What is Healthy Competition In The Workplace?
Healthy competition in the workplace is the interaction between people that encourages striving for greater accomplishments while fostering an atmosphere of success. This type of competition focuses our attention, ignites our work ethic, and sparks our creativity helping us reach our goals and innovate for the future.
Competition can also be negatively driven by driving anxiety, fear, stress, and self-doubt inside us. As we all know, institutions of higher education. Are extremely competitive environments. Students, employees, athletes, educators, and researchers all feel the pressure to produce and succeed for ourselves and the institutions we represent.
The key to healthy competition is when you realize you did the best you could and you are making progress. Remember, progress, is not perfection!
In this article, I’ll be discussing what healthy competition in the workplace looks like, how to promote it, and understanding how to channel your competitiveness.
Promoting Healthy Competition
People will tell you that competition is a bad thing. But most people who prevail in competitions would tell you that competition is healthy and makes people strive for excellence. Developing emotional intelligence and empathy can help you celebrate someone else's success which is a good way of promoting this type of competition. This skill helps you take a positive, healthier approach to win and losing. Loss in competition also develops the vital quality of resilience. The ability to get up off the canvas, dust ourselves off, reflect on our performance, and come back stronger, is a sign of a true victor.
Here are some tips to promote healthy competition:
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Make it part of your team’s ethos:
One of the best ways to encourage any behavior is to incorporate it into your team’s stated values or vision. This creates a foundational expectation around the behavior and increases the chances that it’ll become part of the team’s core character.
Talk about what it means:
Stated values are helpful, but not if they remain words on the page or posters on the wall. To bring values alive and gain true buy-in from the team, everyone has to be clear about what “healthy competition” really means. What are the associated behaviors? What does it look like in practice? As a leader, you can pose these questions and foster a shared discussion.
Clarify the why:
Along with making it clear what "healthy competition" entails, assist the team in realizing all the advantages of acting in this way as well as the disadvantages of not doing so. This will help team members feel more motivated around it. And, similar to the previous point, instead of giving them your opinion, take a coaching approach by asking questions that stimulate discussion.
Model it yourself:
“Do what I say, don’t do what I do” isn’t an effective leadership approach. You can’t ask your team to behave in ways that you don’t embody yourself. They need to see that your actions and words encourage healthy competition, and then they’ll be more likely to follow suit.
Hold people accountable:
If you’d like behavior to stick, you’ve got to hold people accountable when they don’t live up to the agreed-upon standard. Otherwise, they’ll quickly see that the desired standard must not be that important. Accountability can take various forms, but probably the most effective would involve having a conversation to share feedback and concerns and to get fresh alignment around the desire for healthy competition.
Point to inspirational examples:
Highlight other leaders and teams who are experiencing success while incorporating the tenets of healthy competition. This will add more validation to the benefits of being in this type of team and can provide helpful inspiration for truly living the value of healthy competition day-to-day.
You Are Your Greatest Competition
A mindset like this will encourage you to advance steadily and accomplish your objectives. This will help you focus on progress, not perfection. With that mindset, you’ll be able to apply set goals for success that go beyond an unhealthy fixation on winning. Here, the healthy competition challenges you to better yourself to achieve the win you aimed at. It will help you strive for improvement and sharpen your creative and imaginative skills which will make you more refined.
Channel Your Competitiveness
Having a competitive spirit can be a constant form of motivation to succeed. However, it needs to be balanced by positive practices. Healthy competition in a workplace must have the following elements:
(1) Advancing the entire field or organization:
The healthy competition puts focus on the bigger-picture intention of benefiting an entire organization, industry, or discipline. When an individual breaks a record or achieves something new, it’s viewed as an important step towards broader success.
(2) Unlocking personal potential:
Healthy competitors are less concerned about how they stack up to others, and more interested in stretching into new realms of personal potential.
(3) Honoring mutually held values:
There is an unspoken unity drawing players and teams together – a sense of shared values. Things like perseverance, honor, grit, fairness, and integrity. A healthy competition emphasizes the greater ideal and not the individual benefit of a particular athlete or team.
Finally, competition in a workplace if taken healthily can teach some lessons in life that no book or teacher can. It allows you to think twice before doing and implementing something which allows you to learn from diverse perspectives and makes you enthusiastic about things in life and not just a particular activity or thing.
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Meet The Writer!
Hi! I’m Christian James. I am a freelance writer, copywriter, and editor, with a data-driven and analytical mindset. I have experience writing on a wide range of topics in diverse fields. I have a B.Tech. in Computer science from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University and Currently pursuing an Online Certificate in Data Science: Inference Modeling from Harvard University School of Professional and Lifelong learning. As a freelancer, I offer services such as blog writing, copywriting, web content writing, speechwriting, article writing SEO writing, creative writing, and editing. Feel free to explore my medium blog or connect with me on LinkedIn.
