Business Teams – An Oxymoron?

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Gil Davidson, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

Competition was a tool my mother used to get us into action. Who’s going to be the first to get dressed, to tidy-up their room, or to do whatever task she had that required immediate action. Then I went to school and learned that competition existed everywhere. By the time I reached university I learned that true competition meant being shrewd. Some of my classmates carried it to extreme lengths and would check out the only copy of key reference books (that they had already read) just to block others access to it. Just as I thought it couldn’t get any more ruthless I was told to wait until I got into the real world. Wait until I started working….

What did all these lessons teach me about teamwork? I learned:
• Don’t give out more information than you have to,
• Trust only a select few and collaborate only where it will bring you a competitive advantage of some kind,
• and many other lessons that hinder the collaboration of true team work.

How did this fit with who I am and how I like to work? It didn’t, but because it was the modus operandi of most others in business I burnt myself a few times before I learned to be selective about whom I was open with.

Fortunately Canada isn’t as mercenary as South Africa (where I hail from). However, much of the distrust and caution that is a by-product of our western individualism and competitiveness is present here and presents businesses with a problem.

Competition increases productivity. We want our employees to be competitive because it produces drive and stimulates innovation. On the other hand, our world has become so specialized that our businesses are dependent on teamwork. High levels of specialization means that we rely on collaborative team work and are by definition interdependent. Yet all our training and our belief systems encourage independence as the way to keep the edge.

Interdependence is seen as exposing yourself to unnecessary and dangerous vulnerability. Offering up your Achilles heel for others to capitalise on at your expense.

So, we find ourselves in a stalemate where we need each other, but we can’t trust each other. Miscommunication and distrust abound. Team politics rather than logic are what direct decisions.

Competition and shrewdness about whom you trust isn’t the problem. It’s when this belief system becomes your default operating system that problems arise.

When a child first learns to talk, he/she over generalises the use of the newly discovered words. All animals are “dog”; all children are “baby”, etc. When individualism and competition is your default behaviour, you risk over generalising and being unable to let your guard down. Thus you miss out on taking advantage of the specialist knowledge and wisdom that is in your team. Instead you compete for the edge and in your efforts to remain at the top of the pile you skew the focus to your area of expertise and point the problems to others.

Always needing to be individual stops you submitting to a team focus and priority. It also stops you from inviting the questioning of your assumptions, robbing yourself and your team of the best solution.

Having been around the block a few times the old myths I was taught around competition have been corrected and I have discovered that while competition between two bodies can create higher achievement as in the Olympics, competition between the parts of a single body creates stress, chaos and potentially the destruction of the body.

In the right place competition increases productivity. However, when it exists within an interdependent team it limits productivity. If your team doesn’t know how to switch off its competitive behaviour, it’s time to learn new behaviours.