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Chapter 15
Competitive Hazards

Several years ago, Harvey was working in a small division of a much larger company that had morale problems and couldn't quite figure out what was going wrong. After poking around, he discovered the general manager of the division gained sadistic pleasure from watching his teams compete and scramble with each other for limited resources and few rewards.

While interviewing team resource folks, Harvey also discovered that resources weren't nearly as scarce as had been broadcast by the GM. This gentleman simply thought "putting the squeeze on" would heighten the level of team competition. He was right. The resulting friction between teams eventually raised the temperature within teams to the point of team meltdown. The resulting toll on division morale was evident to everyone -- except you-know-who.

What we say about this may violate your deeply held principles, but hear us out:

There is no such thing
as friendly competition.

Competition, the way people usually mean the word, is essentially a win/lose proposition. The competitor who wins gets the gravy today, but the competitor who loses is going to try to get even tomorrow.

Teaming by definition looks to competition's opposite, collaboration. Collaboration assumes that all sides can win; not on every point of every agenda, but enough of a win on the important points, that staying together as a team remains mutually reinforcing and profitable to all.

Why does competition hurt?

Well, it doesn’t always hurt. Healthy competition is an important part of the brute survival instinct. There are times, when resources are genuinely scarce, when you must beat out someone else to get your share to live. In war, the enemy must die for you to live.

The problem is that Social Darwinist managers are awfully quick to equate the workplace with brute survival and war. They pump up the troops with frightening exhortations to devour the next guy, or be devoured by him.

Some leaders line their office spaces with posters and taxidermy of predatory creatures, to encourage team members to see themselves as eagles, cheetahs, and barracudas. Such displays are considered motivational. In reality, all they achieve is convincing teams that they are working for someone too obtuse to try real motivation – informing people of business conditions, and explaining what they need to do to succeed under those conditions.

The problem with unhealthy, over-the-top competition is that it creates such a toxic atmosphere, trustfree atmosphere that teams cannot relax and work together.

Competitors are invariably opponents, withholding information from one another. Collaborators, by contrast, are practically family -- sharing rather than hoarding, relying on one another's experience and expertise to support team outcomes and advance individual goals.

Teams collaborate within themselves to succeed, and they continue to collaborate with other teams, linking arms to achieve the outcomes of the enterprise.

Pitting teams against one another ("Team Red," "Team Blue," etc.), with rewards and recognition going to the team that leaves the others behind is just that -- the pits.

Bottom-line thinking alone should tell you that interteam competition is a bad idea. It promotes the exact opposite results that teams are capable of achieving. Instead of optimizing resources, you waste the efforts and goodwill of the teams coming in second.

Toxic teaming atmosphere is not always of the organization's making. Individuals and groups within the team have plenty of power to shape the teaming climate. As a young journalist Mike went from one news office whose team leader was confident, open, and comfortable, to a newsroom where the leader had disappeared into a glass booth. Where the first newsroom was a place of camaraderie, laughter, and genuine affection, the second was a place of insecurity, striving and jockeying for survival.

Had management been aware that the team was devouring itself day by day, it could conceivably have stepped in and put things right. But, as so often is the case with teams, management doesn't always give a hoot -- and the troubled team is left to stew in its own juices.

It's pretty much the difference between heaven and hell –a matter of perspective.

The HAZARDS OF COllaboration

If competition is "bad," then collaboration must always be good, right?

Wrong. Pure collaboration is as problematic as pure competition. Each has its purposes. But each, practiced to the exclusion of the other, leads to collapse.

Unabated competition, like a Panzer division rolling over Poland, creates a spirit of over-the-top, scorched-earth absolutism, legitimizing whatever means result in victory: treachery, deceit, corruption, murder.

Unabated collaboration is also problematic. It is the nemesis of individuality, progress, diversity, and change.

Here are some of its hallmarks:

                ƒ  Sameness. Too-collaborative teams adopt rigid standards and impose them on themselves, foreclosing creative deviation.

                ƒ  Groupthink leads to purges of perceived outsiders, and stultification of insiders.

                ƒ  Blurriness. Too much democracy leads to mush. When everyone has full, equal input into a process, you can bet that process will lack focus.

                ƒ  Slowness. Consensus doesn't "snap to" the way intimidated agreement does. It is a slow ooze forming, and teams lose momentum waiting for the ooze to arrive.

                ƒ  Leaderlessness. When everyone is encouraged to lead, the end result is that no one does.

                ƒ  Defenselessness. When everyone knows everything, because sharing is so important, there is no confidentiality, and no firewalls. Some teams become so intimate and senstitive with one another they can’t function among outsiders.

                ƒ  Interiority. Teams who work too long together have a way of becoming cross-eyed over time, focusing on subjects of interest exclusively to the group.

                ƒ  Mercilessness. "The many are stronger than the one," is the motto of supercollaboration. It is also the motto of fascism.

 

     Grafting Competition with Collaboration

Which brings us to our favorite word, transcompetition. Think of transcompetition as the grafting of fruit from the two trees of competition and collaboration. Each tree has fruit that's good, and fruit that's not so good. The job of your team is to combine the best of both trees, the best attributes of each approach, for the task currently facing the team.

ü      The will to greatness vs. the will to commonality. Teams require both ambition and humility. Ambition drives us to try great things. Humility lets us to survive to try again when we screw up. As great as ambition is, the will to commonality, may be greater. It seeks to find win/win solutions, common ground even when positions seem cast in stone. Like the will to greatness, the will to commonality is a talent some people are born with, and most people must struggle to attain. On teams it is a pearl of great price.

ü      Focus vs. empathy. Or, inwardness versus outwardness. These are valuable but opposite skills. The Analytical mentality is capable of focusing on the task at hand to the exclusion of nearly everything else. But empathy is the badge of the Amiable mentality. It is forever scanning the horizon for more to understand, from the outside in. Focus is about me. Empathy is about us. Teams require both in powerful measure.

ü      Persistence vs. insistence. They are as different as conquistador and natives, the killer instinct and the instinct to survive. Persistence is heroic, willing to die for a cause. Insistence is about survival – in order to keep the cause alive. Every team enjoys star performance, but every team needs pluggers who will show up every day and do the work that needs doing.

ü      Process vs. results. A results orientation is an attentiveness to the what of the team: Did we meet our goal? But a results orientation all by itself is a form of tyranny: "Give me my results and don't tell me how you do it." A process orientation is attentiveness to the how of the team. Each is equally important and must be balanced against the other.

ü      Play vs. work. Play is a team's genius – its ability to generate, innovate, revolutionize from thin air. Work is why we show up when we don't feel so playful. Business gives lip service to work, but its true ethic is play. Transcompetition means abandoning the pain principle for a pleasure principle -- work for the fun of it.

ü      Depersonalization vs. personalization. Personalization is the talent for communicating in such a way that the person you are talking to feels the message has been custom-tailored to his or her understanding. Personalization is a precious skill on teams. But depersonalization is also very powerful. It is detachment, the ability to see a thing without regard to its effect on you. How liberating it is to take oneself out of decision-making. When detachment comes in, out goes paranoia, disrespect, and the blindness that so often accompanies self-interest.

ü      Loose vs. tight. Which structure is stronger, one that is elastic but encourages innovation and experimentation; or one that achieves coherence through the imposition of order? This is an issue every team must resolve for itself. Loose relationships like confederacies permit wider latitude for expression; but tighter relationships, unions and alliances, have the power to effectively underwrite security. Let duration be your guide. If you are in imminent danger of destruction, tighten the bonds between yourself and others. If your survival issues are longer-term, let loose the line and encourage free minds to find solutions.

 

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