Beating the losing streak
Phil Lewis
Solving stubborn business problems with human insight, strategic skill, and years of experience.
Five signs you’re in a rough patch – and how to address them
“Who do I have to f*** to catch a break around here?”
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in my kitchen – Friday night, glass of wine on the go, wall-eyed with irritation and worry. We’d just lost another big bid: our fifth in as many weeks. This was on the back of what felt like a protracted period of poor performance. It appeared to me that what had been working for us for a long time was no longer doing so. I wasn’t sure why.?
And I sure didn’t know how to fix it.
“I feel like I’ve got this toolbox,” I went on (and on). “And I’m like, maybe the spanner will work. No. Maybe the wrench. No. Maybe the screwdriver. No. Maybe the hammer. No. And now I’m staring at an empty toolbox, wondering what to do.”
‘Avoid DIY’ might be your response (you’d be right). But, overwrought analogies aside, that memory of enervated, exhausted despair has always stayed with me. I can still fall prey to it from time to time.
There is nothing quite as bad as the feeling that you are on a losing streak.
You might be relieved to hear that this is not going to be one of those articles about ‘winning habits’. There’s plenty of that sort of stuff available already – bits of it great, a lot of it not. I’m not sure I have a great deal to add.
Instead, I want to examine the notion of losing streaks, by way of five warning signs that might be of help if it feels like the world is against you.
The world isn’t against you, by the way. It’s just indifferent to your success or failure. This is a more liberating sentiment than it might appear, if you engage with it in the right way.
Warning sign #1: Getting lost in the story
Shortly after the financial crash of 2008, a CEO I know continued to see his business prosper when all his competitors were failing.?
I rang him and asked him his secret. “Simple,” he said. “I am just not participating in this recession.”
We live our lives in stories. And let’s be clear: ‘a losing streak’ is a story – a tragic one. It’s also a narrative with a seductive pull, in that we get to cast ourselves as a victim of circumstances beyond our control, a martyr to fortune, or an unwitting saboteur of our own success. (All human beings are innately solipsistic. This means that we like to place ourselves at the centre of the world’s drama, despite the self-evident truth that this is nonsense.)
The world isn’t against you. It’s just indifferent to your success or failure. This is a more liberating sentiment than it might appear.
Buying into narratives like this is a warning sign of worse to come, for several reasons. Chief amongst them is that the story doesn’t resource us to be creative and enterprising. After all, if you are doomed to fail, why bother trying to make anything better? The story also drains the people we lead of their courage, conviction and creativity. Then there is the fact that our minds naturally focus on making our imagined circumstances real. The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy is notorious for a reason.
As my CEO friend intuited, what is a recession, if not a narrative about a country-wide losing streak, predicated on the questionable idea that growth is the yellow brick road? And the main problem with the recession story is that it saps businesses and consumers of confidence. This reduces willingness to invest or spend, which only serves to perpetuate the downward spiral.
Groupthink can play a big role here. As human beings we have an unconscious desire to conform to dominant narratives. This can lead to the adoption of stories that it might be healthier to challenge. Groupthink can be a particular challenge for well-established leadership teams, where people settle into familiar roles or behavioural patterns. Sceptical or questioning voices might not get the air time they deserve.
Remedy
Challenge yourself and those around you to write a different story. Years ago, a friend of mine listened to whatever gloomy prophecy I was spinning at the time. I can’t recall what it was, but I’ve never forgotten her kind, wise response. “The thing is,” she said. “Everything ebbs and flows. Money, opportunity, success. It’ll come around in time.”
Is this ‘losing streak’ of yours really a losing streak – or simply the law of averages working itself out in a statistical pattern that is inconvenient to you? Is what you’re experiencing more akin to winter before spring? Or is it just a bit of bad luck, like everyone in business experiences from time to time?
Warning sign #2: Saying “it’s our last chance”
I have a trainer who helps me with running. As part of this we do a lot of jumping around (the technical term is ‘plyometrics’’). There are many reasons why plyometric work is good for us and that we should keep at it into old age. “At some point,” he muttered darkly one day, “everyone takes their last jump”.
When the losing streak narrative takes hold, it is tempting to look at every opportunity as though it’s your company’s, department’s or team’s last leap at survival. And this gives rise to another story, one entitled “We need to win this, or else…”
Sometimes, of course, wins are crucial. After all, no business can bear an endless stream of failures – our balance sheets are only so strong. But the route to success is rarely found by way of vast self-imposed pressure and anxiety about negative outcomes. As a leader you might consider this sort of pressure to be healthy. Its impact tends to be the opposite.
As human beings we have an unconscious desire to conform to dominant narratives. This can lead to the adoption of stories that it might be healthier to challenge.
To understand why, we can turn to research into emotional intelligence, which predicts our ability to lead oneself and others, particularly when the going gets tough. The psychologists at Roche Martin spent years mapping this uniquely human attribute. They uncovered the competencies that together determine how emotionally intelligent we are. There are ten of them.?
One of them is optimism. What’s interesting about optimism is that it doesn’t just refer to our ability to remain positive despite what the world throws at us. Optimism also determines our ability to spot opportunity in unlikely situations, to be resilient and to remain connected to the bigger picture.
The assertion that “we need to win this, or else…” runs counter to this. It is where a healthy degree of pressure tips over into a pessimistic, Custer’s last stand view of the world. Optimism suffers – and with it the ability to spot hidden routes to success, to approach the task ahead with energy, and to corral teams into genuine high performance.
Remedy
Pull back from the pixels to see the picture. Map everything that’s happened over the last, say, three years. Look at your wins. Look at your total billings. Look at everything you’ve achieved. If this doesn't work out, it’s not the end. It almost never is. Keep going.
Warning sign #3: Getting tempted to slash prices
Gordon’s Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is the worst kind of formulaic trash TV, but it does illustrate one interesting pattern in human behaviour. Almost every struggling restaurant will look to its pricing, and do one of two things. They either slash it in the hope of driving footfall. Or raise it beyond all sense and reason in the hope of maximising margin.
Thing is, neither approach works. There is a simple reason why: more fundamental issues with the restaurant mean that sufficient numbers of people don’t want to eat there.
Look at your wins. Look at your total billings. Look at everything you’ve achieved. If this doesn't work out, it’s not the end. It almost never is. Keep going.
This is not to argue that pricing doesn’t matter. It does, and pricing strategy can have a big impact on business performance. But nearly two decades of work in consumer psychology has taught me how easy it is to overestimate the influence of price on purchasing behaviour.
The following warning signs are variations on the same misguided, price-focused response to tough times:?
In almost every case, you will find that such tactics move the needle little, if at all. This is because of a simple truth: people buy to satisfy their needs, not to achieve a certain price. Another way of putting this is that price is only an issue when the value isn’t clear.
So that ‘losing streak’ you’re experiencing (if indeed it is one) is unlikely to get corrected by an overt focus on your pricing. Seeking to buy business at all costs won’t work – and even if it did, you’ve achieved little more than swapping one set of problems for another.?
Remedy
Stop focusing on what you charge. Concentrate instead on identifying those with an overwhelming need for what you do, and how you articulate your value to them. As any of the Ramsay episodes prove, when you get the environment and the menu right, and focus on attracting the right kind of customers – margin tends to follow.
Warning sign #4: Allowing the leadership team to go to war…with itself
There are many reasons why we all go through periods of feeling like we’re losing. Sometimes the origins might lie in strategy or strategic execution. We might be experiencing the consequences of economic or other market forces. Money might have proven harder than forecast to access. Some part of the business might be failing to perform. An issue might have impacted our clients or our supply chain. We might be suffering a loss in confidence or clarity of intention.?
Often, these issues feel like they’re interwoven in a sort of Gordian knot. Indeed, the one thing you can say about any period of repeated losses is that both its causes and remedies will not be clear to those on the inside. After all, if the answers were obvious, they’d be implemented already.
Psychological factors compound the complexity. One major issue is the fact that, when things go wrong, we can feel a sense of survival threat. This kind of threat assumes two forms. There is our actual survival, which goes to our ability to make a living. Then there is its more subtle but pervasive form: egoic survival, which goes to the status we believe we hold within our ‘tribe’. Our desire to preserve our status is primal – and often self-defeating. It can act as a catalyst for some all-too-human coping strategies: denial, projection and blame.?
Indeed, if there’s one thing that we all love – you might go so far as to say crave – it’s the feeling of being right. Having our perspective endorsed by others or by circumstance is a dopamine hit like no other. It reinforces our sense of self and affirms our status. It is rocket fuel for denial, projection and blame, because it incentivises us to make the issues we’re experiencing somebody – anybody – else’s fault. Without realising it, maintaining our status in this way can quickly become our primary preoccupation. Now imagine that everyone on your leadership team, consciously or not, is playing the same game. No wonder it can prove impossible to diagnose and remedy the issues with any accuracy.
Our desire to preserve our status is primal – and often self-defeating. It can act as a catalyst for some all-too-human coping strategies: denial, projection and blame.?
Ultimately, tough times function as a sort of barium meal for the quality of relationships and communication in a business. If issues are already present, tough times will exacerbate them. In the worst case scenario, they will turn a Board or leadership team into a circular firing squad. Its key characteristic: endless arguments with a superficial focus on problem solving but where the underlying intention is to establish or reestablish a dominance hierarchy.
Remedy
More than any other warning sign in this article, this is one that, if lit, requires urgent attention. Resolving it might require external assistance – usually coaching, consulting or mentoring of some sort – alongside a deep commitment to change. Indeed, it can often transpire that what looked like a symptom of the tough time (leadership misalignment and relationship problems) was in fact its cause.?
If this sounds like your team, get in touch. If I can’t help, I will know someone who can.
Warning sign #5: Believing that one win resolves the problem
Anyone experiencing a tough time in their business is sure to have a single question going round and round their head: why?
It’s a helpful question, why – if asked in the right spirit. (Clue: the tone of righteous self-pity adopted by your author at the beginning of this piece is not the right spirit.) When asked in an open-minded, humble tone, the question of ‘why’ is the root to uncovering (and resolving) the sort of deep-rooted systemic problems that hinder performance.
Tough times function as a sort of barium meal for the quality of relationships and communication in a business. If issues are already present, tough times will exacerbate them. In the worst case scenario, they will turn a Board or leadership team into a circular firing squad.
Earlier in this piece I highlighted that a lot of factors can influence the outcomes we experience in business. Examples include economic forces, strategic acuity, leadership misalignment, or just dumb luck. In reality, a combination of these factors is likely to be at play, and it can be hard work to discern and unpick them. I also suggested that we are intensely status conscious creatures who don’t like perceived threats to our social standing.
All of this brings with it a significant psychological and emotional disincentive to do the work that is necessary to understand what led us to this point.?
This brings us to the final warning sign (for now): closing the book on the ‘losing streak’ as soon as the first win occurs. Sighs of relief all round, mine’s a whisky, tomorrow’s a new day.
Such behaviour is understandable. On top of the various psychological factors mentioned above, the relief that results from a big win after a period of losing can be intoxicating. In continuing to examine the root causes of those losses, it can feel as though we are dragging ourselves back into negativity. It’s only human to want to turn the page on a difficult chapter.
The only problem with doing so is that, as the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If you don’t spot and address any systemic or relationship issues that contributed to your failures, those failures will recur. And they will keep recurring until you either address them, or they knock you out of the game.
Remedy
Take a breath and congratulate yourself on a job well done. Embrace the win as proof that your team has what it takes to do well, and as a means of lowering the emotional temperature on the post-mortem you still need to perform. Now gather together and do that work. Engage external facilitation as necessary.
If you’re going through a tough time, I hope that the above suggestions are helpful. If you encounter any of these warning signs in your own business, experience suggests that addressing them will help you turn a corner. If you’d like to talk in any more detail about how best to do this, get in touch.
More than anything, it is always worth remembering that bad times in business are normal. We all go through them. Remembering this can light the path to another realisation: while what’s happening might feel personal, it isn’t – in any way, shape or form. The world will turn. Spring will follow winter. And in the end, it’ll be okay. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.