Insight For Life & Wealth: Learning Not To Compete...

Hello Friends!

My Thoughts: Competition can be positive if you understand the essence / goals involved...It should be removed from the "Do or Die" mentality and placed on a pedestal of Team Spirit and Growth...

Most of us have grown up in competitive societies. We compete with our siblings for the attention of our parents. We compete with our peers in school for the best grades to get into the best universities. And this competitive spirit carries over into our work life, where we try to out perform our colleagues.

But what if beating the competition wasn’t the key to success?

The world has become so interconnected that many of our traditional notions of what it takes to “win” no longer apply. Teamwork and collaboration – both within organizations and between them – are increasingly becoming the currency of success. Firms can’t operate effectively unless people work together to solve problems.

But cooling down our competitive engines isn't easy when those instincts are so strong. If you’re in a situation where competition is getting in the way of success, here are two strategies that might help:

Trade places with your competition

You can do this on a very temporary basis just by shadowing people in another department for a day or two. You could also work in their area on a temporary project, or even institute an official job rotation. The more you understand the view from the “other side,” the less inclined you’ll be to compete.

Facilitate discussion between competitors The second strategy is to bring seemingly competitive groups together to talk about their dynamics and develop steps to make both parties more successful.

In one manufacturing firm, factory managers felt that many of the data requests from headquarters were a waste of time, while officials from headquarters thought that managers in the field didn’t provide accurate data on a timely basis.

But when these groups spent a couple of days together, they were able to identify a dozen reports that could be eliminated or streamlined, and construct service level agreements for how and when to provide data.

For most of us competition is instinctual, and in many cases we’ve been conditioned to make it our default path to success. Yet, as the world becomes more complex, learning how not to compete could be the key to winning.

(Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner at Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of “The GE Work-Out’’ and “The Boundaryless Organization.’’ His latest book is “Simply Effective.’’)

Culled from BusinessDay Nigeria: Harvard Business Review.

xoxo

Simply Cheska...