Thought Leaders Circle

Winning is not about being first or better than, it is about achieving your goals in a competitive marketplace. And while it is good to keep your eye on the strategy, you also have to have the internal resources embedded in your people and culture to keep on winning.

Here are some tips on winning, inspired by Hearts and Minds Research into employee brands and high performance.

Good Moods- Martin Seligman defines a good mood as a win-win energy between people. Underlying the good mood is a positive exchange ie:
I know when you get what you want, I get what I want.

Win-win energy brings us back for more. Powerful negotiators understand the win-win will keep the business flowing.

Good Moods are People Magnets – Because people like to be around people with whom they can accomplish things, when you set up a good mood with a win-win….people with a winning mindset will keep in your orbit. Winners have less absenteeism or tardiness in the workplace.

Learning and Creative Solutions- Because winners have the mindset that there is no failure only feedback, they don’t deny reality and seek the unvarnished truth. Winners deal with realities and are willing to examine their behavior and make corrections. Studies of swimmers who qualified for the Olympics shows that people who had excellence, kept examining and improving small routines and processes. (Ten Reasons Winners Keep Winning, Aside from Skill- Rosabeth Moss Canter _ Harvard Blog)

Positive Affect and the Open mind- When we are expecting positive rewards, as we do in the “win-win” state, our brain changes state. We are open, we are more likely to come into a positive solution, we are energized to go the extra mile and we think more holistically, more likely to see the bigger picture. When we are in negative affect, the anticipated lose, we shut down, we can’t see the solution, we become frozen.

Focus- Enduring relationships, held in place by win-wins, the focus and self reliance of the positive affect of winning, keep the winner creating more wins. The compounding impact of knowledge growth, the speed of delivery of trusted networks, allows the winner, and their team, to achieve more than their competitors with the same amount of effort.

Winners enter a virtuous circle, fueling even more success, and so it goes on, until complacency or arrogance brings them to their knees.

A complacent and arrogant market leader is prey for a disruptive challenge. Disruption shifts the game rules so profoundly that the existing market leaders need to enter start up mode and switch business models to compete. Having had their time in the sun, and being too comfortable to struggle in start up mode again, many just ride out the last bit of positive cash flow in the existing business model and exit. Some don’t decide, their arrogance leads to denial and they eventually fail.

So how do we get more of this positive affect stuff?

Look for opportunities to create win wins, practice them to become a master
Choose the company of people who keep you in a good mood
Keep it real- see the unvarnished truth
Keep exercising that creative part of the brain, the one that is always open to a better idea

Louise Kelly
Managing Director
Hearts and Minds
http://www.heartsandminds.com.au

Founder Thought Leaders Circle
http://www.thoughtleaderscircle.com