March 18, 2010

Do you pit people or do you pair them?

Leaders wake up: Promoting competitiveness might backfire on you! 

It's very tempting to use competitiveness as a prime motivator to get sales people to increase efforts, suppliers to cut prices or prospects to sign deals.  But at what expense? 

Think about how you manage people: You need more results than ever from your employees and they seem a little glazed over from the last two years of funky business climate.  So you pit one against the other in an ad hoc call out (why can't the rest of you perform like Eric?).  You see a little bump in activity, but Eric's now eating alone in the break room.  Or you formalize it with a winner-take-all sales contest that acts more like a reality show competition than a team building exercise.  

You tell your supplier-partner that your other suppliers have cut their monthly fees by 20%, so she'd better do the same.  You start to publicly share RFP proposals to drive bidders crazy (whittling down each other's margins along the way).  You spend time building urgency into your sales pitches, using warm leads and limited inventory to scare your prospects into signing. 

Does any of this sound familiar?  

If you are starting to do this, realize something, you are promoting a culture of competition NOT collaboration.  A culture is a set of values, communicated by leaders, that creates a system of social control.  When you teach people to compete with each other, they continue to do it long after your promotional period is over.  While you like the short term results, remember the old saying: When you dance with a bear, you have to keep dancing until the bear's finished.  

You see, values are what shape our decisions and how we allocate resources.  When you pit people against each other, you are teaching them that there is value in scarcity (the small pie).  If you are successful, they will likely understand the motivating force of fear/loss and start to use it for themselves too.  Remember, they are looking to you for tools to succeed (same goes for suppliers or customers too). This means that your path to short term success will pave the road to your long term business culture.  

Instead, try this: Pair people together and promote their synergy.  One of my recent speaking clients in the financial services arena did this: He paired a high sales performance veteran with a rookie that had great research skills.  The veteran got fresh leads and some energy from the rookie and the rookie got some sales savvy and made several sales earlier than predicted.  This promotes collaboration and a focus on shared strengths.  I recently put two of my supplier-partners together to work on my rebranding campaign.  They are now able to complete their work for me faster, and I'm going to have less costs too. One recent consulting prospect of mine indicated he couldn't quite afford my monthly retainer, so I paired him with another prospect in the same industry with the same budget issue and now I'm working for both of them on a combined deliverable - we all win.  In all three cases, the long term effects can only be goodness.  

What's the takeaway?  If choosing between fear & love as a motivator, always choose love.  

Comments

Great post! You raise some very interesting points here and although i do agree that collaberation is generally better than competition, many people thrive off competition so surely in some environments its a better fit?

Found an interesting website the other day that offered some great advice and valuable insights into effective leadership and leadership strategy, definately worth checking out http://bit.ly/aiiSYx

Posted by: Tobias  |  March 19, 2010 at 08:26 AM

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