It's often assumed that the drive to win and be the best will motivate employees to perform at their highest level. However, the reality is that competitiveness can actually be damaging to your team's success. In many workplaces, competitiveness is seen as a positive quality. It's often assumed that the drive to win and be the best will motivate employees to perform at their highest level. However, the reality is that competitiveness can actually be damaging to your team's success.
When you boil it down, competition is really the antithesis of collaboration. By encouraging competitiveness in the workplace, you essentially pit your employees against each other. They begin to view their colleagues as adversaries instead of allies. While this approach may help your employees reach their own individual goals, it may come at the cost of your business reaching it’s overall shared objectives - the ones that require a team to rally together and share information and resources.
Let’s look at an example. Your business may have an objective to increase sales by 10% for the year. In order to encourage this, you individually approach your sales staff and tell them that their goal is to be the “top salesperson in the company for the year”. You incentivise by explaining whoever achieves this will receive a large cash bonus. Over the course of the year, you routinely praise the leaders on the sales board, showing special attention to the person sitting on top.
This scenario sounds like a recipe for major motivation, right? Perhaps not. Whilst you may see a few top performing members of your team rise to the occasion, you’ll also likely see those members keeping valuable knowledge to themselves, a lack of mentoring between experienced team members and newer ones, and a real lack of morale from the people who aren’t receiving any praise or acknowledgement for their efforts. As a result, you could wind up with a couple of great salespeople, and several that aren’t performing. While your top performers will be reaching their personal goals, your overall goal of increasing sales by 10% would be more obtainable if ALL of your team were feeling motivated and rewarded.
So how can we avoid this toxic competitive workplace culture while still motivating a team?