Poor Leaders Promote Competition. Choose a Better Way.
By: Jake Wilder
Tags: Self Improvement, Life, Entrepreneurship, Careers, Leadership

“Destroying things is much easier than making them,” wrote Suzanne Collins in her prophetic warning against our ongoing desensitization to violence and destruction. Which she cleverly disguised in an incredibly entertaining story.

And she’s right. Destroying things is much easier than making them. As more people seek to make their impact by tearing down others rather than creating work of their own, this fact has never been more obvious. Or more concerning.

But the real danger isn’t on the ease of one behavior over another. It’s that we’re creating environments that encourage and reward that behavior.

And if we’re going to successfully take on the problems we’re facing today, it’s a model that we need to change.

We’re bred for Competition

“All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

Most of us were raised to be competitive.

We’re in sports and we’re rewarded for winning. We’re congratulated on our stats and our performance over competitors.

We go to school and we’re recognized for getting the right answers. We’re rewarded for being the top student and those who can’t keep up are separated out.

We enroll in universities that create an over-abundance of attendees and then thin the herd with scare tactics. Pushing out those who couldn’t meet these new challenges.

And through it all, we’re conditioned to believe that winning means success. Losing means failure. And in this zero-sum game, you’re either doing one or the other. All of which is predicated on individual accomplishments.

Competition is promoted and bred into us throughout our lives. So it’s not surprising that this same culture permeates its way into most companies.

And it’s not surprising that this became the default environment by which I managed my own employees.

After all, what could be more fair? We all start out with a fair shot. The best prevail and we’re stronger for it.

Except I was blind to one inconvenient, yet crucial aspect. When winning is what’s important, one option is to raise your performance. Another is to take down your competitors.

And we both know which one’s easier.

Measure what’s Important. Not what’s Convenient.

“Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.” — Virginia Burden

Years ago, I started working with another manager. She started as my peer, eventually became my boss, and through it all taught me more lessons in both leadership and life than I could write about in a year.

And while I was too inexperienced to see the impact that my management style had on my group, she wasn’t.

But instead of giving me a lecture or calling me an idiot, one day she just asked me, “Are you measuring your people on what’s really important?”

I don’t remember my exact response, but I’ll bet it was something along the lines of, “Yeah. Well…what do you mean?”

And I distinctly remember her saying, “Would you prefer the group is successful or one person is successful? And which one do you think you’re encouraging?”

In my zeal for competition, I was prioritizing individual accomplishments. Success meant outperforming the person next to you. Which didn’t necessarily translate into the most value to the team.

In most instances, it actually meant the opposite.

Watch Out for Super Chickens

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” — Helen Keller

In the 1990s, Dr. William Muir ran an experiment to improve the egg-laying productivity in chickens by selectively breeding the top egg producers.

He selected a normal group of nine hens as a control and allowed them to breed and reproduce over six generations. Then he developed a second group by picking the highest quantity egg producers over each generation. Aka, the super chickens.

At the end of Muir’s exciting study (see what I did there? Exciting? Egg-citing? Ah, forget it), the control group chickens were healthy and producing more eggs than when they started. The super chickens? All but three were dead. They’d pecked the rest to death.

As Margaret Heffernan described it from the TED stage, “the individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest.”

Now a common conclusion is that we need to avoid teams full of stars. That if we pull in too many of our top performers they’ll start pecking themselves to death a la a brood of super chickens.

But in-fighting and cynicism run rampant in many companies. And this behavior is rarely limited to their star performers.

It’s a function of the environment. And what behavior is encouraged within it.

When I chose to promote competition through individual accomplishments, I was asking every engineer to be a super chicken. Whether they were a star or a struggling performer, the message was clear: your direct accomplishments will be your measure of success.

And the unintended but obvious-in-hindsight accompanying message said: your coworker’s success is limiting your own.

Given this criteria, what incentive did people have to help out their coworkers? Or make any contribution that would go unseen?

Because it’s often these unseen acts that provide the most value. As Heffernan recounted discussions on this topic with some of the world’s top music producers, they said,

“We have lots of superstars in the music industry, it’s just they don’t last very long. It’s the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves.”

The benefit of teams and organizations is in collaboration across diverse knowledge areas. But this only works if we’re creating an environment that encourages that collaboration.