Shawnee Love   •  
May 10, 2012

I am a firm believer in a little healthy competition to encourage better results.  It doesn’t work for everyone and I don’t think everything should be turned into a contest, but healthy competition can bind teams together and causes individuals to look back amazed that they accomplished so much.

The trick with competition is that it must be healthy for the company to use it for any sustained period of time.

Most of us can recognize unhealthy competition from personal experience.  It is when the drive to win overtakes the importance of the overall organization and includes:

• Fighting over scarce resources,
• Hoarding resources to prevent others access,
• Climbing over each other (and kicking them while you are at it), and
• Taking the opportunity to hurt competitors.

The brouhaha in the early games of the Stanley Cup playoffs was an example of competition gone bad with NHL players taking cheap shots. Yes, they were just trying to win the game which is the goal of any serious sports team, but in deliberately hurting other players, they lost sight of the big picture. The NHL suffers when great players are knocked out. The skill level go down and people stop watching, i.e., revenues go down.  That’s not good for hockey players no matter how “competitive” they are.

Healthy competition is about:

• Respect. Respecting the other competitors and wanting them to be at their best, because when you beat them fair and square, you know you deserve it.
• Learning. Learning from other greats in your field, catching up, and building upon what you learned from them and also learning from losing or failing because those experiences help you find out what not to do in your quest to win.
• Drive. The motivation needed to become the best and the reason you persist when the going gets tough.
• Achievement. Improving until you can reach your potential, or even master your craft (whether your craft is business, sports, music, science, etc.).
• Love. The love of your Craft. Because if you truly love the craft, you will never do anything to damage it.  To do so would be a sacrilege.

A message to those few hockey players who have lost sight of their craft.  If you truly loved the game, you’d mourn the injury to a great player who made you better rather than cheer the absence of an obstacle on your march to the Cup.

What does this all have to do with business?  Check back next week when we’ll talk about how to encourage healthy competition at work.