Avoiding Complacency: Reinforcing Success to Sustain Team Performance

Success feels good. Teams celebrate, confidence rises, and routines settle in. But success carries a hidden danger: complacency. What worked yesterday becomes assumed, and the behaviours that drove performance risk being neglected.

Strong teams remain focused on their higher purpose and deliberately repeat the associated habits and behaviours that earned them previous success. They keep learning from wins and setbacks alike, making sure progress is built on solid foundations rather than fading momentum.

Dr. Pete Lindsay's recent LinkedIn post about his experiences working with Manchester City Football Club during their record-breaking 100-point Premier League season emphasised perfectly the importance of learning from our success. He wrote:

“It’s not the failures that stop teams growing. It’s the successes.”

Pete described how the very habits that fuelled triumph, such as discipline, sacrifice, high standards, can fade once the goal is achieved. Celebration gives way to comfort, edges soften, and focus drifts. Unless leaders actively reinforce what made the team great, the forces that built success can quietly reverse into their opposites.

The State of Play

Organisational research echoes this risk of success:

• Success can lead to decline. Jim Collins, in How the Mighty Fall, identifies complacency after success as an early marker of organisational decline. Without vigilance, strengths fade into weaknesses.
• The “Success Trap.” Studies in strategy highlight how mis-identifying core values and purpose can lead to businesses chasing after the wrong strategy. The demise of Kodak could have been avoided if they remained focused on delivering “Kodak Moments” that stayed true to their original “Share Memories, Share Life” tagline.
• Learning from both wins and losses matters. Research shows that teams who reflect on successes as much as failures learn faster than those who only address problems. Success without reflection often breeds overconfidence.

The lesson is clear: success isn’t self-sustaining. It needs to be nurtured and reinforced.

The Mindflick

Success is a platform, not a plateau. It’s the moment to deliberately name, repeat, and strengthen the habits that made the win possible, while learning from what could have been sharper.

Three practical steps:

1. Name the habits. Make explicit the reliable behaviours and standards that drove success so they aren’t lost in the celebration.
2. Reinforce through rituals. Don’t assume results will repeat themselves. Build deliberate routines that repeat what works. Replay key moments, celebrate specific behaviours, or include “what worked well” in every reflection.
3. Balance pride with curiosity. Enjoy the win, but also ask: how can we build on this? Success is fuel for progress, not a reason to stand still.

Success is only dangerous if it leads to complacency. By deliberately reinforcing what got us here, we ensure it becomes the platform for future growth, and not the reason for performance decline.