Pyrrhic Defeat
A pyrrhic victory is not worth winning because the winner loses so much to achieve it. The term comes from the Greek general Pyrrhus who defeated the Romans at the Battle of Asculum in 279 BC but lost so many troops that he couldn’t defeat Rome itself. This is where we get the term “winning the battle but losing the war.”
General George Washington embodied the opposite: “losing the battles but winning the war.” Washington lost more battles than he won. However, his strategy was simple. “Our hopes are not placed in any particular city, or spot of ground, but in preserving a good army … to take advantage of favorable opportunities, and waste and defeat the enemy by piecemeal.”
If winning the war is our missional goal, the battles could be all the individual confrontations that occur between team members, the difficulties we face, and even the outside forces that seem to conspire against us. In all cases, we must be sure that winning the battle does not decimate our team. A pyrrhic victory is a fool’s errand.
Within the daily struggles we all face, it is easy to lose sight of the main objective. We become obsessed with convincing the people around us that we are right, and we forget that others can be right, too. We become too possessive of an idea or method and lose our ability to access new information. We make disagreements about external things personal and internal.
We strive to win battles and forget about the war. Most importantly, we forget that there are plenty of struggles outside our community without us creating more within our community. We sometimes forget that we are on the same team, fighting for a common goal.
Great leaders encourage and enable cultures of collaboration. Collaborative cultures exist where team members forgo pyrrhic internal victories in favor of winning the war the organization is engaged in. “How do they do that?” I hear you ask….
Foster and reward open communication. Leaders must encourage questions and pay attention to dissenting viewpoints. If you will not be bothered to answer questions honestly, people will not bother to ask them. If you will not pay attention to people who disagree with you, soon, it will appear everyone agrees, but really, they are just withholding their true views (to your and the community’s detriment).
Include rather than exclude diverse and cross functional voices. It is easy to hold a meeting with people who already see it your way. It is also often easier to just do things yourself (getting it done despite opposition may feel like a battle won). People support what they help create. Many leaders have achieved (in form) what they thought they wanted, only to find it will not function unless they are standing in the room (many battles won, war lost).
Get to know each other. When things get tough, and they will get tough, it is hard to devalue people you trust and do life with. I’m not suggesting over sharing or excessive levels of personal involvement, but I am saying we should know enough about each other to be able to empathize and really see them. The essential, immoral act is the inability to see people correctly. Evil happens when people are unseeing—when they don’t recognize the personhood in other human beings.
Great leaders are not measured by the number of battles they win. Great leaders are measured by winning the right war. Avoiding pyrrhic victories (really defeats) and the collateral damage they cause as we focus on taking advantage of favorable opportunities to achieve the main goal (winning the war) is the measure of a great culture and the Bison Way.