Compete with yourself

Why competition in the workplace destroys communication

The other day I found myself in a wonderful situation. Stupid, yes, but wonderful to me. I managed to time my approach to a pair of cash machines so that I and the woman beside me arrived at exactly the same moment – and as we both reached to put our cards in, some troubled part of my brain flicked into competition mode.

I got my card in first, I got my PIN in fast, selected my option and was extracting the cash before she'd got the first menu. And, reader, I made sure she knew it. She laughed. Which was, of course, the entire point. I wasn't really racing her.

Or was I?

I'm a competitive soul, mostly against myself. Hand me a basketball and a hoop and I'm suddenly in my element, trying to relive the days of past. Put me on a go-kart track and mild-mannered Rob quietly becomes a focused F1 driver who is, by the way, absolutely going to win. Give me any challenge at all and I'll race, against myself, to get it done. I like sport, I like competition, and I love watching how it can entice the very best out of someone.

And then there's work. People, inside work, competing with each other. On that, my position is unusually firm: zero. None. And for one very simple reason – people close down the moment their competition is in the room.

Inside a business, competition teaches people that honesty is a competitive liability – and a room full of people guarding their position will never tell you the truth.

That's why. As Franklin D. Roosevelt put it, long before any of us were fretting about it in a meeting:

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

Why competition breeds silence

Competition changes how people speak – and you can watch it happen in any workplace where people are competing against other people in the business.

The most reliable place to spot internal competition is a meeting. Put two teams with competing incentives in the same room and observe the climate. Facts soften and lose some truth. Opinions sharpen, become more pointed and are usually aimed at the other people.

The rather reasonable update that would have been perfectly honest in a one-to-one becomes crafted into a careful story the instant there's an audience with a stake in it. And the problem that genuinely needs the whole room to solve it stays firmly under the table, because surfacing it would hand the other lot an advantage.

So the meeting produces an outcome, maybe – decisions get made, everyone nods – but they're built on carefully incomplete information, and nobody actually said the useful thing that going to help your customers.

That's the real damage, and it's worth being honest about it: it isn't that people turn malicious. Most of them are decent, and would help you in a heartbeat over a coffee. It's that the system has taught them, rather sensibly, that candour costs them. Honesty has been priced as a liability, so they stop paying it.

I also once worked in a company that was gloriously, obsessively fixated on "crushing the competition." We had posters on every wall of racing drivers, sports teams and boxers. Fancy competitive banners were put up. Every company all-hands meeting started with the Rocky soundtrack. Every conversation had a bravado of thrashing, destroying and obliterating the competition.

Genuinely good competition leads to breakthroughs a gentle meander will never create. But, the trouble is that when you define yourself entirely by your rivals, they end up writing your story for you.

Our strategy was purely reactive – a carbon copy of the competition. Our products were morphing into copies of theirs too. We once stood out in the marketplace for innovation and we slowly moved to be just like everyone else. Our pricing raced, rather rapidly, towards the floor. We were fighting every sale on price alone. We had become defined by other people rather than by anything of our own – which is the exact opposite of the thing Paul Hawken points our rather positively:

We're not in competition with other businesses; we're here to offer something others don't.

Everything is connected — which is why it hurts

Internal competition is uniquely corrosive because inside a business, everything is joined up. Something that's very easy to miss when you're focused on your world only.

When one team pulls only for itself, the others, everywhere in the business, absorb the consequences. When one team games a metric, someone downstream makes a worse decision on the strength of it. When something breaks, it often isn't the breaker who fixes it – it's whoever's next in the chain, or the person handling an disgruntled customer. When someone promises something that was never even possible, someone else often bears the cost of it. When someone misses a step somewhere, that demand comes back in somewhere else.

You can see the connectedness everywhere once you look. Win a big new client and you've just created demand – and work – for delivery, support, finance. That's a good thing.

Take the platform out for an hour with a shady release and the ripple hits support, sales and professional services all at once. And probably the executive team's phones too. Ship a product slightly wrong and someone in another building spends their week making it right.

So to encourage teams to pull against each other, when they're all connected to the same body, isn't a motivational aspiration – it's building dysfunction straight into the architecture of the business.

And competition reliably encourages exactly the behaviours you'd least want in that connected system: hiding what's gone wrong, softening bad news until it's meaningless, taking pot-shots at other teams in meetings, carefully massaging the numbers, and shooting down a good idea because it came from the competition. The end product is mixed and varied, and likely contains a heck of a lot of watermelon reporting – green on the outside, red all the way through – followed by decisions made on rocky footings.

The case for cooperation

The antidote therefore, is cooperation. The high-performing organisations do the rather unfashionable thing and organise for cooperation instead of rivalry.

In practice that means a genuinely shared direction, and set of outcomes, everyone can see and knows how they contribute to; incentives tied to collective success rather than individual position; roles defined just enough that nobody's fighting over ownership and can flex to solve the problems sitting between roles, of which there are usually a great many. And actively naming and correcting the competitive gamesmanship when it shows up, rather than rewarding it and sabotaging themselves.

And when cooperation is real, not just printed on a laminated poster by the lift, the behaviour changes mostly on its own. People ask for help instead of hiding the need for it. Truthful updates replace the polished narratives and massaged numbers. Ideas start crossing boundaries to make the entire business better. Problems surface while they're still small and cheap to address. Communication stops being a careful PR narrative and becomes the most valuable asset in the building – the wiring between everything and everyone.

This connects to something I've written about elsewhere: the real forms of energy that move a team – clarity, shared goals, growth, cooperation forced carefully by aligned incentives – are the subject of the companion piece on what teams need to move from potential to outcomes. The point here is just the corollary of it: competition is a form of heat too, and it reliably produces the wrong kind of movement – fast, hot, and pointed sideways, not forward towards the customer and the goals of the company.

What the research says

None of this is merely me making things up either. It's both grounded in experience and data. The studies point the same way with astonishing consistency: internally competitive climates raise stress, breed political behaviour, and pull people out of alignment (Fletcher and colleagues), and managerial bonuses tied to narrow individual metrics can actively encourage mistreatment and the distortion of information (Nikiforakis and colleagues).

The pattern underneath is always the same shape – competition inside a system buys you local wins and global losses.

If what you actually want is clarity and performance, the recipe is rather simple, not easy I might add, and it works like this: paint a compelling picture of where you're all going; align everyone around shared outcomes; design the incentives for collective success rather than individual glory; force cooperation gently wherever the silos have crept in; fix the wiring (communication) that keeps people aligned; and keep everyone's eyes fixed on customer value rather than on each other. Do that, and information starts to flow, problems surface early, decisions get better, and – the wonderful irony – the teams actually move faster than they ever did while competing.

So, the takeaway, and I mean it sincerely: compete with yourself all you like. Race the clock, race the hoop, race your own last effort, race the person at the ATM. But cooperate with the people beside you, deliberately and visibly. Internal competition promises urgency and performance; far more often it delivers silence, distortion and distrust. Cooperation, shared purpose and aligned outcomes are what generate the real energy – and the real results.

Now, I'm off to play basketball. And maybe get some money out on the way too.

Bibliography

Nikiforakis, N., Oechssler, J., Shah, A., 2019. Managerial bonuses and subordinate mistreatment. European Economic Review 119, 509–525. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.07.017

Fletcher, T.D., Major, D.A., Davis, D.D., 2008. The interactive relationship of competitive climate and trait competitiveness with workplace attitudes, stress, and performance. Journal of Organizational Behavior 29, 899–922. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.503