One of the legendary stories about me (if you will indulge me for a moment) goes back to my early days managing a team at my first job. One day, I walked into a team meeting and essentially accused three of my most competitive people of being uncompetitive. This went over about as well as gifting a globe to a flat earth conspiracy theorist, but on the bright side it's made for a pretty good story - let's just say I think I've been asked "Hey Tim, do you think I'm competitive?" more than a couple of times over the past few years (1). The outrage was a good response at the time (and, I think, the teasing callback is a good response now) because one of the great Business Bro virtues is competition - we want to be competitors, forever winners with our ideas, grit, and culture; we want to join competitive teams, and define our successes as a result of a competitive mentality. Simply put, we all want to be winners, but how can you win, in any sense of the word, without being competitive? The question for leaders, for Business Bros of all levels, is how to find that competitive spirit and harness it to lead the team, competitively, to victory.
On that day a few years ago, I had realized after some time that my team had a problem with competitiveness, though it wasn't strictly a lack of the quality that was the problem. I first noticed this after I started interacting with the team more often outside of work, where I was surprised to see highly and almost pointlessly competitive individuals emerge from their daily nine-to-five hibernation. Whenever I spent time with them in casual settings, I always sensed the will to win simmering under the surface, with the most competitive of the group seeming to suffer from an allergy to losing - it was like they had wagered their entire existence on the outcome of any game, and would therefore commit all of their energy and determination to achieving victory at the dart board, Skee-ball machine, or bar trivia night. The team was full of unique individuals but this burning desire to win was one of the few consistent qualities among them, clear to anyone at any time with one exception - in the workplace. When the bright lights of the office came on, it was like the stage was suddenly just a little too intimidating for them to dive fully into the competitive possibilities of their roles.
I didn't consider this a huge issue, but I was a little curious about the phenomenon. What happened at work that scared away competitiveness? What made this innate characteristic disappear in these team members? My limited personal experience helped me relate to the situation - I'd spent most of my first year and a half simply trying to fit in, a process that inadvertently stifled most of my personal strengths; I didn't even try to teach myself programming until year three. There is a particular pressure on new employees - and especially on young or inexperienced ones - to try and perform in accordance to a perception regarding their employer's wishes. Without explicitly being taught, I figured out that it's not advisable to challenge people's assumptions, or at least all of them at once, but this was the inevitable result if I tried things outside the expectation (2). My group was young, which suggested this was a factor - if the organization discouraged competitiveness, the last place to expect open defiance would be in the rookie class.
The organization's stance toward competitiveness was obvious to me from how the CEO described our roster. The company line - we'd hear it every few months or so - reinforced how our "talented" group of employees was central to our success; we hired "talented" people who played to win. This never resonated with me, which at the time I thought was specifically because I had a healthy dose of blue-collar thinking, and I didn't regard "talented" as a positive descriptor; our high school basketball team took pride in the slogan "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard", printing it on our t-shirts, and perhaps this conditioned me to sniff out talented people so I could zip past them when they inevitably became complacent. In my mind, "being talented" wasn't a job quality, it was a coping mechanism that losers relied on to console themselves when I beat them. If our CEO was talking about how "talented" we were, in my mind he was essentially turning us into a passive group, and setting us up for failure.
But even as I rolled my eyes each time our CEO made these proclamations about our "talented" team, I was starting to see the flaws in my mentality and becoming better at expressing the thinking underlying my objections. My fundamental protest to the word was rooted in the effect it had on people; the talented person could thrive as long as complacency was kept at bay, but complacency is a fairly standard feature whenever it's hard to measure success, which is the case for most office environments. The problem in my team, which I'd initially hypothesized was an inability to apply their skills in a workplace context, was actually more of a question about reference points - who were they competing against? At the day-to-day level in almost every business, this is never clear, which is a big reason why most organizations work hard to set goals and create accountability; it's an admission that we can only compete against ourselves. It's easy to be competitive when the scores are announced at the end of each round (or stock prices prominently displayed on a blinking ticker board) but learning to push the person in the mirror to a higher standard every day is a different matter; self-competition is the inevitable conclusion of an evolving competitive mentality.
Our company was no different in this regard and set goals as part of a performance improvement process. This presented a fresh set of questions for me, namely the concern that I'd never responded to goals. My opposition to goals isn't as strong (or strongly held) as my reaction to being called "talented", but it does share some similarities. The most significant parallel was the way it was rooted in experience - I'd done perfectly fine by simply trying to get a little better each day and saw no need to invent measurements and timelines to market the process; the first year I read over eighty books, I learned of it the next year, when I went back and counted - at no point had I announced an annual target.
I was open to the possibility that others might respond better to external signposts like goals, but I only seemed to notice instances of team members using outside benchmarks to their own detriment. A common occurrence was the noticeable way energy levels would drop anytime we encountered an immovable obstacle that took us off the trajectory for meeting a goal - rather than attack the challenge with a renewed effort, it felt like an inevitable heaviness settled into our thinking and discouraged a second effort. There were also those instances where someone settled for an inferior performance by justifying it against the benchmark of a lesser colleague, a problem so pervasive that our president once asked me to help out in another department's training because he thought the trainer (who had just announced his resignation) would set an abysmally low standard - his own - while onboarding his replacements.
At the root of the problem was a widespread belief that the organization was simply incapable of meaningful change, a founding myth reinforced by the old guard who told one too many stories of false dawns promising change and innovation - the inevitable arc of these failures had convinced us that the status quo was a permanent feature of the organization. This is a hard, serious problem that most people encounter throughout their careers, and there is no easy solution. However, in my mind the first step toward progress is dispelling the notion that unless things are visibly changing, things are never going to change - the best way to instill this belief is directing the emphasis of the competitive spirit inward, toward the self, which is always the starting point in any change process, and encouraging a mentality that measures an individual's growth against a personal, internal reference point.
I'd like to say that, armed with this ever-accumulating insight, I marched around the office and instilled a sense of internal motivation in each and every person over whom I had even the tiniest influence. It certainly feels about the time for it in this essay, at least by the terms of the "problem-struggle-insight-solution" storytelling model favored by all those chattering Business Bros whenever they share an anecdote from the front lines. I will admit that I did try one or two things in a group context - including that cringe-worthy story at the top - but I learned quickly from the initial stumbles and refocused my efforts to individual meetings, where I could speak more plainly about struggles, challenges, and opportunities specific to each person (2). The change, like any lasting transformation, was a grinding process full of starts and stops, but I like to think shifting the competitive mentality from an external to internal focus had a lasting effect, both for the organization and for individual careers.
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The idea of competitiveness is a healthy one when understood in all its diversity. The obvious kind is the one we see, which anyone can talk about - the will to win, the fiery attitude, the desire and passion and energy coming together in the most visible way on the journey to victory. This is the competitiveness that sees sprinters blast off with the starting pistol, running as hard as possible to the finish until they collapse dramatically in a spent mess after winning the race; we know it because we see it in all forms of competition. But the less obvious version escapes most novices, most likely because it's never visible - it's the form of competitiveness where you study, train, and commit to a winning lifestyle, so that when the starting pistol goes off you are one of the runners with a chance. It's competing at midnight, when you review it one last time; it's competing at the grocery store, when you break a cycle and step toward nutrition; it's competing in the mirror, when you call out your own lies and rebuild from the exposed truth.
The thing that makes success isn't the competitiveness of wanting to beat opponents when you see them at the race - it's the competitiveness to beat them when you don't see them; it's competing in each of those long, lonely hours of preparation, which are a prerequisite to reaching your potential on the big day. The reality is that most people, whether they see themselves as competitive or not, don't have this understanding and don't compete with their habits, routines, and lifestyles; leadership means taking responsibility for instilling this mentality and setting people on the path that will take them to their full potential.
Footnotes
1) The problem with being a manager is that you don't really remember the things you say to your team - for me, the recall period lasts around fifteen minutes - but your team will somehow corral each and every syllable that flees your pompous lips. Actually, I should revise that - your team will forget all the smart things you say, but if anything dumb gets out there prepare for total recall.
There's another similar story (which I will not write about, beyond this footnote) a couple of folks from this team like to tell about the day I (apparently) asked a new hire "does a tree ever stop giving shade"? I believe this happened, but don't ask me about it.
2) This changed for me as I got older - I realized how the downside was essentially a small investment that, despite sometimes flopping, would pay off handsomely in the long-term. This doesn't necessarily make it an easier process, but it was helpful perspective for me anytime I came to that thin line between cog and contributor.
Of course, for young people - as I was in those first couple of years after college - this isn't a realistic way to think about the world. The big problem is that first jobs are almost always "cog" situations - the employee accepts a job despite being mostly the same as the other candidates. In these roles, there just isn't much room for defying expectations. I'd tentatively suggest traditional first jobs are a good idea for young people committed to being part of a certain industry, but for anyone else it might not be worth the hassle - better off trying to find a "contributor" situation, where value isn't so closely aligned with fulfilling a job description.
