LOSING

By Raoul Suarez

I’ve been part of teams that lost quietly and teams that lost loudly. The quiet ones hurt less. We’d walk off the field, out of the office, or away from the table knowing we gave what we had. No raised voices. No finger-pointing. Just tired bodies and the shared understanding that tomorrow we’d try again.

Then there were the other teams.

The ones where the loss lingered long after the game ended. Where a single mistake could replay itself in meetings, in jokes that weren’t really jokes, and in the silence that followed when someone spoke up. You could feel it the moment you walked in. The tension. The guarded looks. The unspoken math of who might be blamed next.

People don’t want to be a part of a losing team.

Obviously.

Losing wears you down slowly. It’s like a drip that never stops. It makes effort feel pointless and progress invisible. But people will still show up if there is hope. They will continue to participate if the losses feel like they are just part of a longer story that hasn’t finished yet.

What people truly don’t want is to be a part of a toxic one.

A losing team asks you to endure.
A toxic team asks you to doubt yourself.

In a losing environment, failure belongs to the group. In a toxic one, failure is always personal. Someone is blamed, shamed, or quietly pushed to the edge. Mistakes are remembered longer than successes. Voices grow cautious. Silence becomes a survival skill.

I’ve seen people stay through seasons of defeat because they believed in the people beside them. They trusted the process, the coach, the culture. They knew the scoreboard didn’t tell the whole story. Losing, in that context, always felt temporary.

Toxicity feels permanent.

It changes how people walk into a room. It changes how they speak. Effort becomes selective. Passion becomes guarded. Eventually, even the most resilient stop giving their best. They stop not because they can’t, but because they’ve learned it isn’t safe to do so.

A losing team says, “We’re struggling.”
A toxic team says, “You’re the problem.”

One invites effort. The other drains it.

Whether it’s a locker room, an office, or a group of friends, people want a chance to win (or at least improve), they want psychological safety, and they want mutual respect. Take away one, and you get disengagement. Take away two, and you get turnover.

That’s why leaders matter more than talent. People don’t leave teams. They leave environments. Dealing with a losing streak and being in a toxic environment not only strips away dignity, it turns teamwork into endurance and participation into self-protection.

I’ve been part of teams that lost quietly and teams that lost loudly. The quiet ones hurt less because the people in it don’t ask for guarantees. They only ask for fairness, and the sense that their effort counts for something. Of course, winning matters. Yes, improvement matters. But the culture matters more than both. A healthy team can survive a bad run. A toxic one will not continue to thrive even if there’s success because victory feels hollow in that space.