The cost of winning all leaders should know about

Homer gives Odysseus one of the great escapes in literature, then, a few lines later, has him ruin it. Trapped in the Cyclops’ cave, watching the giant eat his men two at a time, Odysseus keeps his head. He gives a false name, Nobody. He gets the giant drunk, blinds him with a sharpened stake, and rides out clinging to the belly of a ram.

Aboard his ship and pulling clear of the shore, however, Odysseus throws it away. He cannot resist the credit. He shouts his real name across the water: it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, who blinded you. The giant prays to his father, the god Poseidon, for punishment. And so it is that Odysseus’ boast costs him ten years of wandering and the life of every man he leads.

This naming and boasting is gone from Christopher Nolan’s recent film. But cutting it loses something, because that second shout shows what the research on leadership has spent years confirming. Winning changes the winner, and rarely for the better.

A leader I worked with some years ago, call him Alex, delivered an improbable turnaround in a business most observers had written off. The praise and publicity he received were hard-earned and well-deserved, and for a while he wore them well. But then, something slowly changed. Board papers he would once have taken apart line by line came back with a single tick. Meetings got shorter, as he reached conclusions faster. And when his finance director flagged concerns about an acquisition he wanted to make, bigger and riskier than anything the business had tried before, Alex heard nervousness where he should have heard evidence. The deal went ahead, but undoing it when things went wrong took three years and a new finance director.

What stayed with me was that none of it looked like arrogance. There was no dramatic shift in his behaviour. He had just quietly become more difficult to inform.

What winning does to the winner

What happened to Alex, on a psychological level at least, is something that can accompany every success that every leader has, and it has a name in the research: the winner effect. Win a contest of almost any kind, a match, a deal, a fight for promotion, and the body tends to respond with a rise in testosterone, and with it a lift in confidence and appetite for risk that primes the winner to compete again and stake more next time.

For example, a study of traders in the City of London found that their morning testosterone predicted how much they made that day, and the researchers argued that wins push it higher still, setting up a loop in which each win invites a larger, less careful bet.

In a much-cited study of large acquisitions, the more recent success a chief executive had banked, and the more the press had praised them, the higher the premium they paid for their next deal, and the worse it went on to perform. A later study of chief executives who won prestigious business awards found the same pattern: the winners underperformed both the market and their less garlanded rivals in the years that followed.

And then there is listening. Studies show that simply making people feel more powerful, as winning tends to, is enough to make them lean more on their own judgement and less on others’ advice, including from experts who know more than they do.

So winning feels good. Underneath, though, ego climbs, the appetite for risk climbs with it, and the willingness to listen drops away. The prize comes with a psychological cost.

Why success hits leaders twice

In The Power Trap, I argued that the biggest risk with power is not that it corrupts character, but that it changes the world a leader operates in, and quietly makes good decisions harder to reach. Success sits at the centre of that argument, because success is how power tends to arrive. Every win lifts your standing and authority, providing a fresh dose of power and ego, with all the side effects they bring.

What makes success particularly hazardous is that it administers the dose twice. The first hit is internal: the shift in risk tolerance and listening described above, working beneath awareness and invisible to the person it changes. The second is external. People are more wary of arguing with a winner, so in the afterglow of a visible success, the information moving towards a leader softens and sweetens. Mixed results get relayed as encouraging signs. Private doubts stay in the corridor. Agreement and flattery climb. One study that tracked chief executives found that those who received the most flattery and agreement were the most likely to keep backing a failing strategy, and the most likely to be pushed out in the end.

Put the two together, and the arithmetic becomes dangerous. Certainty rises in the leader just as challenge falls away around them. And it arrives when the stakes are highest, because the aftermath of a win is when leaders reach for their biggest bets. Odysseus only shouted his name once he was sure he had won.

Staying Nobody

The uncomfortable part is that none of this can simply be switched off. Some of it is physiological as much as psychological, and much of it works beneath awareness, giving no signal you can catch in the moment. And the obvious workaround, avoiding success, is no kind of plan.

What can be managed are the conditions around the win. The first move is to treat success itself as a risk event, the way a bank treats a sudden spike in trading profit as something to be examined and explained. The first big decision after a win deserves the hardest look, because that is when the winner effect peaks and leaders overpay, overreach and overcommit. Build it in as a routine process, and it no longer depends on someone finding the nerve to question a person who has just won.

The second move is to engineer disagreement, because after a win it tends to be less visible. Speak last, so your certainty does not lead the room. Run pre-mortems on decisions, imagining them as already failed and asking why. Ask your team what they argued about before they reached their recommendation, and be suspicious of the answer if it is nothing.

The third move is to treat sweetened information as the hazard it is. Meet flattery with a flat, neutral response. Keep one or two people close whose standing does not rise or fall with yours, because they are the only ones with nothing to lose by telling you what you have stopped being told.

None of this is instinctive, least of all after a victory that feels deserved. It usually is. That is what makes the moment so hard to see straight.

Remember where the damage was done. The cave was where Odysseus was at his most brilliant, but victory fuelled his pride, and the deck, minutes later, was where he lost the next ten years. He managed to stay Nobody for exactly as long as staying alive required, but not a moment longer. Leaders who want to keep what they have won have to hold the line longer than that. The time to worry is not when you are losing. It is the morning after you win.