Unhealthy Competition

Competition is everywhere: at work, at school, in sports, in the way people chase promotions, grades, wins, recognition and status. Some countries have even changed their entire school system to be competition based and I get why.

Competition can make people sharper, it can push us to prepare better, move faster, and stop accepting mediocre work from ourselves. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve and there is nothing wrong with wanting to win.

But I think we confuse two very different things:

• Competing against a standard is healthy.
• Competing against the people who are supposed to help you build something.

The second one is where things start to break. I have seen this happen at work, a team builds something useful and instead of asking how to build on it people start asking who owns it.
Someone presents a good idea and the room starts looking for weaknesses before it looks for value. A project starts creating impact and suddenly the conversation shifts from adoption to credit.

It creates a race to deliver the minimum viable solution that can be claimed as your own instead of the best solution that can be built on top of what already exists. The mentality becomes:

“My solution is better than yours.”

“My team needs to be credited for this.”

“This should belong to us.”

That is when competition stops raising the bar and starts slowing the work down. The problem is the scoreboard. When the scoreboard rewards visibility over impact, people chase visibility and then everyone acts surprised when collaboration becomes difficult but people usually behave according to the scoreboard in front of them. If the scoreboard rewards internal winning people will compete internally.

This is why useful ideas start becoming political objects. A solution is no longer judged only by whether it solves the problem; it's judged by where it came from, who owns it, who gets credit, and which team looks better if it succeeds.

That changes the energy and now instead of asking: "How do we solve this better?", people start asking:

How do I make sure my idea wins?

How do I make sure my team owns this?

How do I prove their solution is weaker than mine?

That kind of competition does not create excellence, it creates politics and politics is expensive.

It creates duplicated tools, disconnected platforms, slow adoption and teams solving the same problem from different corners of the company and all because the incentives are pointing in the wrong direction.

The hard part is rarely just building a digital solution. The hard part is getting people to trust it, use it, improve it, and let it become part of how the business moves and that requires collaboration. Not the polished version where everyone says the right thing in meetings, the uncomfortable version where teams share context, expose constraints, reuse each other’s work, and admit when someone else already has a better answer. That last part is hard.

It takes maturity to see another team’s solution and say:

This is good. We should build on it.

It takes discipline to say:

This does not need to be ours to be valuable.

It takes confidence to say:

The goal is not that my team wins, is that the business stops losing time.

That is the kind of competition I believe in, not team versus team. The question should not be, “How do we beat the other team?” it should be “How do we make the work better than it was before?”

To be clear, I am not arguing for a culture where every idea gets applause, that is not collaboration and good work needs tension, ideas should be challenged and solutions should be tested but the challenge should serve the work, not the ego.

• If I criticize your solution because I see a risk, that is useful.
• If I criticize your solution because I need mine to win, that is politics.

The behavior can look similar but the intention changes everything. That is why I do not think the answer is less competition, the answer is better competition.

Compete against:

• Manual process that still wastes hours.
• Duplicated report nobody trusts.
• Platform nobody adopts.
• Workflow that breaks every time one person is unavailable.
• Meeting where everyone agrees and nothing moves.

That is what we should be trying to beat because the enemy is not the other team is the friction everyone has learned to tolerate. Once that becomes clear, collaboration stops feeling like a threat and someone else’s good idea becomes useful and the goal is to mature it.

Ambition without collaboration becomes ego. Collaboration without ambition becomes comfort but ambition aimed at a shared problem can create real progress. That is the balance, we need to compete with your own standards, against waste, against slow execution, against the version of the process that everyone complains about but nobody changes.

But do not confuse beating your colleagues with building something meaningful. The company does not win because one internal team looks smarter than another, it wins when the work moves better than it did before. That should be the scoreboard.