Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End. Random House/Crown Business, 2004.
Referenced in: Leadership Development Through Failure and Setback
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Kanter, a Harvard Business professor and long-time editor of the Harvard Business Review, studied winning and losing teams and organizations. She was perplexed by how winners can be long established, but then encounter a losing streak that sets in motion a cycle of failure. Others emerge from the setback and restore their ability to win. She conducted over 300 interviews with leaders in business, sports, and politics. She discovered the keys are a confident response to the circumstances, and leaders who facilitate the emotional and relational climate for that confidence. It explains how organizations such as the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team can maintain winning streaks even with less talent compared to previous years, and how companies like Gillette can reverse losing streaks.
Winning streaks create their own positive momentum and increase confidence, inspiring the necessary effort, as well as support from others, to insure the next victory. Losing cycles create a similar kind of negative momentum, destroying confidence and the capacity of people to bond and attract necessary support, leading to even more losses. In this sense, winning and losing become self-fulfilling prophecies, trajectories, or pathways. They are not one acts, but habitual patterns that can begin, end, and be restored.
Winnings streaks are perpetuated by confidence on four levels:
- Self-confidence — an emotional climate of high expectations.
- Confidence in another — positive, supportive, team-oriented behavior
- Confidence in the system — organizational structures and routines that encourage accountability, collaboration, and innovation.
- External confidence — a network to provide resources
Also, winners work harder and longer than users, believing their efforts will pay off and increase their chances at success. This causes others to look more closely at, invest more time in, and give more benefit of the doubt to, winners. A similar effect occurs among the teams who win together. They practice the three pillars of confidence — accountability, collaboration, and initiative — that allow them to work together comfortably. They also enjoy leadership continuity, without a lot of turnover that requires constant readjustments. Such a culture attracts money for investment, interests top talent, creates powerful networks, and secures better deals with potential alliances.
Winning streaks end when the winners become less disciplined in maintaining their winning habits. A kind of overconfidence and arrogance sets in that causes them to ignore or deny painful truth and put forth disciplined effort to deal with weaknesses. They must continue dialogue and self-examination in the confident spirit that a solution can be found.
Losing streaks are characterizes the mantra, “Powerlessness Corrupts”…confidence, collaboration, dialogue, etc. Team members feel powerless against the losing momentum, and begin practicing the polar opposites of the winning habits. They avoid talking about unpleasant truth about their weaknesses, start criticizing and blaming rather than taking responsibility, grow timid amidst the mediocrity, isolate themselves, become increasingly self-focused, foster rivalries within, allow anxiety to paralyze their initiative, increase negativity, and even put their greatest energies in other endeavors.
Turnarounds are essentially the art of an infusion of new leadership that restores eroded confidence. Usually, at first, it demands a series of unpopular decisions to correct a situation that no one inside the organization fully acknowledges. Groups in failure cycles have a way of either demonizing leaders who tell the truth, or heroizing unhealthy rescuers who create false positives of a turnaround but soon reveal their incapacity to instill trust. For these and other reasons, failing groups experience a recurring cycle of rapid leader turnover.
To effect a lasting turnaround, there must begin a new culture consisting of three practices. The first is accountability, or straight talk that faces the hard facts about the current situation and taking responsibility (not shifting blame). The second is collaboration, where creative synergy replaces isolation, inward competition, and rivalries, and people feel joined together in a shared vision of success. The third is initiative, overcoming learned helplessness by providing tools and resources and creating permissive environments to try their hand at all potential solutions.
This kind of turnaround can occur in individuals, groups, small businesses, larger corporations, and even entire countries. It requires leaders who first have confidence in themselves and in others. Kanter’s three pillars are just as applicable to a church, and each of them can be seen in biblical examples such as Nehemiah in the rebuilding of the wall, and Paul in his relationship with the Philippians.
This text is good alongside: Learned Optimism, Failing Forward, Speed of Trust, Becoming a Resonant Leader
From the Publisher
From the locker room to the living room to the boardroom—how winners become winners … and stay that way.
Is success simply a matter of money and talent? Or is there another reason why some people and organizations always land on their feet, while others, equally talented, stumble again and again?
There’s a fundamental principle at work—confidence—that makes the difference between winning and losing in any competition, be it a high school basketball game or a high-stakes business situation. In Confidence, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter shows why organizations of all types may be brimming with talent but not be winners. Based on her extraordinary investigation of success and failure in companies such as Continental Airlines and Verizon and sports teams such as the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles, as well as the arenas of education, health care, and politics, Kanter explores a new theory and practice of success and provides people in leadership positions with a prescriptive program for maintaining a winning streak or turning around a downward spiral.
Packed with brilliant, practical ideas, Confidence provides fresh thinking about success in all facets of life—from the factors that can make or break corporations and governments to the keys for successful relationships in the workplace or at home.
About the Author
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Kanter is the author of such groundbreaking books as Men and Women of the Corporation, When Giants Learn to Dance, and Evolve!
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