Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (Kindle Location 838). Hyperion. Kindle Edition.
Winning too much is easily the most common behavioral problem that I observe in successful people. There’s a fine line between being competitive and over-competitive, between winning when it counts and when no one’s counting—and successful people cross that line with alarming frequency. Let’s be clear: I’m not disparaging competitiveness. I’m pointing out that it’s a problem when we deploy it at the service of objectives that simply are not worth the effort.
Winning too much is the #1 challenge because it underlies nearly every other behavioral problem.
If we argue too much, it’s because we want our view to prevail over everyone else (i.e., it’s all about winning).
If we ignore people, again it’s about winning—by making them fade away. If we withhold information, it’s to give ourselves an edge over others.
So many things we do to annoy people stem from needlessly trying to be the alpha male (or female) in any situation—i.e., the winner.
When the issue is important, we want to win. When the issue is trivial, not worth our time and energy, we want to win. Even when the issue is clearly to our disadvantage, we want to win.
If you’ve achieved any modicum of success, you’re guilty of this every day. When you’re in a meeting at work, you want your position to prevail. When you’re arguing with your significant other, you’ll pull out all the stops to come out on top (whatever that means!) Even when you’re in the checkout line at the supermarket, you’re scouting the other lines to see which is moving faster.
Let’s say that you want to go to dinner at restaurant X. Your spouse, partner, or friend wants to go to restaurant Y. You have a heated debate about the choice. You point out the bad reviews Y has received. But you grudgingly yield and end up going to restaurant Y. The experience confirms your misgivings. You have two options during this painful experience. Option A: Critique the restaurant and smugly point out to your partner how wrong he or she was and how this debacle could have been avoided if only you had been listened to. Option B: Shut up and eat the food. Mentally write it off and enjoy the evening.
I have polled my clients on these two options for years. The results are consistent: 75 percent of clients say they would critique the restaurant. What do they all agree that they should do? Shut up and have a good time. If we do a “cost-benefit analysis” we generally conclude that our relationship with our partner is far more important than winning a trivial argument about where to eat. And yet . . . the urge to win trumps our common sense. We do the wrong thing even when we know what we should do.
If the need to win is the dominant gene in our success DNA—the overwhelming reason we’re successful—then winning too much is a perverse genetic mutation that can limit our success.