As a child, we are always encouraged by our teachers, parents and the society to be top in studies, sports and whatever. Never in our life, we are asked to collaborate and participate in win-win situations. If you are missing competitive spirit, people would call you a ‘timid’ who is afraid of competing with others. As a child, it’s OK up to some extent to compete with others because that is the only way to do our homework regularly, learn things and showcase our talents. But during this process, we often forget the importance of collaboration.

But as we have grown, we have ignored the importance of collaboration many times in both professional as well as personal lives. Most of the times, team members in a project are reluctant to share certain information or expertise that they possess with others because they want to highlight themselves during the appraisals and promotions. But in the process of highlighting themselves, they are indirectly increasing the project complexity. Imagine a team member who has some information on a particular technology or functionality does not share to others in the team, then others will have to re-invent the wheel and have to spend some time in learning  and understanding in order to implement it. Had the expert team member helped others while they are struggling, it would have reduced learning time as well as built trust among them. Leadership has to take responsibility for this kind of environments partially. Because in order to evaluate the employees, they add certain parameters which degrade the quality or efficiency of the work and affect the work culture up to a certain extent.

For example, instead of evaluating the team member based on how many modules he/she has completed in a project, he/she should have been evaluated based on:

1) How much he/she has collaborated with other team members along with completion of his/her own work.

2) How much efficiency he/she has exhibited in eliminating the issues and taken additional responsibilities when others were afraid to take. 

3) How much instrumental was he/she in the success of the project.

This helps team members to support each other in successful project execution and at the same time, each marking their own milestone in the project that helps the leadership to evaluate each member correctly. 

When new employees join the company, they invariably bring expertise in different technologies and methodologies to resolve challenges because of their previous projects. Existing team members might not have the same exposure or expertise which newcomers would have. This does not mean that the existing employees lack the skillset that the newcomers have. It is only because they did not get an opportunity to work and solve those challenges. Many companies conduct internal training in order to fill in these gaps. But still, a collaboration between the newcomers and existing employees is very much needed in effective execution of the project.

In case, if there is only one person in the team who has an expertise on a particular skill set and it is needed for the project completion, leadership can change the responsibility of that person from a developer for example, to a module lead and ask him to lead the team members for that part of the project. This would give that person an opportunity to lead a team if it is a first time and at the same time gets an opportunity to work with all the team members by helping them in resolving their challenges. Dynamicity leadership style in these kinds of situations, by changing the roles of the team members as needed and creating an environment to collaborate will help both the team as well as the management to get profit.

The side effects of competition instead of collaboration among team members will add more stress in their personal lives. An unhappy employee at the workplace cannot work as expected and brings a lot of gap in expected vs actual work. Also, he/she would affect the work culture of the team in a negative manner. Finally leading the project to skip deadlines.

But this does not mean that team never should compete with each other. Competition is very much needed, but it should be in a healthy and positive manner. Like every developer should compete with others in writing code that has zero bugs, better unit tests, and integration tests so that if there is a bug in the code, it can be detected earlier. Leadership can create a dashboard showing the number of bugs across team member name and highlight the team member who has consistently delivered less or no bugs.  Leadership can reward the best team member for his/her best efforts. This also motivates the team to deliver better code and this kind of competition is very much needed and can be welcomed into the team.

Another scenario would be two or more different teams working on different parts of the project can compete with each other in delivering efficient functionality in less time or within the delivery schedules. This kind of healthy competition between two teams or among the team members will provide better output and eliminate unexpected costs for the projects because of scope creeps or more bugs that would have arisen because of lack of collaboration.

I tried to explain this in a simple way based on my IT experience, but a lot more examples can be discussed based on our daily experiences. But on a high level, we can conclude that leadership should provide opportunities for the team members to collaborate and compete appropriately.  A team should also try to have healthy competition and look for opportunities to collaborate with others and help to create a positive atmosphere.