I recently sat across the table from an executive I've known for a very, very long time. Long enough to notice new wrinkles and tell old stories. Let’s call him Dave. Over the past five years or so, Dave has grown his company eightfold, which is the kind of growth that usually comes with a cautionary tale. Like a burned-out team. Or drifting values. Or a revolving door of leaders.

But not this time.

Dave has been growing his company while paying almost obsessive attention to one main thing: the wellbeing and development of his executive team.

At one point during our recent conversation, Dave chuckled and admitted he’s probably collected too many direct reports. Most leadership books would tell him to reorganize. But one of the main ways he has managed that growth is by investing in his leaders through coaching and offsites that address both their personal development and the core challenges facing the business

He finds and vets facilitators with the same rigor as full-time employees, and leans on them to bring fresh perspective and guided experiences that inevitably shape the following weeks and months of collaboration and work. Every agenda includes real business challenges, the hairiest issues, the numbers and the roadmaps. But only after the deeper work. Trust-building. Clearing the air. Lingering team issues that are holding them back.

First they become a stronger team. Then they do explore how to work better together. In that order.

I was thinking about him on Sunday, when Spain won the World Cup.

If you missed it, Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time, in front of 80,000 people in New Jersey, capping an undefeated and amazing tournament. The entire tournament has been one of my all-time favorite events to watch. It’s been incredible — especially seeing Egypt get so far!

When I was studying what led to Spain’s win, I learned something that made me smile. During the group stage, Spain made its home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a river city of about 194,000 people, training at the soccer facilities of a local school.

The choice was very intentional. Chattanooga offered privacy, security, excellent fields, and easy access to Spain's first two matches in Atlanta.

But the organizers did more than find a quiet place to practice. It transformed the team's hotel into Raíces, or "Roots," a living collection of photographs, objects, stories, and symbols from Spanish football history, all designed to remind the players who they were, what they shared, and what they had come to do together. The retreat from the spotlight was useful. What Spain built inside that space is what made it special.

An executive of a growing business and the soccer federation of the best team in the world arrived at the same conclusion: before you can win together, you have to BE together.

At Ei, we follow the research behind this closely. Google's Project Aristotle famously found that “psychological safety,” the shared belief that you can speak up without being punished for it, is the single biggest predictor of team effectiveness, ahead of talent, seniority, or strategy. And studies on offsites point to why leaving the building matters so much. Stepping outside normal hierarchies and office politics makes people measurably more willing to speak honestly, extended and uninterrupted time together lets teams stay immersed in a hard problem until something actually breaks open, and time in nature has been shown to restore the attention and cognitive capacity that our inboxes spend all week draining. It's time, safety, and depth, three things almost impossible to manufacture between meetings. Because teams don't transform in the margins of a calendar. They transform when someone finally clears one.

This is why nearly everything we build starts with getting people out of their usual rooms, or at least their rhythms. Not because retreats are pleasant, though they can be, but because the science and the scoreboard keep telling us the same thing. Depth and growth require space and sometimes even distance.

So, this week, look at your team, look at your next quarter, and ask when you last gave your people somewhere to go and something deeper to do when they got there.

If you are planning to bring your team together this year, or you have the opportunity to, and you want some help making sure its time well spent, join us on July 29th for our open workshop on offsites. We’ll walk through what makes time spent together actually change how a team works. Grab your spot here.

Because the work that wins championships often begins off the field.