The first step to creating a winning culture is to stop talking about winning entirely. What’s one thing that’s automatically true, by definition, when someone wins? Someone else must lose.
You may already be thinking of reasons this doesn’t really apply to your workplace. Bear with me here and let me explain.
Winning is a very familiar concept to us
Winning is a concept so common, so widespread, so engrained in our everyday lives that we don’t even think about it. It’s reflected back at us in so many ways and in so many places that it feels normal. So familiar, in fact, that we don’t even notice how it affects us.
When we see someone praised as a winner, we automatically and unconsciously feel like a loser. We don’t choose that feeling; it’s baked into our society and reflected back at us over and over.
Winning is an emotional rollercoaster
Winning creates a positive feeling in us, not just a thought or idea. Losing creates a feeling too – a negative one, a feeling of failure. There are two main responses to that feeling: giving up, or fighting to win. When someone who feels like a loser fights to win, they create more people who feel like losers, who then either give up or compete harder themselves, and the cycle continues. It may appear to motivate people and encourage progress, but is it the best or most emotionally healthy way?
Someone who feels like a loser wants to be a winner, so they become motivated to compete. Or they simply give up. Do we then say “well, that’s too bad for you I guess”? Are we fooling ourselves into thinking this is a positive and productive way to improve motivation in the workplace?
Winning creates division between people
The concept of winning creates sides: us versus them. Out in society, teams compete and the outcome is glory for the winners and disappointment for the losers. That context gets carried into the workplace. We unknowingly create adversaries between ourselves by creating competition, and competition has a lot in common with conflict and fighting: people fighting to win, and fighting to not lose. Some will act in their own selfish interest so they’re rewarded with positive feelings; others fight to win simply to avoid the fear of feeling negative ones.
It’s easy enough to say “this is just friendly competition.” It’s not so easy to stop friendly competition from engaging people’s individual survival mechanisms and turning into a more personal kind of conflict. If you want competition in your culture, it needs to be designed with human nature in mind.
Fighting against versus fighting for something
We mistakenly fight each other when we should all be fighting against a common challenge, or fighting for a solution, goal or vision. When the stakes are win-or-lose, there is less incentive to collaborate and more incentive to act selfishly or even sabotage others. That doesn’t mean people are bad; it’s a function of human nature and how we’ve set up our society.
The ideal workplace is one where the entire team is aligned, standing side by side and facing the same challenges together. A culture of winning doesn’t achieve this. Fighting for something beats fighting against someone; a competitive culture points the fight the wrong way, at colleagues instead of at the shared challenge.
How to create a winning culture at work
To create a winning culture, stop making individuals win against each other and align the whole team against shared challenges. Celebrate achievements everyone enjoys together, recognize collaboration and helping, and remove the situations that divide people into winners and losers. People give their best work when success is shared and nobody walks away feeling like the loser.
In practice, consider the following:
- Prioritize individual recognition over praise or awards
- Celebrate and reward business achievements where everyone enjoys the win together
- Recognize collaboration and cooperation
- Support a culture of giving, sharing and helping
- Recognize and support learning and development
- Actively encourage equal participation and inclusion
- Remove situations that cause divisions between people
- Create a time and place for open and honest communication
- Avoid individual incentive programs and competitions where possible; look for creative ways to reward contributions that don’t create negative emotional triggers
- Be aware of the behaviours you may be incentivizing without meaning to: selfishness, competition over cooperation, sabotage, political posturing, perceived favouritism, secretive behaviour, dishonesty between people
What this looks like in practice
Suppose someone on your team notices a colleague having trouble with a task and steps in to help them work through it. When the work lands, you recognize the two of them together for what it did for the company, as a team effort, without weighing who contributed what. Later, in private, you thank the one who stepped in for taking the initiative. Nobody was ranked against anybody, and helping just became an easier thing to choose next time.
Or suppose one of your people works late to rescue a sudden deadline and does it well. Instead of an award or public praise, you tell the team plainly what they did and how it moved the team’s goals forward, then give them the floor to present the work. Their contribution is stated as fact, not held up as a trophy. Nobody else walks away feeling like they lost, and the path to the same fair recognition is obvious to everyone.
When someone on the team is struggling
Suppose someone on your team is upset and frustrated, producing poor work and creating conflict with colleagues. That may be a sign they feel like a loser or a failure in some way, though we can’t assume. If a person already feels down, immediate discipline or blame will only compound the feeling; ignoring an obvious issue can be even more damaging. Instead, meet privately. Ask how they’re feeling and how the company can support them. Listen, acknowledge their concerns, then be clear that the behaviour has to change, and ask how they think the situation can be improved. That gives the person a feeling of power over their own situation while still asserting that something must change. This isn’t a fight the manager must win against a problematic employee; both of you can align to face the behaviour together, not the person.
Breaking out of the cycle
It’s hard to break out of cycles and patterns so familiar to us that they seem normal and obvious. Even if something is normal, common or widespread, that doesn’t mean it’s the best or most effective way. It does mean we have to think more carefully about how we do things, because the link between what we do and its impact on people isn’t so obvious.
By understanding a little about human psychology, we can make small changes in the way we do things to minimize unintended and unwanted feelings and behaviours. Do that and you vastly expand what your people can give the workplace: efficiency, effectiveness and morale all improve.
And if you do want some healthy competition in your workplace, remember how the concept of winning can automatically and subconsciously make people afraid to lose. That fear creates unwanted and unproductive behaviours.
So have a look around. Have you noticed competitiveness in your workplace that leads to conflict or negative feelings in your team? Was it engineered into your culture deliberately, or did it grow in on its own?