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The Newsletter | Edition 032
In our Off-White Papers, we provide practical guidance on how to respond to our rapidly-changing world. This weekly newsletter explores those topics in real-time, with information and action steps on how to make progress now.

IN TODAY'S NEWSLETTER...BRILLIANT COMPETITION.
Humans are hardwired to be competitive, both internally and externally. In the workplace, when done right, competition can be healthy and help drive business goals. However, for the wrong reasons, it can turn toxic. What can organizational leaders do to identify, prioritize, and promote healthy competition while quashing toxicity? What does it look like when it’s at its best? At its worst?
  1. Why competition can be kind, from Chris Konya
  2. Collaboration isn’t togetherness, from Joanne Bolens
  3. Step away from the scorecard, from Fabian Castro
And this time, our illustrations from Ash Casper.

AN ALTERNATE COMPETITIVE REALITY

From Chris Konya

TL;DR

While so many reality shows bring out the nastiest in people, Great British Baking Show AKA “GBBS” is a competitive environment where contestants help one another once their work is done. They give advice, offer supporting embraces, and handshakes that bring people to tears. Of the many lessons on GBBS, the greatest is that competition can be filled with kindness.


WHY IT MATTERS

Watching the shows of support on GBBS makes you realize that a win is only as great as your competition. So build them up, make them great, and in return, your wins (and theirs) will mean that much more.

ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

Create a culture of supportive competition where building one another builds oneself.

THOUGHTS

The most impactful way to do this is to develop a mindset of competitive support. To do that might mean unabashedly sharing wins, playfully one-upping one another, or creating competition rituals that include cheering on your competitors to create a collective culture of raising the bar together. Remember that culture begins with the small behaviors of every day, so make sure to model the culture you want in everything you do.

IN THE BALANCE

From Joanne Bolens

TL;DR

Distributed work is threatening the delicate balance between competition and collaboration. It’s easy in this environment to become isolated from the broader context and happenings of teams adjacent to your own. But companies can rethink their virtual and physical office spaces and ways of working to safeguard healthy team collaboration.

WHY IT MATTERS

Collaboration and competition are not antagonistic, but symbiotic. When in balance, these forces are essential to any team’s success; competition drives individuals’ performance up, while collaboration allows teams to work towards a shared goal. But in a post-covid, distributed work environment, will the deficit of spontaneous collaboration lead employees to prioritize individual goals over shared ones? Dropbox, amongst other companies, is one step ahead, completely rethinking its office space to only be in service of collaboration. Called Dropbox Studios, these spaces are specifically for collaboration and community-building, and employees will not be able to use them for solo work.

ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

Redesign your spaces and team moments to serve spontaneous collaboration, not just togetherness.

THOUGHTS

This might mean reinforcing collective success by rewarding entire teams over individuals, making your office space only/mainly available for human moments vs solo work time, or giving teams a budget to meet wherever they please (e.g., a co-working space, a cafe, or a park).

SURVIVAL OF THE COLLABORATIVE

From Fabian Castro

TL;DR

In a material- and achievement-oriented society like ours it’s only natural that we try to create standards of success to compete against. But how we tend to define success is most often in personal checklists that don’t create lasting happiness. In other words, we’re keeping score.

WHY IT MATTERS

As Douglas Rushkoff once highlighted, Darwin’s story of evolution is not based on competition and survival of the fittest, but in marveling at how species are collaborating and cooperating with one another for mutual survival. By viewing evolution through a strictly competitive lens, we miss the bigger story of our own social development and have trouble understanding humanity as one big, interconnected team.

Given the business environment we want to succeed in, we seek sources of quantitative evidence of our progress and effectiveness. However, scorekeeping in this manner creates a dependence on external rewards, and it sets us up for dissatisfaction. Psychologists have found that extrinsic rewards can actually extinguish intrinsic rewards, leading us to enjoy our activities less.

ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW

Try something other than keeping score when evaluating personal (and teammate) progress.

TIPS TO BEGIN

  • Develop safe spaces for true candor in self-reflection. “Sunshining” for example, is a Netflix term used to describe a company practice that encourages employees to air a mistake they've made to colleagues in the name of transparency.
  • Create opportunities to recognize admirable intrinsic characteristics in others, not just the work they delivered.
  • Highlight how others outside your team improved the health of the organization at large, and how that made your job easier.
  • Create an idea meritocracy, much like Netflix and Bridgewater Associates, where there are channels that involve everybody, regardless of hierarchy, to submit larger ideas and debate their potential.
  • Celebrate process and collaborations even when they lead to coming up short on the “numbers” since so much of the day-to-day work is overlooked.

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