Should I Win, or Should We Win?
From a young age, many people are told to be the best. We must get the best grades, we must win sports competitions, and we have to beat out other people for spots at colleges. This subconscious drive to outperform our peers can be incredibly deep rooted. Although we use this drive to succeed as a sort of pseudo-survival tactic in the real world, there are plenty of opportunities in which we can reframe the context surrounding our competitive edge in order to develop a healthier, and stronger, organization and workforce. It boils down to direction.
Even at the very beginning of our professional lives, we are pitted against other people to secure a position. We have to have the shiniest resumes and make sure we ace our interviews. All this does is enable the feeling that we must stand out from the crowd. However, what do we do with that drive once we are in the workforce? Fortunately, we can utilize this thirst to stand out to enhance the effectiveness and camaraderie within your team with a bit of strategic vision and a whole lot of communication.
When you fully buy in to an organization or team, you steadily move from “me” to “us”. This is the secret ingredient that develop a healthy in-group vs out-group mentality. Although laced with negative connotation, you should want your team to feel a sense of protectiveness over one another and an atmosphere of having each other’s backs. This can develop into a group that thinks not only for themselves in their actions, but how it will affect each member. This is how we draw that sunk in fallacy of always needing to compete into a positive light. Once you can visualize your successes as wins for the whole team, you begin to satiate that implicit victory driven inertia.
Many organizations have watched their morale drop, and environment become toxic, as competition was used to inspire productivity. This is a phenomenon we are watching in real time throughout the United States Air Force, for example. Airmen scramble each year to prove that they deserve a coveted “promotion statement” to garner additional points when it comes time for them to test for the next rank. This has caused a rift where teams focus less on how they can perform better together, and more on how they individually contributed and how they can highlight this contribution in the hopes of getting some sort of “reward”.
Individualism can be a great survival tactic, but it will inevitably disintegrate teams as each member cares less about the wellbeing of their supports and more on their own achievements. This is why it has been shown that if you can drive your team to want to better their unit, as a whole, rather than their own singular list of wins, you can lift the morale and psychological safety amongst your team members.
Some realistic examples on how you can develop this tribal mindset (within healthy boundaries) is to make sure that you always take the opportunity to highlight the accomplishments of your team. Ensure that you are taking the time to acknowledge how each member contributed and focusing on the idea of it being a joint effort. Throughout these moments, you must ensure that you consistently are sharing the unifying vision and what it is exactly that you are all striving for. Additionally, you could praise your team on their actions and effectiveness. Compliments and recognition always feel more genuine when it is both unexpected and not simply on the large gains. This combination of individualized consideration and shared celebrations will eventually draw the team into a mindset where they feel as though they are operating towards a bigger goal, together.
All in all, enabling your people to outperform others as a team will be a fantastic way to functionally utilize this drive for completion that rugged individualism has instilled within most of us within the modern era.
