Markets shift, incidents happen, and the scoreboard is always on. The best teams don’t “rise to the occasion”, they fall to the level of their preparation. Whether you’re on the pitch or in the boardroom, resilience is less about being the hero and more about the habits you build before game day. In our recent webinar, Veeam SVP Shiva Pillay and Fox Sports Studio Analyst and former World Cup athlete, Alexi Lalas, shared insights on how to win under pressure, from the elite competition of the World Cup to mission-critical IT. In the sections ahead, we’ll pull a few World Cup-grade lessons and turn them into practical ways any organization can build teams that thrive under pressure.
The Scoreboard is Always On
Pressure isn’t occasional anymore, it’s constant. The market shifts overnight, technology changes mid-quarter, and customer expectations show up and expect response in real time. Nowadays, whether you’re running IT, leading a team, or juggling both, it can feel like you’re always under lights.
However, it’s important to remember that pressure isn’t the enemy; it’s a revealer. It reveals how clear your priorities are, whether your team really knows the plan, and whether the culture you’ve built when things are calm can remain the same when they’re not.
Your Team’s World Stage
The world stage isn’t just for athletes anymore. In fact, most teams are now operating in their own version of prime time, where performance is visible, expectations are immediate, and mistakes don’t stay private for long. In the webinar, Shiva put it plainly: “I think for us… the world stage for our customers is protecting their data. All the spotlight, all the eyes in the world.” That sentiment reaches beyond any one role or industry. When you’re responsible for systems, services, customer experience, or continuity, you’re doing your work under bright lights, too.
The difference is you don’t get a kickoff time. Pressure can show up on a random Tuesday, with no warmup and no margin for confusion. That’s why resilience can’t be a slogan. It has to be a discipline, built into how teams prepare, communicate, and respond before the moment arrives.
Turning Pressure into Progress
Big moments can feel like pure stress, but they’re also a privilege. Alexi captured that mindset in the context of the World Cup: “This is a coming together of the world, and I think of 2 words: Opportunity and responsibility.” You get a chance to perform on a big stage, and you’re accountable for how you show up. Work is no different. When something goes wrong, teams aren’t just fixing systems. They’re protecting trust, revenue, reputation, and everyone’s time.
That’s the reframe: Pressure can be useful. It forces priorities into focus and exposes complexity that’s been quietly slowing you down. It also creates a real opportunity to simplify, align, and get sharper before the next high-stakes moment arrives.
Train for the Hard Days
Teams that look calm under pressure aren’t just calmer by nature — it’s by design. Shiva’s framework is simple: Clarity, reps, and resilience.
Because when the moment hits, you don’t get time to sort out basics. “You cannot be on a field… [or] in a disaster recovery (DR) situation and then trying to figure out where the ball’s supposed to go, who’s supposed to be in what position,” said Shiva. Preparation should feel almost invisible.
Clarity means everyone knows what “winning” means and who owns which decisions. Reps mean you practice until it’s muscle memory. Resilience means you assume things will break, and you plan for that anyway. In business, “winning” is restoring critical services fast, communicating clearly, and keeping customer impact low.
The Playbook: Clarity, Reps, and Resilience
Resilience isn’t a personality trait. It’s discipline, and it’s learnable. The simplest way to build it is with a playbook that teams can actually use under pressure, plus the willingness to practice it.
Clarity that holds up under stress
You can’t improvise positions after kickoff, and you can’t wait for an incident to decide what matters most. Clarity is how teams move fast without getting sloppy:
- Define what matters most: Including top systems, workflows, customers, and obligations.
- Assign decision rights: Who declares an incident, who can shut down access, who sets recovery order, and who owns communications.
- Pre-write the first three messages: Audiences include internal team, executives, and customer-facing.
- Define “back to safe,” not just “back online”: Getting running might not be enough on its own—make sure your systems are safe too.
- Tighten handoffs: Make it obvious when work moves between teams.
Relentless reps
Alexi put preparation into perspective: “What you see when I’m on television is the very tip of the iceberg.” The part people notice is powered by the part they never see. The same is true for operational readiness:
- Run tabletop exercises that force decisions.
- Do timed drills to find friction.
- Practice with constraints and assume a key dependency is down or communication is limited.
- Rotate roles to avoid “single-hero” knowledge.
Rehearsal isn’t glamorous, but it’s the difference between panic and execution.
Resilience as a mindset
Assume your systems will break and plans will get punched. Resilience is responding with confidence, then learning fast:
- Build Plan B paths (e.g., tools, comms, decision chains).
- Keep a living runbook.
- After drills or incidents, write one-page lessons learned with owners and dates.
Consistent Teams Over Heroes
Culture is where your preparation either holds up or falls apart. A hero culture can feel exciting, but it’s fragile. It depends on a few people being available, awake, and perfect at the exact wrong moment. Real resilience is steadier than that. As Shiva said, “Trust in general is core to everything”, and trust is built through consistency, not speeches. It’s built when people see the plan work, when leaders back their teams, and when accountability is clear without becoming punitive.
That’s also where leadership shows up most. Alexi described it as “[the] ability to both be calm, but translate calm to people.” Calm doesn’t mean minimizing urgency. It means reducing chaos so the team can think, decide, and execute. Day to day, that looks like teams trusting the plan because they’ve practiced it, people raising flags early because they won’t be punished for surfacing risk, and leaders creating clarity instead of noise.
In fast-moving environments, the goal isn’t to chase every new trend. It’s to strengthen fundamentals, remove friction, and amplify good judgment without outsourcing accountability. That’s the human part we sometimes forget.
“I think more so than any sport, this thread that binds us through soccer is unique and beautiful,” Alexi said. In work, that “thread” is trust, shared habits, and the ability to operate as a team when it counts.
Resilience isn’t what you do when the lights come on. It’s what you’ve rehearsed, clarified, and reinforced long before the pressure hits. The World Cup is a reminder that the teams who win aren’t waiting for hero moments; they’re running a playbook they trust, together, at full speed. Build that kind of readiness into your operations now, so when the next hard day shows up, your team can recover fast, communicate clearly, and keep moving forward.
