Great teams don’t need to win every point, just the ones that count

I’m talking about that tough decision your top team needs to make, that then holds up over time. The reorganisation that doesn’t end up tearing the place apart but instead brings people together.

Doing all of this as a senior leadership team is genuinely tough.

When you’re in it, even if it does all come together, it may not feel like you’re actually winning at all. Instead, it may feel more like there’s always one more mountain to climb, one more difficult relationship to work with.

I’m very keen that the business teams I coach know what it takes to win.

And I’m actually even more keen that they know what this feels like. Because that feeling is what sustains their efforts over time. And it also suggests that we might need to take a slightly different route to how we measure your success as a team.

First though, let’s talk about one little shift that I often point leadership teams towards.

Winning day-to-day at work often feels only marginally different from losing. But that margin is what makes all the difference.

There’s a great analogy to be drawn from the world of tennis.

Look at Novak Djokovic, holder of the men’s records for 24 Grand Slam singles titles and 428 weeks as world No.1. Yet across their careers, Djokovic and his great rivals Federer and Nadal have won only around 52–54% of the total points they’ve played.

For not quite every second point – they’re actually losing!

And this can be why it feels difficult to know how you’re doing as a senior leadership team. Why we inevitably end up focusing on the things that don’t feel like a win, and not noticing those that do.

So the insight to take is that you don’t need to win every point, you need to win the points that tip the game.

For a senior leadership team, what tips games is alignment: how well you move together towards the same thing. McKinsey’s long-running Organisational Health Index, covering more than two and a half thousand organisations and eight million people, finds the same thing again and again — the healthiest organisations deliver three times the total shareholder returns of the least healthy. And Alignment, crucially, is one of the three pillars holding that up.

So if you want to know what makes a team win games, and how that feels so it becomes sustainable over time, do these three things:

  • First, ask your team, “What does it feel like, when we’re winning?”

And it may take a couple of goes at that, because what you’re likely to get first time around is a lot of people saying what it doesn’t feel like. They’ll say, “Not like we’re fire-fighting all the time.”

Ask the question again, “And when we’re not firefighting all the time and we’re winning – what does that feel like?”

  • Second, count and celebrate the wins.

There is so much caution against doing this. People worry that counting a small win will somehow divert attention from the next point in the match. And there’s some truth in that. It’s a skill for your team to learn together. Pause, count the win, take that energy into the next point.

  • Third, Alignment, and the health of your team, is so much more important than scoring individual points.

It’s both a feeling and a good metric. Ask yourselves, “Do we feel like we’re standing shoulder to shoulder?” And then look at the games you’re playing – are you winning more than you lose?

Teams win games and the best-aligned teams consistently win more.

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation: clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better performance.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch. https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

LinkedIn Newsletter

Convictions: Leadership Teams is my monthly LinkedIn newsletter: longer, more personal pieces setting out what I’ve come to believe about leadership teams and the work of developing them. You’ll find it here:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/convictions-leadership-teams-7437896226198450177/

Further reading

McKinsey & Company, “Healthy organizations keep winning, but the rules are changing fast” (2024)

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/healthy-organizations-keep-winning-but-the-rules-are-changing-fast

If you don’t think your team is amazing, who will?

This is the best bang-for-buck leadership tool I know – and most people shy away from using it, because it means sticking your neck out.

It starts with a question: at work,

How do you regard the people and teams around you?

Are they good; are they smart; are they trying their best?

Or are they careless, lazy, unthinking, unfeeling?

One huge lesson I discovered really early in my leadership career was that:

  • You can make an intentional choice about how you regard the people around you at work; and
  • That choice pre-determines what you actually get!

This is one of the most important choices I know for leaders to make and as we’ll see, it matters even more for whole teams, especially the one at the top.

If you think the people around you are lazy and unthinking, well, what a surprise, that is how they will be.

If you choose to see the people around you as amazing, full of innate ability, trying to do good, that is absolutely what you will get back.

And not only that, it’s a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating dynamic, especially if you’re the kind of person who holds themselves to a high standard. Because that gives you the kind of impact that makes other people (often unconsciously) say to themselves:

‘Hey, you know what, Nick clearly thinks I am an awesome person. And if he thinks it, well, it must be partly true at least. I am going to try my best to live up to that. It makes me feel good. I’m going to raise my game with other people too, and show them how awesome I think they are.’

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking at this point (26 years of coaching does give me some Jedi powers), there’s always that one exception.

I say, ‘Hey think of people at work as awesome, and they’ll be awesome’, and you’re thinking of Bill. Bill is the guy who always seems to do less than he could, to take advantage. We all know a Bill.

The risk for you, if you start trying to think of Bill as amazing, is that he betrays that gift. This is a real risk. Do not use that as an excuse to tamp down on how you regard everyone else at work, though. Add Bill to your innate belief in the potential of others. And then if he doesn’t live up to it, decide whether there’s more work to be done with him. If you don’t do this, you will never hit your own full potential as a leader.

And there is an even bigger payoff waiting for you if you want it.

I have seen from so many coaching assignments that this mindset matters even more with teams. And the more senior the team is, the bigger the impact.

We know from Hackman and Wageman’s research that the senior team’s functioning is truly decisive. The whole organisation’s fate can hang on it.

So if you’re a member of a senior team, or even the CEO, how you regard your colleagues matters much more than you think. Whether you see them as amazing people with huge potential, or as lazy, unthinking and obstructive – it won’t just stay in that senior team. It reaches out from your boardroom to every corner of the organisation.

So you have to decide. Do you want a senior team that sees each other as less than amazing?

Or do you want to take a risk, and be the role-models for inspiring everyone’s potential?

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation: clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better performance.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch. https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

LinkedIn Newsletter

Convictions: Leadership Teams is my monthly LinkedIn newsletter: longer, more personal pieces setting out what I’ve come to believe about leadership teams and the work of developing them. You’ll find it here:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/convictions-leadership-teams-7437896226198450177/

Further reading

Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great – Ruth Wageman, Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss, and J. Richard Hackman (Harvard Business Review Press, 2008)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Senior-Leadership-Teams-Takes-Common/dp/1422103366

The Team You’re Actually On

Senior leadership teams have a keystone that no other team carries or rests upon in the same crucial way.

It literally holds the show together. And if you’re a senior leader who doesn’t know it’s there – then you are a problem.

Only at the point of that keystone – the senior leadership team – is the whole organisation joined together.

So this can start being a problem when someone gets promoted to the senior team for the first time, and continues if their CEO or MD either doesn’t get its importance or know how to deal with it.

Say you get promoted to Chief Financial Officer, CFO. That’s a big deal! All those responsibilities that come along with the car and the bonus.

Here’s the thing that can be VERY hard to wrap your head around if you’ve got a ‘C’ or a ‘Director’ in your job title.

If you are on the senior leadership team, then that is the team you are ON.

So far so obvious.

But what is much less obvious is that, as CFO for example, you are NOT a member of the finance team. You just head that up.

I go into senior teams and see it happen over and over. A room full of smart, capable people, but each one quietly still captaining their own function. No one really comfortable with sitting on the team they’re actually on.

It’s the difference between leadership and membership.

And when people get it wrong, what happens is that:

  • Silo-working becomes entrenched;
  • Mutual accountability on the senior leadership team becomes almost impossible; and
  • Performance down the line suffers.

 

That confusion, about which team you’re really on, is why your team agrees in the room, but those decisions and their commitment begin to unravel the moment people are outside of it.

We already know the organisational costs of silos are real and consequential. Work by Tett shows that fragmentation produces organisational blindness, with serious downstream costs.

And we can now see it in the data. When work went hybrid, studies by Yang and Zuzul et al. found cross-group connection (people talking across functions rather than within them) falling by around a quarter. That makes the job of holding a senior team together harder still for any CEO today.

The issue isn’t a failure of the individuals, and it isn’t just a conceptual challenge. It’s an identity problem. And almost nobody is naming it as one.

Senior leadership teams have to grasp this identity. THIS is who we are, and this is who I am as a Chief Something Officer – a member of that team. Get this right and the decisions stop unravelling, accountability comes to life.

Get it wrong, and that keystone never sets. The building comes down.

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation: clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better performance.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch:

https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

Further reading

Gillian Tett, The Silo Effect (Little, Brown, 2015) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00GFHG2CM

Yang et al., “The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers,” Nature Human Behaviour (2022) — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01196-4

Zuzul et al., “Dynamic Silos,” Management Science (2025) — https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02797

Self-Awareness, Part 1: Getting to Know Yourself

Self-Awareness is the best start for leadership development. But how do you get that? What should you look for; and how?

The ancient Greeks had the phrase “Know thyself” chiselled on the doorway to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Real knowledge, insight and understanding about important events and people in the world around them wasn’t possible they reckoned, without first having the foundation of self-knowledge.

If that’s still true today, how do you actually go about getting self-awareness? What should you look for; and how do you do it?

I think there’s perhaps three or more important areas to consider and I’ve set out some of those below. These are often used as early as the second or third phase in my coaching approach, as they’re so fundamental to the development work we need to do after that.

This is a fairly long post for me, over 1,200 words, because I wanted to give you a rounded sense of where to be looking, what to be listening for and how it feels to be embarking, in a structured way, on this kind of self-knowledge work. What I’ve written here isn’t the only way to go about it, and even at over 1,200 words this is still only a very quick jog around the park. Anyway, I hope you find it helpful in some way.

1. Your Values

These are the things that, at the moment at least, are intrinsically important to you. They can or might change over time or in a different context. Some may be more important than others, and that also can be fluid but, most of the time, they’re fairly consistent. Here’s my own top 5 Values:

  1. Making a difference / Usefulness / Legacy
  2. Excellence / Strive to be the best / Learn-Apply
  3. Congruence / Authenticity / Be true to yourself
  4. Independence / Self-reliance / Go do it
  5. Balance / Harmony / Wholeness

Note that these are in ‘strings’ of words, separated by “/” because often one word by itself isn’t enough to capture everything about a particular value.

A simple way to start to uncover your own values would be to remember a time, at work or at home, when things felt like they were going great, or just right, or were especially poignant in some way. What were the circumstances of that time? What was going on around you, who was present, how did you feel?

The chances are that during that time several of your values were being quite strongly upheld. People can often begin to identify those values by reflecting on that time and getting curious about what made it so great for them.

2. Your Thought Patterns

This is about how your (mostly unconscious) mind filters out what is useful information and what isn’t and how it then represents that information, so that you can make sense of the world around you.

Since this process happens very fast and mostly unconsciously, one of the best ways to uncover your own patterns is by way of a kind of compare and contrast with other people. Look at the way they do things, and see how it compares with your own way.

Here are two examples of the kinds of things to consider:

  1. Are you motivated into action more by (a) the chance to achieve a goal; or (b) the need to solve or avoid a problem?
  2. Do you prefer (a) to have lots of choice and variety, creating different possibilities in the way you go about things, or (b) do you prefer to stick to a tried and tested process?

Another important pattern became obvious to me when I got a new Satnav. My old one used to show me a map of my whole route when it had finished plotting. Only after you’d seen that ‘big picture’ screen, did it let you start navigating. But my new satnav didn’t give you that overview. Once it’d plotted a route, it just went straight to “Turn left”. I really found it difficult to trust the new satnav and would often ask my wife to just check the ‘big picture’ of the route in our tatty old road atlas, which she hated doing. Turns out, I’ve got a strong preference for thinking in big picture terms and, until I’ve done that, it’s really hard for me to get into the detail, even though I’ve trained myself (I’m an ex-accountant!) to work with detail. And my wife is the opposite, she’s fascinated by the detail, so she hated being asked to check the big picture of the route.

Again, these factors are not immutable, they can change and be changed. It’s important to not ‘adopt’ them as fixed determinants and to not use them to pigeonhole yourself or others, or to excuse bad behaviour.

It’s possible, although I don’t think it’s often that necessary, to go through about 20 or so of those key patterns as part of the coaching process in in easy conversational way with me. I don’t often do that, because I’d rather people take responsibility for their own self-knowledge than have me or some anonymous psychometric test do it for them.

As well as the kind of thought patterns I’ve described here, you could also look at key aspects of personality, such as introversion or extraversion. The important thing is to just look, listen, feel and think your way a little more consciously than normal really. The psychologist Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

3. Your Fears, Doubts and Limiting Beliefs

What holds you back? What doubts do you have about yourself, your abilities, the kind of person you are, the way others might see you?

What things are you so unconsciously afraid of, that you’ll automatically come out fighting, even when that isn’t the best way to do things?

In what way do you sell yourself short? Or sabotage your own efforts?

What unwritten rules have you made up about how you have to “be” (e.g. a favourite of mine: “I have to be strong”)?

What shame or hurt are you carrying around about past experiences that made you feel inadequate?

I love working with fears, doubts and limiting beliefs because I see them not as ‘bad’ things, but as really useful data about what’s important to people and about how they might really shine, if they want to.

If you’re ready now to start uncovering some of your own possible fears, doubts and limiting beliefs, try completing some of the sentences below. Do it fast and without too much conscious thought:

I’m often too …………………

I need to be more …………………

I can’t seem to …………………

I should stop (or start) …………………

I mustn’t keep …………………

I shouldn’t always …………………

I must be less …………………

Every time I try to do ………….…….,   ……………. happens

I want to …………………, but that’s just the way things are

I don’t deserve to …………………

I ought to …………………

If you find anything at all, start celebrating, because that just might be the bit of self-knowledge that opens all the other doors. And if completing the sentences didn’t uncover anything for you, just try going back to those questions I’ve posed at the start of section 3 above and become curious about how any of those might apply to you.

After working through those three key areas, the next level of self-knowledge is to get really clear about what’s even more important to you than your patterns of thinking and your doubts and fears and about how you might apply your values to your life and your work.

Self-Awareness, Part 2: Becoming Your Own Observer

9 Expert Questions and one handy Diagram for Building great Self-Awareness

The best starting point for any development and growth at work, whether as a leader, a team member or just as your individual self, is the place of “self-awareness”.

And I’m talking here of self-awareness in a wide sense.

If you’re looking at self-awareness just as an emotional intelligence tool, then you’ll be focussed too narrowly, just on the awareness of your own feelings. What I want you to get, is a self-awareness about the whole you. That’ll include your drives, flaws, experiences, ambitions, assumptions, patterns of behaviour, values, resourcefulness and more. But also, and maybe more importantly, the big picture of what it’s like to be you. And what’s it like to experience who you are.

This kind of deep self-awareness really is essential to any kind of development. It’ll answer questions right down at a tactical level about what you want to be doing with your time and effort and how best to interact with the world. And it’ll act as a kind of beacon, keeping you heading towards the more important, bigger picture of what you’re about.

Sometimes this kind of self-awareness is forced upon us when something we’re trying to achieve goes wrong. Then we have to re-assess things on a personal level. And at other times, self-awareness comes out of a ‘gap’, a sense that something’s missing or unfulfilled.

Overcoming the uneasiness and discomfort around this kind of self-knowledge is important both to make sense of what’s happened so far and to move forward.

If you wanted to get some more self-awareness without being forced into it by that kind of circumstance, how would you go about it?

One of the best ways is to pretend to be your own observer.
Check out the diagram alongside. (If you click it and then right-click it, you should be able to download a copy.)

First, imagine ‘seeing’ a version of yourself. Get a sense of who this person is, and what’s important to them.

Second, imagine you could observe how this person goes about interacting with the world about them and with other people.

There are many things you could be observing and getting a sense of, but to get you started here’s some of the things I’ll typically be asking my clients about to help them develop their self-awareness. We talk about them as if they were another person, so instead of saying “what’s important to you”, I’ll get them to practice being an impartial observer of themselves by asking, “what’s important to this person?”.

Here’s some of the aspects you might be considering as you pretend to observe yourself. It’s a fairly long and deep list, so don’t feel you have to get all of this straight away:

  1. What kind of things are really important to this person?
  2. What’s the story of how they got to where they are today? And what did they have to overcome, sacrifice or achieve to get here?
  3. What are they like, at their absolute best?
  4. What qualities do they have that make them a resourceful person? What personal attributes, skills and knowledge can they call upon?
  5. What holds them back or keeps them stuck?
  6. As they interact with the world, how clear are they about what outcomes they want?
  7. Thinking of a specific interaction that you want to understand more about, what was their intention at the outset? Did what they wanted to have happen, actually happen?
  8. How wide is the range of choices they have about how they approach things; do they have one typical way of operating or a wider range?
  9. What are some of the assumptions, hidden beliefs or ‘rules’ that they have about the world, about themselves and about others?

6. Why Leaders aren’t more Honest with Each Other

When I talk about senior leaders not being fully open and honest with each other, it’s tempting to frame that as a failure, a failure of courage or commitment. But the risks involved are real. To be genuinely honest with a peer on a senior leadership team is to risk status, to risk being seen as weak, to risk damaging a relationship you depend on, and to risk a professional identity that has taken decades to build.

This is a rational response, not excessive caution, and Hackman and Wageman’s research confirms this. The way senior leaders are selected, rewarded, and held accountable makes this kind of vulnerability very difficult. Given what’s at stake, of course people can sometimes play it too safe.

To explore this yourself, think of a time when someone gave you a direct piece of feedback that stopped you in your tracks, but which you realised was immensely useful. How did you react at first and why? And if you wanna go further than that exploration, just share that really simple story with colleagues.