Creating healthy competition

I ran across an interesting HBR article today entitled “Is Your Culture Too Nice?“  It’s pretty thought-provoking, because I’ve become accustomed to polite work cultures, feeling uncomfortable with those which are more confrontational.

Why can’t we all just get along?

But the challenge here is to distinguish two ideas which tend to get muddled together:

We often equate Competitive with Combative, Friendly with Cooperative.  But as we see here, there are actually mixtures of the ideas which end up being quite useful.

Normally, we think of competitiveness as structured in win/lose terms.  But there’s also some interesting territory in the upper right of this diagram, which is being competitive without some of the negative attributes.  Suppose you have two marketing teams, each looking to outdo each other in creatively bringing customers in the door.  This can be structured as a win-win relationship, where they’re not competing against each other for critical resources, but still look to each other as benchmarks of excellence.  In an ideal situation, you’re totally open and honest with the teams so they know exactly how this is win-win, but still competition.

I’d like to talk about the lower left quadrant as well, which is some of what the HBR article alludes to.  When people are “cooperative” on the surface but actually are combative in their behaviors, you see all forms of unethical, even illegal, dysfunction.  As a leader of an organization like this, you might think that you’ve achieved alignment and compliance, but will then be surprised at the degree to which people undermine your results.

Unfortunately, a lot of employees feel pushed into this quadrant because they’re terrified of losing their jobs, but don’t have any other reason to make strong contributions.  They’ll be cooperative on the surface, but may have sabotaging behaviors under that.  Perhaps you’ve had deep doubts about your own security, and wondered whether it might have impacted your true effectiveness and value to the organization.

In my previous career, we sometimes had interesting discussions about whether the company was in the lower right hand quadrant or upper right.  Had we become so nice and friendly with each other that we’d forgotten that we were facing tough conditions out there in the market?  One of the ways to create a healthier environment was to create a friendly internal competition that reflected the outward reality, based on a win-win attitude of striving for high standards and market leadership.

When it worked, it was spectacular.  But it took constant vigilance by courageous leaders to maintain the right balance.

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