Leadership: Balancing Cooperation and Competition

I attended a seminar in Roanoke, Virginia in the late 90s where Stephen Covey was the guest speaker.If you don't know, Stephen Covey is the author of the best-selling book, ‚Seven Habits of Highly Effective People‚ One of the seven habits, habit four, is Think win-win. The idea behind habit four is for people to operate with the understanding that there may be a solution to your problem that is mutually beneficial to the other party involved and yourself. Too often, we think in win-lose dichotomies due to the competitive nature of our society.

In addition to living in a capitalistic society, we compete in most aspects of our lives beginning very early in life. We have pretty baby competitions, baby pageants, and even the competitively covert statement, she the prettiest baby ever!. As we get older, there are new competitions for us to complete. There's tee ball, and worse, tee ball tryouts. We compete against other families to get our kids into the best preschools. I colored my picture better than anyone else in the class. You run faster than I do, but I make better grades than you do. My team will beat your team. I live in a better community than you do. You graduated from a better college than I did. And this discourse continues throughout life.

At the seminar in Roanoke, Dr. Covey asked two people from the crowd to volunteer to help him demonstrate the next lesson he wanted to present. Several hands rose from the crowd, but two burly young men were selected to stand at the front of the room. Quickly he had the two men facing each other about two feet apart. He instructed each man to slide his right foot forward so that the right side of his foot was touching the right side of his opponent's foot. Next, he instructed the men to grasp right hands in a standing, arm-wrestling pose.

He told each man that whenever he was able to push his opponent's arm over to a 90 degree angle, he would receive one dime. Go! Dr. Covey yelled. The competition began. The two men locked arms and grunted and groaned until one man was able to defeat his opponent. Dr. Covey repositioned the men into their original stances and said, "Are you ready to go again? Go!" And once again the men locked arms and began the struggle. He quickly stopped them this time.

Stop. Think. Is this the best way to approach this situation? Too often we view our life situations and react the same way. We see the obvious ways we might win or lose, then we tense our muscles to make sure we are on the winning side. Rather than cooperate, we compete. We don't ask the question, Is this the best way to approach this situation? In other words, we don't really think. We react from our own fear of losing. The two men at the seminar quickly realized that relaxing their muscles and opening their minds was the pathway to finding the best solution. By allowing each other to "win", they developed a windshield wiper motion that allowed both men to collect lots and lots of dimes in a very short amount of time with very little effort.

The Cooperation Concept is abundant in the leadership literature. Leaders around the world speak of its value, and today leadership authors speak of the demise of institutions that don‚ foster collaboration amongst its members. One of the things that is absent from the literature, or at least my understanding of the literature, is a discussion about the delicate balance between competition and collaboration at the various levels of society, as well as within organizations.

Look at the two major political parties in America. Surely, you can see the forces of competition and collaboration at play here. I see the value in both forces, I like one more than the other, and yet I hope we never get to the point in America where we try to eliminate either. Competition, unchecked, leads to a world where the weak are extirpated by the powerful. Collaboration, unchecked, leads to a world where we acquiesce to the middle, and greatness becomes obscure. I suggest that the same phenomena occur within organizations.

Suppose you work in a factory that produces widgets from gadgets and trinkets. The more widgets the factory produces, the more the factory profits. As a factory worker, you realize the more gadgets you produce allows the factory to produce more widgets, so you begin to work diligently producing gadgets. At the end of your shift you have made three times more gadgets than any of the other nine gadget-makers at the factory. You go home that day with a new sense of satisfaction and three times more money than the other gadget-makers. The next day, eight of the other nine gadget-makers produce gadgets as quickly as you do, and thus, go home that evening with increased pay. Unfortunately, one gadget-maker can't keep up with the increased pace, so he quits his job.

Meanwhile, over at the trinket division, the ten employees just finished a meeting on how to improve the quality of the trinkets. The employees believe that better trinkets create better widgets, so they routinely meet to discuss ways to improve trinket production. Employee three shares with the group that she is able to place an additional rivet in the trinket when another employee holds the two sides together for her. Additionally, this gives her a free hand to apply the needed amount of pressure to the rivet, making the trinket stronger and more durable.

At the end of the day, the trinket supervisor and the gadget supervisor are called to the CEO's office.

We only produced 18 widgets today. What's the problem? asked the CEO.

Problem. There is no problem. We produced 18 trinkets today. Evidently they were all assembled into widgets.the trinket supervisor replied.

We produced 87 gadgets today, with only 18 being assembled into widgets!, the gadget supervisor retorted.We paid the gadget workers for all 87 gadgets, but the company only makes money when we sell widgets!

I am curious, said the trinket supervisor. How many gadgets did you have to throw away?

We only had to throw five gadgets away today. The gadget workers had a good day, but if the remaining gadgets aren't converted into widgets, we will have to throw them away too!

Although this example is somewhat simplistic as to the happenings within an organization, it does illustrate how the ideals of cooperation and competition can run amuck if left alone. The gadget supervisor created a good division based on competition. The trinket supervisor created a good division based on cooperation. Neither division is great.

Greatness will emerge when the organization begins to balance cooperation and competition. Different organizations need to balance these two concepts according to their needs. This CEO may challenge the trinket division to increase production and challenge the gadget division to increase quality. These challenges may be accomplished by having the divisions compete with their previous performances. For example, the trinket division may need to create more than 18 trinkets tomorrow. The gadget division may need to reduce their bad gadgets by ten percent. The CEO may challenge all plant employees to create more quality widgets.

As the leader of the widget company, I think the CEO needs to teach the employees Dr. Covey's concept of Think Win-Win. Unfortunately, we have this idea that competition means that someone wins and someone loses, and preferably the other person loses! Through collaboration the gadget division can improve its quality and the trinket division can improve the number of trinkets it produces. Through competition each division can be pushed to its maximum potential. For the leader, it is imperative to maintain the appropriate balance.

How do you maintain that balance? Well, that may be a follow-up post to this blog.