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)
