

#1: Master the fundamentals that actually move performance

In tennis, fundamentals are non-negotiable. Footwork. Serve placement. Shot selection under pressure. Elite players don’t abandon them when the stakes rise. They rely on them more.

Organizations are no different.

Fundamentals are the two or three things that matter most for performance in your context. Not generic best practices. Not last year’s priorities. The few levers that, if consistently reinforced, materially improve outcomes.

Senior executives who perform well at match point do three things:

• They are explicit about what are the fundamentals.

• They monitor them relentlessly.

• They adjust them deliberately as conditions change.

When fundamentals are clear, teams don’t need more direction. They make better decisions on their own. When fundamentals are vague, leaders compensate with activity—and wonder why progress feels slow.

#2: Shape the collective mindset—especially under pressure

Every competitive environment includes setbacks. Missed shots. Bad calls. Unexpected moves from competitors.

What separates sustained performers is not avoiding pressure, but how leaders frame and respond to it.

Mindset is not about positivity. It is about orientation. Turning volatility into opportunity. Consider this:

• What outcomes matter most?

• What gets corrected—and what gets ignored?

• How do leaders behave when performance dips?

Executives who shape a high-performance mindset hold two things simultaneously: belief in the team’s ability to deliver and uncompromising accountability for results. That balance—explored in several of my earlier leadership pieces—is difficult, and decisive.

Teams take their cues from the top. Under pressure, leaders reveal what really matters.

#3: Lock in the leadership team

High-performance teams are rare not because talent is scarce, but because alignment is fragile.

“Locked in” means:

• Shared clarity on priorities

• Explicit ownership for outcomes

• A consistent operating cadence

• No daylight between what leaders say and what they tolerate

When leadership teams are locked in, performance accelerates with less oversight. Decisions move faster. Trade-offs are cleaner. Energy goes into progress, not internal negotiation.

This is the difference between teams that perform episodically and those that sustain results over time—a distinction I’ve addressed repeatedly in my work on leadership teams and strategic execution.

Match point is a leadership choice

In tennis, intensity doesn't win match point. Precision does. Doing the right things, in the right order, under pressure.

For executives, match point moments arrive more often than they realize:

• The start of a year

• A strategic reset

• A leadership transition

• A market shift

The leaders who perform well don’t add more. They set conditions deliberately.

So the question is not: What more should we do?

The real question is: What condition must be true—right now—for our strategy to convert into sustained performance?

That answer is where leadership begins.