execuBooks

wisdom. wherever.
Subscribe to execubooks.com: e-summaries of books for business people

Confidence
How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter Published by Crown Business, 2004 ISBN 1400052904

Introduction
Sometimes it seems as if there are only two states of being: boom or bust. When things are up, it feels as if theyll always be up. People come to believe they can succeed at anything they try. When things are down, it seems as if theyll always be down. Any company, group or person can be swept along by one of these fortunate or unfortunate cycles. What causes them to rise or fall is often a matter of confidence. Confidence is the bridge connecting expectations and performance, investment and results. Confidence is a familiar term used every day to indicate future prospects in a wide variety of circumstances the self-confidence of athletes, consumer confidence in the economy, public confidence in leaders, votes of no confidence at board meetings. But theres remarkably little understanding of what lies behind it. Consider the following dramatic examples, and the questions they raise about how confidence builds or erodes: The womens basketball team at the University of Connecticut consistently broke records, winning 10 Big East conference championships and chalking up a 70-game winning streak. For the 2002-03 season, the individual talent level of the team was well below that of its predecessors and many of its opponents, yet the team of valiant women continued to

rack up victories. They were confident they could win, even without the best players. Although its competitors cancelled hundreds of flights and lost millions of dollars during the Great Blackout of August 2003, Continental Airlines kept flying and even made money, despite power outages at its Newark and Cleveland hubs. Minutes after the electric power grid went down, employees were on cell phones sharing ideas about dealing with the crisis. Far from losing money and passenger goodwill, Continental increased both, exceeding forecasts by $4 million for the two days following the blackout. The companys employees had confidence in one another, which enabled them to spring into action as a team. At De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., successive generations of student athletes won every single football game for more than 12 years, even when they faced the toughest national competition. But at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, no matter how hard the spunky student athletes tried, or how much talent was on the team, they lost all but a handful of games over the same period. What happened to confidence during those winning or losing streaks to make further success or failure seem inevitable?

Cycles of Confidence
As patterns develop, streaks start to run on their own momentum, producing conditions that make

Buy the Full Book!

www.amazon.com www.bn.com www.chapters.ca
2004 execuBooks inc.

www.execubooks.com

Confidence

By Rosabeth Moss Kanter

success or failure more likely. Winning creates a positive aura around everything, a halo effect that encourages positive team behavior, which in turn makes further wins more likely. Winning makes it easier to attract the best talent, the most loyal fans, the biggest revenues to reinvest in perpetuating victory. Losing has a repellent effect. Its harder for the team to bond, harder for it to attract new talent, easier for it to fall behind. Winners get the benefit of the doubt. Losing breeds qualms. Confidence consists of positive expectations of favorable outcomes. Confidence influences the willingness to invest to commit money, time, reputation or other resources or to withhold or hedge investment. The fundamental task of leaders is to develop confidence in advance of victory, in order to attract the investments that make victory possible money, talent, support, loyalty, attention, effort or peoples best thinking.

behavior. Winning makes people feel more engaged with their tasks and with one another. It makes people like one another more, want to spend more time together, feel more generous, and therefore want to practice, prepare and help one another succeed. It breeds respect, which then makes people more willing to take responsibility and admit mistakes, because they feel secure. Those behaviors make it more likely that problems will be caught and solved, because people share information, take responsibility and admit mistakes, pull together and find solutions. Confidence in the system organizational structures and routines reinforcing accountability, collaboration and innovation. Winning tends to turn informal tendencies into formal traditions, by building winners habits of responsibility, teamwork and initiatives into routines, processes and practices that encourage and perpetuate themselves. This makes it more likely that leaders will remain in place so there can be a continuity of strategy and approach, instituAt the beginning of every winning streak, leaders have tionalizing systems for producing winners behavior. created a foundation for confidence that permits unex External confidence a network to provide pected people to achieve high levels of performance, resources. Winning makes it easier to attract financial and to do it as part of a successful team. Each time the backers, loyal customers, enthusiastic fans, talented team or the organization wins a victory, support for recruits, media attention, opinion leader support and confidence is increased. An occasional win turns into a political goodwill. Continuing to win stimulates this long winning streak. network to grow in size, scope and magnitude of inWinning begets winning because it produces confivestment. dence at four levels: At each level emotional, behavioral, organiza Self-confidence an emotional climate of high tional, environmental confidence feeds winning and expectations. Winning feels good, and good moods are also feeds off it. Momentum builds because each succontagious. Success cess in a sequence of sucmakes it easier to view cesses makes it easier to events in a positive light, to generate self-confidence, Find out why leading companies are investing generate optimism. It proconfidence in colleagues, in execuBook corporate solutions duces energy and proconfidence in the system, motes morale. Its easier to and investor confidence. With execuBooks, your most valuable aim high and expect to All those aspects of confiresource your people can acquire the reach the target. Its easier dence converge to prepare critical business knowledge they need to find the energy to work the people who must deto succeed in only 15 minutes each week. hard because it looks as if liver victory on the field, Compete successfully! the hard work will pay off. even if the team is a differThose attitudes reinforce ent set of people every The Easy Read to Succeed top performance. year, as with a college or Confidence in one high-school sports team. Toll-free: 1-866-888-1161 another positive, supWinning becomes an inE-mail: clientcare @ execubooks.com portive, team-oriented grained tradition, embed-

Winning Streaks

Join the Leaders!

execuBooks

www.execubooks.com

Confidence

By Rosabeth Moss Kanter

ded in the culture and supported by powerful external networks, even if individual talent comes and goes.

Why Winning Streaks End

Winning is hard work. Winners experience problems and must solve them. For the most part, it isnt external factors that stop winners but their own failure to maintain the disciplines and support systems that helped them turn winning into a habit in the first place. Its also hard to win forever because of the paradox of success. Success creates its own problems, which make it hard to sustain. Regulation can reduce a winners advantages and the competition often gets tougher as others aim to topple or hurt the leader. It isnt mistakes that cause winners to lose but panic. Panic is a sudden anxious feeling of loss of control. Panicking can make a small fumble worse by causing people to lose their heads and forget to think clearly. Neglect also contributes to ending winning streaks, as the fundamentals disciplines and routines are forgotten. Winning also ends when threats and problems are denied. Denial is the hobgoblin of complacent minds. The antidote to denial is dialogue the capacity to discuss the undiscussable. Winners who continue to reinforce accountability, collaboration and initiative are better equipped both to see and want to see mistakes and changes, because they have confidence in their ability to do something about the situation.

cism surrounding people undermines their confidence in one another and makes them feel that theyre surrounded by mediocrity. Isolation increases. Misery only wants company to spread the gloom. Misery prefers to be alone, sitting in the corner sulking while keeping an eye out for its own interests. Misery certainly doesnt want to be reminded of failure by being in the company of other losers. Focus turns inward. Depressed organizations, like depressed people, shut off contact with the outside world, ignoring or neglecting customers or suppliers while they meet purely internal goals. People associated with losing streaks are more likely to refrain from telling other people whats on their minds and much less likely to offer constructive suggestions to help other people improve. Rifts widen and inequities grow. People in losing situations are more than four times as likely as those in winning situations to say that their team or work group never or rarely pulls together or presents a unified image one of the strongest differences between losers and winners in any of these behaviors. Initiative decreases. People can become paralyzed by anxiety and decision paralysis can set in. Aspirations diminish. To cope with losing, people reduce aspirations and look for life satisfactions elsewhere. Negativity spreads. Emotional contagion spreads the gloom.

Losing Streaks
Losing streaks begin in response to a sense of failure, and failure makes people feel out of control. Things start to go wrong and the feeling intensifies. A sense of powerlessness grows, and powerlessness corrodes confidence. Nine pathologies begin to unfold in an emotional and behavioral chain reaction: Communication decreases. Communications about losing arent much fun, so meetings become less productive and enjoyable, and people start to avoid them. At the very time when communication is most needed, losers are likely to stop talking. Criticism and blame increase. Finger-pointing accompanies losing. It was his fault, not mine! Find the weak link! Off with her head! Blame starts flying in all directions. Respect decreases. The sheer amount of criti-

Turnarounds
To walk on water, it helps to have stones under your feet. Three stones are crucial to coming back from a losing streak and attaining the walk on water confidence of winning: Facing facts and reinforcing responsibility. Accountability is the first cornerstone of confidence, a pillar of winning streaks. When accountability crumbles when troubles provoke denial or people cover up their own mistakes or find an enemy to blame winning streaks end. Accountability is missing in losing streaks, when people stop talking, stop practicing and stop trying, or become more accustomed to finding fault than facing facts. To shift the cycle from losing to winning, leaders must develop accountability the discipline and responsibility of the best athletes and best teams.

www.execubooks.com

Confidence

By Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Cultivating collaboly what confidence brings: ration. Collaboration is the the resilience to bounce second major cornerstone back from defeat to victory of confidence, and its in business, in sports, You are what you read. equally necessary for in professions, in politics So let us put the right books on your shelves. small sports teams or or in life. Our expert editors design and stock your home, complex organizations Confidence doesnt office or corporate library with the books you need containing many teams. In guarantee that youll win to succeed for only the price of the books. order to solve strategic every time. But confidence and organizational probdoes make it more likely lems, anti-teamwork sins that accountability, collaboCustom Library Advisory Service of decline must be elimiration and initiative will kick Media That Means Business nated, and peoples confiin to shape positive expecToll-free: 1-866-888-1161 dence in one another must tations for the next round. E-mail: clientcare @ execubooks.com be restored. Feeling that they can People have become uncover weaknesses and isolated or withdrawn, are attacking each other and transcend them, winners are more likely to analyze showing no respect. Reasons must be found to get problems and face them head-on, communicate and them to identify with everyones fate. It takes more than co-operate with those whose support they need, and slogans or exhortations to shift human behavior. It take initiative to make adjustments or try innovations. takes a consistent message, the model of leaders perPeople with confidence feel they can count on themsonal conduct, and productive conversations across selves, count on other people and count on shaping many positions. events. They can lose and still return to winning. e Inspiring initiative and innovation. Of all the pathologies that accumulate in a losing streak, one of ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a professor at the Harvard Business School and former editor of the most damaging to individuals, and eventually to the The Harvard Business Review. places they work and live, is passivity and learned helplessness. To shift behavior, turnaround leaders change the context. They teach people to see the world differently beThe Power of We: Succeeding Through Partnerships, cause they give them new opportunities and experiby Jonathan Tisch and Karl Weber, John Wiley & Sons, ences. They believe in people and their power to make 2004, ISBN 0471652822. a difference, showing them theyre worth it by investing in things that matter to them. They direct the energy Profitable Growth Is Everyones Business: 10 Tools You tied up in negativity into positive actions. They make Can Use Monday Morning, by Ram Charan, Crown initiative possible and desirable. Throughout, they start Business, 2004, ISBN 1400051525. with small wins things people can control.

Need to Succeed? Read to Succeed!

execuBookshelf

Related Reading

Conclusion
By now, the secret of winning should be clear: try not to lose twice in a row. That sounds facile, but its exact-

Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the Frontiers of Management, by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School Press, 1997, ISBN 0875848028.

www.execubooks.com