The 2010 winter Olympics  – two weeks of intense competition that determines the best of the best, and showcases the teamwork and talent of athletes from around the world. This made us take stock: every day, we experience our own version of the Olympics, except our version takes place in the office towers and meeting rooms that make up our workplace. Every day, employees around the country work within teams and as individuals to hit their goals in an effort to be recognized for their contributions and advance their careers.

What else do our workplaces have in common with the Olympics? Competition – a natural occurrence that often gets a bad reputation, but is vital to creating a strong team that produces results.


Healthy Competition

The purpose of creating healthy competition in the workplace is to build a results-driven culture where employees are motivated to perform and achieve their goals. As Laurent Duperval, of Duperval Consulting says in a 2009 CarreerBuilder story, “Competition in the workplace is usually a good thing. Healthy competition will cause others to surpass themselves in order to achieve a goal that they might not attain otherwise.”

It’s not a good thing when competition becomes damaging to morale and the company’s ability to achieve its overall goals. That’s when you’ve got an Olympic-sized issue on your hands.

In John C. Maxwell’s book, The 360 Leader, Maxwell illustrates the value of competition with his concept of “Competing vs. Completing”.

Competing                                                                                        
* Scarcity mind-set                                                            
* Me first                                                                               
* Thinks win-lose                                                               
* Single thinking (my good ideas)                                    

Completing
* Abundance mind-set
* Organization first
* Thinks win-win
* Shared thinking (our great ideas)


How do you balance completing and competing?

From The 360 Leader, tailored for this blog post

1. Acknowledge your employees’ natural desire to compete. If you squash it, you lose an edge that motivates employees to do some of their best work. If you let it run wild, employees will run over each other and alienate themselves.

2. Embrace healthy competition. Healthy competition on does so many positive things for a team, many of which cannot be achieved through anything else. Healthy competition:

* Helps bring out everyone’s best. How many world records are set when a runner runs alone? People function at peak capacity when they have some else pushing them.
* Promotes honest assessment.
* Creates camaraderie.
* Does not become personal.

3. Put competition in its proper place. The goal of healthy competition is to leverage it for the corporate win. Competition in practice helps teammates to improve one another for game day.

4. Know where to draw the line. It’s not difficult to define. When competitiveness raises the bar and makes others better, that’s healthy. Anytime it lowers morale and hurts the team, it’s unhealthy and out of line.