Don’t run your company under the law of the jungle

Competition is healthy for any team that hopes to achieve good results. However, I am experiencing an intriguing scenario in my company that I fear could ruin things if not addressed.

A few of my managers seem to have pushed the concept of competition too far and are now engaged in some kind of rivalry among the departments they head. I find this awful and not good for the business, but how to do I pass the message without killing their spirits? I believe egos are involved in this whole issue and taming egos can at times have devastating consequences.

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On the surface, yours is a fairly simple and straightforward question. In reality, it is a deep question that has for years preoccupied experts in evolutionary biology, business and even politics.

On the face of it, the system of competition you have put in place is intuitively correct. By encouraging competition among your staff members, you expect that the final “product” will be better, and that your organisation will move to greater profitability.

If, for example, you are selling cars or insurance, the more each of your 10 sales people sell, the better your top line. So if each of the 10 sells five more units per day, then in total you are selling 50 more units daily. On paper you have a perfect business.

In reality, however, you have a problem. The total number of cars your market can absorb in a year is limited by the economic environment.

In a similar way, animals have to fight for limited food, water, mates and all those things that enable them to survive.
The entire system of survival for the fittest is based on the principle that the most able in the jungle gets food, water and mates, more readily than the less able.

This theory, therefore, puts man in the situation where biologically, competition is the order of nature.

Civilised society, on the other hand, argues that by working together, we can as a team do better. In the real world, we have engineers, barbers, butchers, carpenters and others. Each is an expert and cannot be replaced by the other. Together, society is better off. If all people in a city were teachers, who would fix the cars?

This perhaps is where your company is having a problem. You have not yet moved from the jungle and are killing each other. You can share with your managers the story of three giants who now work together.

PSA Peugeot, Citroen and Toyota decided some years ago to develop a new city car now sold simultaneously as Peugeot 117, Toyota Aygo, and Citroen CI. Same car, three different companies. The companies shared common costs and became more competitive than each working on its own. In politics, diverse political movements come together from time to time to get or fight for political power. The NDP-Kanu alliance of the 1990s comes to mind, as does the Jubilee and Cord groupings. All are examples of working together to achieve a common objective.

Get your team to check out what co-operation means. Simply put, it is the action or process of working together to the same end. It also means collaboration, synergy and unity of purpose.

To what extent does your team have a clear vision and clarity of purpose? To what extent are the different teams working to deliver an outcome that they can all identify with? Have you made them understand that they are all better off together and badly off separately?

What type of incentive scheme does your company have in place? If It is one that is likely to benefit individual’s for working alone, then they will steal and undermine each other because they have no reward for working for the company as a whole.

If on the other hand the reward comes equally to those who work hard and those who are lazy, then there is no incentive to “go the extra mile”.

Discuss this with your staff and you will found out what will drive them in such a way that you and those who work best are rewarded.