Winning in Collaborative Environments
Competition limits potential when it blocks collaboration.
I love competition. But, I’m wondering about the damage it causes within teams. Don’t expect competitors to collaborate.
Would you help a teammate beat you? What if the winner receives a raise or bonus and you don’t?
Leadership:
Leaders don’t compete against team members. “We” environments leverage diversity. “I/you” environments build protective self-preservation.
Leaders help others win.
Two assumptions:
The first rule of winning is defining it. Helping others win assumes you know what winning looks like.
Second, helping others win assumes you know what helps.
Two questions:
Build the team by asking two questions:
How can I help you win?
How can you help me win?
Team mates always, unreservedly help each other win.
Two statements:
Make serving observable. Complete these statements with each member of your team.
I help you win when I ….
You help me win when you …
Collaborators help each other win.
How can leaders help others win?
What helps you win?
Leaders help others win by giving them room to breathe and grow,. Most of us grow best in supportive environments where we have an opportunity to learn from our errors, not be ostracized, criticized or destroyed by them.
What helps me win is the above- supportive people and supportive community, and self-discipline.
What about you Dan? 🙂
Hi Martina. Thanks for faithfully sharing your insights.
How teams deal with mistakes is central to creating collaborative environments. Thanks for that insights. Environments where mistakes are always punished…everyone hides mistakes and/or blames others.
What helps me… Becomes I love innovation, go with my idea for awhile before shooting it down. We can shoot holes in it after we’ve explored potential.
It feels like a waste of time to defend an idea I’m not even sure will work. But I love thinking how it works BEFORE how it doesn’t.
Thanks for asking
Competition boosts innovation; collaboration breeds complacency.
Thanks Alex.
Thanks Dan for all your thoughts, they have been helping in a lots of ways. “Leaders don’t compete against team members.” That really stood out. Leaders should not allow any form(s) of competition among their ranks. Leaders are to lead and not go against members, the work of a leader is to bring out the best in its followers by providing quality leadership.
Season greeting from Nigeria.
Hi Nigeria…thanks for contributing today.
I’ve seen environments where leaders were threatened by high performers. Guess what happens?
Happy New Year
Great topic Dan.
I was a competitive ski racer on college. Captain at two different colleges. That particular team structure is a bit unique. Think another example of this is archery and bicycle racing like the Tour De France.
In these cases and in mine on my teams there were individual opportunities for winning as we’ll as team opportunities for victory.
That gave me the chance to do part of exactly what you asked in your post Dan. Could or should I help my teammates beat me? My choice was , “heck yes cause it helped our team and as Captain I had to think about the team, not just me.”
I also felt in the spirit of competition however or whoever helped anyone competing against me the only thing that mattered is who was better that day. On those two runs. Let the chips fall where they may and after we are back to being friends and teammates.
Worked out great! I won a bunch individually and the teams won our conference 3 out of 4 years.
In my work life I help the folks I work with by doing everything I can to put them in a position to win. Whether by title i work for them or they work for me doesnt matter, at least to me. if we get the job done well enough we will all get paid. At our company our SuperOrdinate Goal is to Deliver Peace of Mind. To our customers and sounds kind of odd but even more to each other. That’s I’d because we deal with each other much more than we deal with any individual customer. How we treat one another cannot be stressed enough.
Others can help me win by clearly defining the goal and then get out of my way. Go micromanage someone who needs it. Hehe
One last thing Dan you mentioned what winning looks like. I have found it much more useful in my life to think about what winning “feels” like. Yeah I know we got 5 senses and all but that feeling one is a humdinger. Don’t believe me, just in case read all of Anthony Robbins work.
Ok thanks Dan for another among many thought provoking posts.
Scott
KaPow! Thanks for sharing your insights,Scott!
I have competed in team sports and you are right…helping team mates excel helped the team excel. I wish business was more like this.
YOu said so many things I appreciate:
Deliver peace of mind… I had an insecure boss once who thought I was after her job. Imagine how that went.
I hadn’t thought about “how winning feels.” Thanks for your adds.
Cheers
You are most welcome and thanks providing a place I can think and share. Have a great weekend.
Scott
Thank you Scott – you drive home an important point. There is a time for competition and a time for cooperative behavior. Each has its place and in its place is a good thing. Building others can ultimately build ourselves.
It’s also so important to design reward systems that support this. When there are only a few people that can be recognized at the end of the year, or be rated at the top, it creates unnatural competition.
Thanks Karin. I agree… as I wrote this I was mulling over differences between reward and recognition.
I’ve always chuckled when I hear leaders talk about teamwork but only reward individuals.
However, rewarding performance is essential. Think about sports teams who have great disparity of pay on the same winning teams.
Thanks for stirring the pot.
I’m a big fan of competition. Competition produces results. I think you can be on a team and still have significant and meaningful competitions. It has been from my experience that the absence of competition shows a potential lack of passion.
Be competitive, and be a good team member.
Thanks Todd. I appreciate your insights.
Part of this is cultural as well. Many cultures are far more comfortable with collaboration.
I like your “and” in the last sentence.
BTW, I’m a competitor. I always want to know how to win.
Think the qualities of a good competitor and the qualities of a good team player are mutually exclusive.
In a competition you win by “scoring” more and/or make your competitors score less. I think setting team members to compete puts them in a position where the team loses.
The spirit of competition must be very high, but inside the team I cannot think of a way to make competition improve the overall team output/result.
Even if it does somehow, I think you end up with some levels of resentment and those soft things that end up contributing (or negating) most of possibilities of the team, because, no wonder, they are what’s needed to improve and sustain collaboration.
Competition is good. Rivalry is destructive. The line between the two is razor thin.
Competitors who drive themselves to excel, and liberally share “how to win” tips with their competitors flourish. Olympic gymnastic teams are excellent examples of this, where individuals strive to be the best – for the good of the team AND for personal gain.
For rivalry, one only has to think of Tonya Harding paying men to hit Nancy Kerrigan in the knees and prevent her from participating in the Olympics.
I once had a boss who deliberately pitted managers against each other, under the belief that some kind of evolutionary filter would occur, and the cream would rise to the top. The result was a poisonous atmosphere, with extremely high turnover, and a company that eventually went bankrupt.
An elderly German man, this boss told me once in a private conversation that he respected Hitler as superb manager, because Hitler used that same technique to develop strong underlings who hated each other to much to rebel against his authority, yet individually strove to be the best.
In Canada, where I live, there is a very large engineering company that has recently been in the news as its top managers have been indicted one by one for corruption and bribery on a grand scale. That company, like Enron, fostered a culture where individual performance was glorified, no matter what the means.
I think the main difference between competition and rivalry is egocentricity. Competition seeks to excel. Rivalry seeks to conquer.
Good leaders seek excellence.
I really liked your comment. I think you hit it when you say the line between competition and rivalry is razor thin.
That’s why I think promoting competition is cannibalistic, to put it graphically. It hurts way more than what it accomplishes.
I think the main job of a leader is about building the culture to something prone to higher performance, and that implies destroying important aspects of the culture when it is deemed ineffective or dysfunctional.
When building cultures, I don’t think you can play it so close to the line without ending up building something you don’t want. And I think this is the case with competition/rivalry. If you accept and promote things so close to the line, such as competition and its close proximity to rivalry, defining what is acceptable and what is not can be a very hard job. People will inevitably depart from the specifics and will take incorrect assumptions, based on the ambiguous signals that the leadership is sending.
The job of a leader is so complicated and even hard because they cannot disregard things that may look superfluous. Sometimes those things are the ones that become the assumptions that define the culture of the team or the organization.
What can be said about healthy competition and healthy rivalry?
I speak from a place of expertise; good, bad or indifferent . Living competition & rivalry from my first recital at the age of 5; I have learned there are few who want to share secrets in “Winning”.
If I was speaking from a world of performing arts alone; I would not have taken the time to bore you with this subject.
So sadly, I became a multi-million dollar producer in real estate; along w/agent represented auditions for; tv, commercials; musical theatre etc.
Then in the big black pot; throw in a music career…Wow! Experience abounds!
Sadly,because life in all of these arenas was like putting pit bulls together to duke it out in an arena without enough space to fight!…
TO SURVIVE I DO HAVE THE SECRET…
Learned on the proverbial streets of “healthy competition” & “healthy rivalry”….
I GAVE IT ALL AWAY! EVERY SECRET! IN REAL ESTATE….I ACTUALLY HELPED MY COMPETITION.
AS WELL…WHAT EVER I DO IN LIFE I SHARE. MY AUDITIONING TIPS…MY MUSIC TIPS….
WHAT EVER IS ASKED OF ME…I SIMPLY HELP OTHERS TO SUCCEED.
After a life time I know; unequivocally; it matters not what others may or may not do for me; I love to see others do well. My dreams are sweet, and I no longer need to compete!
THANKS FOR THE WRITE-UP, I DON’T REALLY KNOW MUCH ABOUT THAT WORD B4 “WE”, COS AM THE LAST BORN OF THE FAMILY. THE ONLY THING I CARE ABOUT IS JUST ME ALONE. WELL, I KNOW IT NOW……..THANKS………..
Sports teams really do provide the best example of this idea that competition and collaboration can coexist. On most teams, you have your starters and your reserves or back-ups. Every day in practice the reserves are competing with the starters to try to win the starting role. This competition is important because it pushes all to perform at their highest level. Just think, if that reserve player was not pushing the starter to try and take that starting role, the starter would not have to work as hard every day. So the competition is important for maximizing performance. But on game day, the starters and reserves support each other for the good of the team. The competition becomes collaboration. So how do effective coaches accomplish this harmony between competition and collaboration?
I believe it begins by painting a clear vision for the team and constantly emphasizing that the top priority is accomplishing the team goals that are also clearly communicated. Coaches must communicate how the team goals help the individuals and remind the team that when the team wins, we all win. “A rising tide lifts all boats” as they say.
I do think this spirit of collaborative competition is most important. But it is also one of the greatest challenges we leaders face.
late to the party but some of the comments spurred me a bit: competing with colleagues, to me, seems strange. are we not too busy using our competitive spirit to face our real competition…. the COMPETITION !? great teams aren’t complacent, they are bent for leather determined to succeed in their market. the greatness comes from their cooperative spirit, leadership, and that elusive grace or magic that we are always trying to catch or at least define
Catie,
I enjoyed what you had to say… Tried to get that point across; but coming from a different type of work; something was lost in the translation. You magically used the right road of communication.