I just wrapped a day of coaching with one of the most engaged, ready-to-learn teams I’ve ever come across. This specific team operates as a special operations force within their company serving all business units. They provide data-backed consumer insights that help shape the user experience, informing what products are launched and how they are marketed. Their chief frustrations are that they are underutilized by their company and their informed insights are often overridden due to internal pressure and leadership biases. This leads to the team feeling stuck in a reactive state when communicating with internal stakeholders. Their aim has been to foster a new mindset around their goals and operations so that they can be involved earlier in processes and have greater impact through the development and sales cycle. In short, they want to prevent fires, not put them out.
Before launching into the strategy work that their leader wanted to do with them, my first course of action was to get them in the mindset of what’s possible. We played a game that I learned from Sandy Sullivan called Playing to Win v. Playing to Avoid Losing.
When you read that title, what comes up for you?
I asked the team to think about the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of sports teams in both camps. I always quickly learn who the sports fanatics are as I witness stats come rolling off the tongue. For the team playing to avoid losing, common words that come up are “tentative, fearful, stiff, defensive, conservative, blaming, survival, and low trust.” For the team playing to win, I often hear “risk-taking, bold, flow, aggressive, opportunistic, strategic, communicative, prepared, in the zone.”
I then asked the team how they show up as individuals in each state. Here’s what they came up with:
Playing to avoid losing:
- Procrastination
- Doing the easy things first
- Victim of the inbox
- Waiting for direction
- Paralyzed by overwhelm
Playing to win:
- Focused
- Aligned
- Prioritizing tasks
- Doing hard things first
- Sense of purpose
With this in mind, we then discussed how they operate as a team when playing to avoid losing. Here was the magical turning point: When they were dreaming up what it would look like to play to win, they conjured up the very vision that their leader had in mind for them. Even if they’ve heard pieces of it before, it came more naturally and felt generated by the team themselves.
The afternoon then became a delightful and inspiring application of forward-thinking, optimistic energy as they moved from vision to strategy against a tight timeline within just a few hours. They want the win and believe they can achieve it. They have a structure and system for holding this energy in place through meetings dedicated to building vision.
The question I offer you is this: which game are you playing?
