Laura Stack* says while many chief executives promote internal competition among their employees and teams, the end result can be terribly counter-productive.
In military and police organisations, the professionals involved are well aware that if they’re not extremely careful, their actions can be lethal to co-workers.
It’s usually known as ‘friendly fire’ occurring when personnel find themselves accidentally under fire from their own side.
Most police or service people with combat experience have stories of tragedies or near-tragedies that occurred during the aptly-named ‘fog of war’.
Sadly, friendly fire can kill you just as dead as enemy fire.
Friendly fire is common in the workplace, too.
While it may not prove lethal, it can kill your motivation and morale, and with them, your productivity.
Unfortunately, internal competition is often imposed from above in the form of unnecessary contests, forced ranking of workers from best to worst, and the pitting of individuals against each other.
This is done by ill-informed managers who believe competition forces everyone to improve.
According to research cited in the book Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman, one-quarter of workers basically ignore competition.
Another 25 per cent wilt in the face of it and disengage from their jobs.
The remainder often benefit, but let’s be clear here: It’s best to direct competition outside your organisation.
Otherwise it can become divisive and damaging.
Here are five good reasons to leave competition at the office door.
It damages collaboration:
Some competition may seem healthy, but it isn’t always productive.
Too much puts you at odds with at least some of your co-workers (so much for team building).
These days, most jobs require the cooperation of multiple people just to complete a finished product, and you can’t cooperate if you’re always competing.
Rather than cementing your team, it splits you apart.
“Every man for himself” leaves everyone flailing unproductively.
It can create a culture of fear:
When internal competition creates conflict, workers lose trust in each other and their management.
In a dog-eat-dog workplace, fearful workers spend much of their time engaging in self-preservation, political manoeuvring, passivity, one-upmanship, even backstabbing.
This is energy that might have gone to productive work elsewhere.
Communication may fail:
Sometimes the lines of communication between individuals, teams, or divisions get deliberately cut by internal competitors.
Even when they’re not, people may communicate or socialise less if they’re more worried about a co-worker’s success than their organisation’s.
Workers grow less likely to share experience, and some will keep secrets that might be helpful to others just for their own competitive advantage.
Mutual understanding falls apart:
When competition kills communication, workers lose track of (or stop caring about) the bigger picture.
The organisation’s course becomes less obvious, meetings become contentious and unproductive, and mission and vision fall by the wayside.
People stop worrying about core values, and no one remembers how to align their goals with the organisation’s or even care to.
Engagement dies a painful death:
While strict competition may cause people to own their jobs more than they normally would, it doesn’t encourage top-down ownership.
True engagement comes when a worker cares as much about their work as the chief executive.
That requires a broad mutual understanding of the organisation as well as a willingness to collaborate in order to see the mission and vision come true.
No matter how deeply you own your job, true engagement dies if everyone looks out for number one.
Internal competition rarely causes things to fall apart as disastrously as I’ve indicated above.
Most people do benefit from some level of internal challenge.
However, it’s the intrinsic rewards — increased self-esteem, satisfaction for a job well done, productive teamwork — that have the best traction, not material rewards.
Those are nice, but when chasing them devolves into little fiefdoms and deliberately siloing information, it kills productivity.
* Laura Stack is a keynote speaker, author and authority on productivity and performance. She has authored seven books, including her newest work, Doing the Right Things Right: How the Effective Executive Spends Time. She can be contacted at theproductivitypro.com.
This article first appeared on Laura’s blogsite.
