Who are you competing with?
As a manager, I have weekly reviews with each member of my team. We talk about 3 things each week:
- What’s gone well (and how can we do more of that)
- What needs improvement (and how can we improve faster)
- What’s the general feeling of how things are going in relation to your goals and the rest of the team.
3 simple questions that get right to the heart of what we’re focusing on, living our strengths, and shoring up the weaknesses enough that they don’t bring our strengths down, and take time to think about how we FEEL things are going.
During a recent weekly review, one of my folks said to me about the feeling of how things are going on the team, “Sometimes I feel like I’m doing more work than Fred. And it’s not fair. Fred should work harder. It’s not fair. Why don’t you make Fred work harder.”
These are very fair feelings. I think that all managers can relate easily to this. After all, we’ve all been there. If Fred and I are on a team, shouldn’t Fred pull the same amount of weight as me? And as Fred’s manager, shouldn’t I expect that Fred, Sally and Steve all are going to produce 500 widgets a day, take 500 calls a day, or sell 500 shingles a day?
NO!
That’s right, NO!
We are each uniquely gifted with a special mix that’s ours and ours alone, so our only real competition is ourselves. I expect some of the basic qualities to be the same for each person on the team, as I hired them each to do the same day-to-day job, but I don’t expect the same results for each person.
Each person on my team started at a different day, has different collateral duties, and doesn’t produce the same number every day. On a month-to-month comparison, it always ends up with everyone having numbers that are pretty close.
I’ve seen an interesting phenomena that tells me some folks on my team don’t believe I compare them their performance and nothing else: As soon as they see they seem to be producing more than another person, they slow down and let the rest of the team catch them.
If you’re like this, keep in mind that if everyone has the same score, you all look painfully average and in the mean with their stats. And as we all know, stats don’t tell the whole story for performance.
If you’re one of those people who slow down as soon as you get a few steps ahead, I’d like to offer you a better way. I offered this to my guy who was complaining about Fred:
Play full out, and remember that you are your only competition.
If you’re worried about how much Sally is doing every day, how much Fred is doing every day, why Tina gets to do x and Jimmy gets to do y, STOP RIGHT NOW. Start by thinking about doing YOUR personal best, every single day. Play full out for a month. If you really are head and shoulders better than your competition (if you’re reading this article, you’ve already shown you’re smarter than the rest of your team), play full out for a month and really set yourself apart from your peers.
See what your personal best can be.
Ultimately that’s what you’re getting paid to do, is to improve YOUR best numbers, every year, every month, every week, every day.
Play full out and let the numbers speak for themselves. You have no idea what you’re really capable of, and unless you’re a fully commissioned sales person with 100% transparency of numbers, you have no idea what everyone else is getting paid to do the job they do.
Who are you competing with?
You are your only competition, so start acting like it. Make today a better day, a greater day, by competing with you, and only you.
And if you keep at it for a full month, and you play as hard as you can, and compare yourself only to you, you’ll be amazed at how much YOU can do.
Tags: competition, leadership, output, self-leadershipRelated Stories
POSTED IN: employee engagement, looking inward, productivity, self management
3 opinions for Who are you competing with?
Alik
Jan 1, 2008 at 8:22 pm
I’ve read the questions you ask during weekly reviews and smiled since I do the same. The only addition for me is 4th question “personal asks”. It helps me understand team members personality better and then play to their strengths. Then I continued to read the post and it seems to me like the rest of it IS dedicated to personality. Comparing team performance to each other slows down productivity – agree. I once was on the team where a manager was sending monthly personal performance to the whole team. People hated it and considered each other a competitor rather team player. Imagine that situation, morale was not the best and overall team performance too.
Todd Rhoad
Jan 3, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Playing full out is great advice. However, if your managers aren’t watching, the numbers may not mean much. If you review Mintzberg, Pavett and Lau’s work on managers, you may be surprised to find that managers who focus on their subordinates are promoted far less than those that emulate higher level managers. I’ve seen this quite often. If your manager holds a performance review that lasts about 10 minutes and only occurs once a year, you know what I mean. Then, you aren’t competing with your peers, you’re competing with a much greater force. Fighting it won’t help any either.
The best way to achieve career success is to stop competing one on one. I worked years to understand how a team of high performers could compete against other individuals by collectively managing the perception of each team member. You see, it wasn’t that they didn’t do great work. It was more that no one knew they did it. More importantly, no one knew what they were capable of doing. Why you say? No one was looking.
The team based approach convinces your competition that it’s too difficult to fight your team. It also convinces management that you’re the player the want on their team. Get enough people to echo this thought and it becomes reality.
This approach will come out this year in the book “Blitz the Ladder.” Don’t waste time competing when you can convince everyone else that you don’t need to.
David Zinger
Jan 3, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Todd,
This was a powerful comment about the power of team and competition.
Now if we could just get some of the “higher level” manager to emulate their “lower level” managers who do a good job with people.
Of course, it would be even better if we could all really “level” with each other.
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