If you're a manager, who do you want on your team — a bunch of whiners who moan and groan about everything little change or challenge, or the winners who know what they have to do and are willing to meet every obstacle as an opportunity?

Of course, you'll say you want the winners, but I bet you have a few whiners on your team right now anyway. These are the folks who say things like: "This isn't fair. Why do I always get the crummy assignments? It just seems pointless anyway."

If you are wondering how you ended up with a team of both winners and whiners when you used the same methods to interview and hire everyone, you may have made a common, but understandable, tactical error.

It's highly probable you needed someone to fill the position yesterday and you were getting a good vibe during the interview. You didn't tell the applicant the information that would make the winners really want the job and the whiners disappear.

Because you didn't want to be turned down, you didn't tell the applicant how hard the work actually is or the people challenges he/she would face — or whatever else is difficult or distasteful about the job.

So the next time you find yourself headed in this wrong direction, instead of just hyping the job, the company and the golden opportunities ahead, say something like: "You seem really interested in this job, and you and I both agree you could be a really good fit. But I need you to know that, in addition to the opportunities it offers, there are several difficult challenges, too."

Although it's counterintuitive to tell an applicant how tough it might be, when you stress both the good and bad parts of the job, you screen in only the winners who love a challenge and really want to be on your team. The whiners will suddenly come up with a reason why they can't accept your offer of employment.

While it may sound like just one more thing to do, you only have to do it once, up front with each applicant. The payoff is all the hours you'll save down the road because now you're actually choosing winners and they are choosing you.

Best of all, you will enjoy your job more and so will all of your other winning employees because they don't like playing with whiners either.

So, take a page out of the head coach's playbook and pick only winners in the first place.