I have tried to be a keen sportsman and strongly believe that one can learn a lot by playing sports. It teaches you how to lose, how to come back and fight. One learns that sometimes you play to win and what it takes to build a real team.
Reading Harsha & Anita Bhogle’s the Winning Way was a great experience as it resonated very well with my own experiences. But more than that I was thoroughly impressed how the Bhogle’s had managed to articulate the lessons so well in this book. They say that the book is the result of 100s of seminars they have done and its easy to see how we the book readers are getting the truly and magnificiently distilled content.
The Winning Way is fully recommended and with so many references to cricket I am sure Indian managers would relate to every word. (Flipkart link)
Winning Teams – Lesson 1 of The Winning Way
- Have a Band of boys kind of attitude- relaxed n happy
- Show a willingness to pass the ball. Be the one who builds the goal rather than scores it
- Live in the present, and plan for future
- Back-up underperformers
- Have a Can-Do approach
- Are attentive to 1% things – the mundane things that need to be done right. Think about the single runs scored/saved
- Have a Common shared vision – idea of a shared journey
- Healthy Focus on competition
- Have a Non-negotiable work-ethic
- New people and new ideas to prevent staleness
- Nurturing and culling talent at right times
- Hunger, passion and energy
Symptoms of losing teams – Lesson 2 of The Winning Way
- Beauracratic – delayed decisions
- Egos, internal competition, groupism
- Getting credit more important than getting the job done
- Lack of focus
- Too many or too few processes
- No new people or ideas. Same few people perform
- Weighed down by past failure
- Not enough back-up plans
- Blaming others or environment for failure
A good leader – Lesson 3 of The Winning Way
- Has vision and communicates to inspire
- Manages team climate & makes the team addup to more than sum of parts
- Is trusted and respected
- Approachable and understands the individuals, empowers the team
- Courageous in decision making, always interest of team first
- Accepts responsibility and gives credit
- Serves as team glue
It also has specific sections on Managing Success, Understanding the importance of Goals and how to be/build team players. Something that we all could learn from the likes of Tendulkar, Ganguly, the Aussies and who better to tell us their story than Harsha Bhogle.
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