Key takeaways
By reading this article, you will learn how to:
- Balance a competitive focus with a collaborative mindset for greater long-term success and innovation
- Encourage team-driven environments, where collective performance is valued over individual wins
- Lead with intent to collaborate, creating a space for shared ideas and deeper, sustainable change
Competition is instinctive—but is it always productive?
Many would say we live and work in the most competitive landscape that we have ever faced; in reality, it’s always been this way. We think something is different to what has gone before, that something is new, when often it’s just relabelled. Who remembers when scenario planning was business continuity, when cyber-attacks was hacking?
The nuance of language, and the threat landscape, mean that these terms have moved on for a reason, but when it comes to competition, it’s always been instinctive. From our early human days, our fight or flight response has served us well. Enabling us to identify significant danger to our safety so that we can respond accordingly.
We follow these instincts in business, too. Developing our abilities to compete so that we can win. We want to stand out from the crowd, find that point of difference, streamlining our mission, our vision and our USP.
This approach has traditionally created great success, developing brand loyalty, building demand for our products and services, driving innovation and killing the competition.
The limits of a competitive mentality in business
In the midst of such fierce competition, an ‘arena of combat’ emerges, organisation versus organisation, team versus team, leader versus leader, bringing alternative and divisive ideologies and theories to the fore. This is replicated in society. We live in a polarised world. It is one side or the other, left or right, right or wrong, yes or no.
But do competitive cultures really stimulate the performance that we all desire?
They emphasise the ‘consequences’ of not achieving the results that we seek, a win at all costs mentality that isn’t always in the best interests of all of us. In combat there are after all, always winners and losers.
Competition stimulates a relentless approach that focuses on continually raising standards, foundational to an organisation’s success, but at what cost to our people and our longer-term success?
Has relentless competition in certain markets, always led to better outcomes for their clients? Certainly not in all cases.
When we negotiate, we always strive for the best deal (best for all of us), but often default to and win, the best price (best for some of us). Think about recruitment. An agency wants you to sign up to terms of 20% for contingent recruitment. You negotiate hard and get it down to 10%.
But who will get the best candidates? The customer who paid 20% or you who negotiated 10%. This is why our Talent Acquisition team are so focused on breaking this model, determined to create a best outcome, an approach where we all win.
Collaboration as a strategic advantage
Collaboration requires a different mindset, one that multiplies our potential impact as we work together, share our knowledge, pool our resources and extend our thinking with the new insight of others.
There are many good examples of collaborative businesses. Google lead a renowned collaborative and creative environment. Gmail and Google Maps born out of putting cross functional teams together to explore multiple perspectives, creating open communication in a flat hierarchy to support innovation.
So how can we adopt this approach across our own workplaces and beyond?
Lessons from sport and the power of teamwork
Sport is an environment that embodies the competitive nature that we often strive for. We maximise the “performance” on match day, aiming to leave everything out on the field of play to defeat our competition. But success, at an individual or team level, is driven from buying into a united approach. Coaches focus on creating environments where it’s the sum of our talents that will enable us to stay ahead of the pack.
Cycling’s ‘domestique’ role is the most uncelebrated of team players. They compete in some of the most physically demanding terrain in the world, pushing themselves to their limits, riding directly into challenging headwinds to protect the energy of their teammates for 90% of any event, before releasing them, energy intact, to claim the win. Even in what appears to be a sport focused on individual brilliance, team ethics wins the race.
Collaboration has got to be the key to open the door that competition can’t. It’s that final 1% that many of us crave, that final competitive advantage. There are limitless possibilities that exist if we were to use our combined capabilities to solve some of our most pressing issues.
Thriving through collaboration in a changing world
Many of the headwinds that we face are all of ours to solve. Be that technological integration; the relentless march of AI; intergenerational workforces or a continually evolving workplace. That’s before we consider the environmental, social or political landscape shifting around us.
Leaders and managers face into these challenges daily. Pressure mounts with the need to deliver results with limited time and finite resources. Working together collaboratively presents our best opportunity to face into these challenges. Creating synergy, reducing overlaps and duplication amongst many other benefits.
In any environment, collaboration is the key component of high performing teams. Enabling leaders to empower diverse teams to be more innovative and develop alternative approaches. This is in direct contrast to the competitive environments we so often find ourselves in, we strive to be different but ironically, work in exactly the same way we always have.
When all parties are given the time to collaborate, we get more flexible, productive, sustainable, inclusive environments. This takes patience. Collaboration needs energy, ideas and creativity. This takes persistence. Leaders who encourage collaboration provide the focus, clarity and direction to develop deeper and long lasting change. This takes courage.
It is these enhancements that can create a positive cycle (pun intended) for us all to perform. Natural selection dictates that there will always be an element of survival of the fittest, but as Darwin said it is our ability to adapt, to work together that will enable us to thrive.
This next chapter of our working world is our most critical and needs something different. We will always focus on winning the work, the fight, or the battle. But by working together, encouraging collaboration across our workplaces, sectors or disciplines, then we have a real chance of winning the war. Would our landscape then be the most collaborative we’ve ever faced, that really could be different.