Who doesn’t want to be a winner? The language of winning and losing resounds through playgrounds, classrooms and workplaces, teaching us that ‘winning is what counts.’ It can seem so easy and appealing, but what does it really mean? Cath Bishop finds out
In practice, a focus on winning leads us to value only outcomes and results, to admire those who come first, and to look on our peers as opponents. But does that really help us to perform at our best and explore our potential? Might it actually constrain us? And what could we be missing by only focusing on winning?
It’s easy to believe that winning is a universal force for good, but when you look a little closer, it doesn’t always look like that at all. In sport, multiple champions tell stories of feeling empty or depressed after they win. Other winning athletes have seen their titles stripped from them due to doping offences. They present a dark picture of where a winning mentality can lead. In business, how many of the battles to be the best have turned sour?
How do we view ‘serial winner’ Fred Goodwin who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to the largest annual loss in British corporate history and an unprecedented bail-out by the British government in 2008? Or leading investment manager Bernie Madoff who ran the biggest investment fraud the world has ever known? Or business giants such as Enron and Volkswagen who fell short over the longer-term due to cultures that allowed the need to win trump values, ethics and long-term reputation.
In politics, the narrative of winning slips repeatedly out of leaders’ mouths, wanting to ‘beat coronavirus’, win financial crises or declare victory in any number of international negotiations and conflicts. In reality, they face complex global issues ranging from climate change to inequality, global health to international security, none of which are issues that can be ‘won’. Businesses face similar complex challenges of managing environmental impact, balancing social responsibilities and shareholder returns, and connecting with local and global communities. A different narrative and a different mindset from trying to be ‘number one’ is needed.
Flatlining productivity
Looking across the organisational world, flatlining levels of productivity and declining engagement across sectors alongside record levels of burnout show us that commonplace company narratives to ‘be the best’ in the marketplace and ‘destroy the competition’ are not working.
It’s easy to take the dominant narrative of ‘winning’ for granted, even to think that it’s ‘natural’. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Contrary to popular opinion, we are not ‘wired to win’. Anthropologists have proven that it’s cooperation which defined the first humans. We are social animals; relationships and connection are key to our lives. While we do have a part of our brains that responds to short-term wins, delivering a dopamine hit that feels good, relying on that sort of short-term extrinsic motivation leads to ever diminishing returns. Just as with the path to addiction, the desire for the next short-term hit is short-lived and less fulfilling than the last, leading to a craving for the next and so on to destruction. Instead, we could choose to develop the different part of our brains that responds to meaning and purpose.
The Long Win proposes a different approach that plays to strengths that we could all choose to develop to help us fulfil our potential together:
- a desire for purpose and meaning in our lives,
- the ability to be lifelong explorers and discoverers, and
- the importance of human relationships throughout our lives.
Long-Win thinking uses three themes to explore and practise these areas, the three C’s: clarity, constant learning and connection.
Creating clarity
Creating clarity is an ongoing process of determining what matters over the longer-term and considering the wider impact on society. It ensures that we deliberately develop the part of us that thrives on purpose and meaning. Research and commentary on how purpose-led businesses outperform their purpose-less peers is extensive.
Author Jim Collins described purpose as the ‘extra dimension’ that marks out what enables companies to go from ‘good to great.’ One study looked at organisations across sectors that had flourished for a hundred years, ranging from the Royal Shakespeare Company, to NASA to Eton College. While most businesses focus on serving customers, owning resources, being efficient and growing, the ‘Centennials’ aim to shape society, share experts and focus on getting better rather than bigger.
New generations joining an increasingly diverse workforce (though not nearly diverse enough yet) bring different expectations and ambitions to the workplace too, and are much more likely to be making career and work decisions based on purpose rather than short-term incentives or targets. Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan and Google’s mission ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ show how some companies are recognising the importance of developing narratives and an ethos based on purpose.
Constant learning
A greater sense of purpose is then further fuelled and sustained by a Constant learning mindset which enables us to value learning, personal growth and development rather than judging success on short-term outcomes and narrow metrics. When goals revolve purely around hitting annual sales targets or winning Olympic medals, then we are in danger of overlooking long-term factors, such as culture, values and wellbeing, in order to achieve those goals. When that happens, those goals become less meaningful and motivation levels drop instantly. Simple metrics do not engage staff to go the extra mile, to connect as a team or adapt positively as the world changes around them. Creativity, innovation and resilience is lost when purpose and learning are absent.
Purpose isn’t just what gets discussed at away days, and learning doesn’t just happen on courses. Both need to be part of a daily mindset, where every meeting, every interaction and every chance to reflect is an opportunity to find meaning and learning to take with us.
Connection
The third part of long-win thinking focuses on connection, the glue that links up all three Cs. If we don’t connect as a team, it’s hard to create clarity about our purpose. If we don’t connect with customers and colleagues, then it’s hard to keep learning, anticipate emerging needs and prepare for an uncertain future.
Through my careers as an Olympic rower and British diplomat, relationships were always central. No Olympic crew would dream of attempting to train and race against the rest of the world without developing deep collaborative connections with others. This didn’t just work at the level of sharing the common goal of going fast and winning, but at the level of understanding deeper motivations and drivers and listening to diverse perspectives and views, all of which would be essential to maximising collective performance. In the diplomatic world, the whole foundations of negotiating are built on relationships, understanding others’ perspectives in order to develop cooperation and collaboration that might create new ways forward across some of the major global challenges of our time.
The Long Win offers a clear, but not formulaic, alternative to a toxic winning mindset. The three C’s are dynamic, emergent themes to be constantly explored and expanded. It is time to redefine success and start to pursue ambitions that go beyond simply coming first. There is a bigger game to play with more riches to be won than simply the next round of annual bonuses.
Cath Bishop is an Olympic medallist, International Diplomat and Cambridge University Business Coach. Her new book The Long Win: The search for a better way to succeed is out on 13 October, published by Practical Inspiration Publishing, priced £12.99
