So you want to win? No you don’t. Not really.
You want to win and win and win and win!
Winning is rarely about doing it once and walking away. Winning is about SUSTAINING performance: SUSTAINING competitiveness: about getting to the top and STAYING THERE.
Lots of people, teams and companies win once – very few are able to adopt the thinking, systems and practices that enable them to sustain competitiveness year after year after year.
Why is SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVENESS so important?
No one goes from being UNCOMPETITIVE to WINNING in one step.
Being COMPETITIVE means you can launch a winning campaign or successful sales program or grand final winning plan from a position of relative strength. It is almost impossible to go from last to first in a single year or season.
Sporting teams – particularly football teams – are notoriously BAD at sustaining competitiveness. With very few exceptions around the world, most teams feel the need to (unnecessarily) go through the PERFORMANCE CYCLE:
STAGE ONE: NON COMPETITIVE: The organisation is failing to perform and struggling to survive.
STAGE TWO: STRIVING FOR SUCCESS: A person or team ignites the desire to succeed and inspires the organisation to strive for success. The acceleration of progress comes from embracing change and learning and the commitment to turn learning into action.
STAGE THREE: SUCCESS: The organisation gets to the top but then loses momentum by ceasing to change and learn at the same rate. They adopt a “secret formula” mentality, i.e. “we know what it takes to win, therefore all we have to do is repeat what we did last year and we will keep winning”. In the meantime the competition is accelerating their learning and performance – determined to become the next No 1.
STAGE FOUR: THE FALL:
Things start to fail. Management and staff get sacked, reviews, reviews and more reviews are commissioned, finally the Board is overthrown, there is public brawling and the organisation is at the brink of collapsing altogether…… and we are back at STAGE ONE again.
I did some work with a top professional football team who was highly successful in the 1960’s. Now, almost 50 years later, many of the players who starred on the field in the golden days of the club were running the Board, the Management committees and even had a hands-on role in the coaching.
The biggest problem the club faced was that these people – with the welfare of the club in their hearts and only the best intentions, kept looking for ways of taking the club back to the 60’s – because “that’s the way we do it here”.
My reply was, “So your way is to fail to perform for 50 years?” After some heated discussion came the realisation that they needed to retain their proud traditions but embrace effective and meaningful change. Respect the past: embrace the future.
How can you SUSTAIN COMPETITIVENESS?
1. DEVELOP AND UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN UNIQUE PERFORMANCE CULTURE
Understand who you are as an organisation, what things make you unique: embrace your uniqueness – it is your edge.
2. BRING IN PEOPLE, IDEAS, RESOURCES ETC WHICH EITHER SUSTAIN YOUR PERFORMANCE CULTURE OR ADD VALUE TO IT
Once you know who you are, continuously strive to sustain your uniqueness OR add value to it by bringing in the right people, ideas, resources etc
3. WORK HARDER, MORE CONSISTENTLY, SMARTER THAN ANYONE ELSE.
Competitiveness comes from CONSISTENCY – excellence in all things, every day, from everyone in the organisation.
4. ACCELERATE YOUR PERFORMANCE THROUGH BETTER LEARNING
Learn faster – accelerate your performance by relentlessly seeking new, smarter and better ways to do what you do.
We work with people, teams and organisations to develop sustainable performance improvement through our unique, individualised performance enhancement process.
Experience the MOREGOLD difference.
Wayne Goldsmith