How to win (in the right way)

Valorie Kondos Field coached the UCLA Bruins gymnastics team to seven national championships. She did it, she has said, by eventually rejecting the culture that had shaped her own career. This was a world in which the obsession with winning was producing, in her words, ‘broken human beings’ and you read about this all the time, not just in sports, but in business and education too.

I’m confronted by similar stories almost every day. From the KPIs that turned colleagues into competitors, to the bonuses that corrupted behaviour and the ‘league tables’ that crushed spirits. Winning-at-all-costs is a real and documented pathology, and I have seen it ruin enough people - and the organisations they work for - to earn its bad reputation.

The problem isn't winning per se. The problem is who decided what that winning looked like, and how they went about it.

In her brilliant book The Long Win, Cath Bishop, makes the case that we need to completely rethink what success means. Not abandon the pursuit of it, but understand that sustainable high performance comes from widening the winning lens. Where it becomes less about a scorecard/scoreboard and more about growth, learning and the quality of relationships along the way.

This resonates with something I see in almost every team I work with. People want to win. They genuinely do. Not necessarily in the way their boss has defined it, or the way their industry measures it, but in ways that feel meaningful to them - hitting a personal milestone, delivering something they're proud of, growing in a role that challenges them.

The failure mode isn't their ambition. It's the absence of co-creation and agency over their conditions.

When leaders hand down a definition of success without inviting anyone else to shape or participate in it, they get compliance at best and quiet resentment at worst.

I’ve worked with two teams in the last two weeks, who - encouraged by their leaders - have defined the environment that they believe will allow them to win. One in sales, the other in customer service. They have created a new benchmark and are excited to hold themselves accountable to this.

This requires courageous conversations to overcome the deeply ingrained habits of waiting to be told what matters and take real ownership of the direction. Neither of those things is easy, yet, both are necessary for the team to genuinely achieve the ‘win’ they are looking for.

Valorie Field built a culture in which her athletes felt safe, seen and genuinely cared for. She didn't get there by lowering standards, she got there by raising the humanity.

That's what good winning looks like. A way of working together that people actually want to come back to.

Winning, done well, isn't the enemy of culture. It's the point of it.