Winning is winning!

Creating a Winning Culture should be the aim of every organization.

Once you have this culture then winning really does become a habit, people expect to win every time, people want to win every time, and every time people will try and find a way to win.

But in many organizations, and especially in sports teams, people confuse playing well, and playing the right way, with winning.

Winning is about the results, did we win or did we lose. What does the scoreboard say.

In my sporting days I played a lot of rugby, and often people would say we won but it wasn’t pretty.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as an ugly win, or a gracious defeat.

You either won or you lost, period.

Once you have created a winning culture, then you can look to focus on improving the quality of performance, the beauty of the way you do things. But this should not be at the costs of winning.

When chelsea won the Champions League Final in May against Bayern Munich, Munich played the much better football, they had the much better chances, they looked the much better team, but Chelsea took home the trophy.

They did what they needed to do to win, here I am not talking about cheating or anything like that, I am saying focus on winning.

Get the results, meet the objectives. Don’t worry about whether they were done with the style and grace you were hoping for, that would be a bonus.

Playing gracefully and with style and losing isn’t a great results, if you don’t believe me just ask the Bayern Munich players. They would have much rather played badly and won.

Winning comes first, everything else is secondary.

Teams or organizations who focus on style first usually not end up winning anything,  as they are focused on the wrong thing.

Of course there will be a lot of detractors, especially the other teams, who will say “yes you won, but it was ugly”.

This is just jealousy, they are trying to get you to change your focus, to lose your death like grip on that winning attitude.

Don’t listen to them. Winning is the objective, not losing in style.

As an Englishman who loves his sport, this is a mentality that plagued England for years, especially in Rugby and Cricket, but once we learned to play with the same determination as the All Blacks and the Australians our fortunes changed.

We developed a winning attitude, a winning spirit, and ultimately created a winning culture which allowed us to win World Cups in both sports, and a host of Gold Medals at the Olympics.

Winning is winning, losing in style, not matter how well or beautifully you played, is still losing.