Organizations have often made competition unhealthy. Whether it’s the sales competition where someone holds up a gold trophy after beating out every other salesperson in the organization or chopping the bottom 10% of your organization every year as Jack Welch did at GE, we tend to pit our best employees against each other.
Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash
Is that really healthy competition?
No, it breeds a lot of animosity, frustration, and anger. Salespeople brew and stew. They voice their displeasure over having to compete against their teammates.
That’s not healthy.
So, what is healthy competition? How can you encourage your team members (and yourself) to seek out healthy competition?
Well…
What Is Healthy Competition?
Healthy competition means looking at yourself. Take a good look at who you are and who you want to be, and find a way to get there. I’ve got three steps you can take to gain healthy competition.
Find others in your field:
That’s right, get out of your organization. You don’t want to compete against those you’re working with. Why? Because unhealthy competition creates an unhealthy work environment.
Instead, find others in your field. If you’re a salesperson, go find other salespeople who are doing what you desire. They may have a higher closing rate, more loyal customers, or higher satisfaction rates. If you’re an organizational leader, you may look for other organizational leaders. These leaders are crushing it.
Go find others in your field.
Compare yourself to them:
Ewwww… but comparison is yucky and icky. We shouldn’t want to compare ourselves to others.
Wrong…
That’s precisely what you want to do in this situation. You want to see how you rank against people who are high-performers. These are the people raking in sales, having a solid and loyal team, and being looked up to in the industry.
Why do you want to compare yourself to them? So you can see where you need to improve.
Seek out ways to improve:
And this, folks, is what all good, healthy competition breaks down to. You want to find others in your field who are doing better than you so you can seek out ways to improve.
As you look at those who are doing better than you, you can have your own personal competition with them. They don’t even need to know you’re competing!
Look at what they’re doing better than you. Watch how they’re doing it better. Then, try to adopt their methods so that you can improve yourself.
The more you have these imaginary competitions, the more you can find new ways to improve yourself and your skills. Don’t be shy about seeking out competition.
When you make competition healthy and about improving, you’re going to improve. Not only yourself but your organization. You can use this method to train your team to find healthy ways to compete. You can apply these methods to yourself and improve your leadership skills.
Be a healthy competitor. You’ll benefit from the skills you gain and the lessons you learn.
