The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 236 - Collaboration vs. Competition

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hi, Pete.

Pete: So I was a guest at an awards night a couple of weeks ago for Tracey's work, and it was actually a really fun experience. And I got in a conversation with one of the award recipients at the end of the night, and something he said, I've been thinking about ever since. And I really, really want to bounce it off you, get your thoughts, and I think it might be helpful for our listeners.

Jen: Bounce it off me, Pete. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: So I was at what was kind of like the Oscars for business owners of car dealerships.

Jen: Okay.

Pete: Context, Pete, context. My wife works for Toyota. She was working in the head office for a number of years, and is now one of the regional managers in Australia. And we were at the awards night for this particular region, where they basically have everyone come together, all the dealership owners who are small business owners...or medium to large business owners, actually. And they gather, and there's a bunch of categories and a bunch of criteria, and there's all of these awards, and it's a big celebration. It was a really lovely evening. And perhaps, like a few of our listeners, I had certain connotations with what an awards night for a bunch of amazing people but also car dealerships might be like: "Maybe it's about sales. Maybe it's about, you know, driving as many dollars as possible." And there were some categories that involved sales, but actually, the conversation I got in to with the winners of the grand award, the Dealer Of The Year, at the end of the night, just reminded me of like so many of the things we talked about, and also just this idea of like culture, and the way that we build teams actually can influence results. So I think it was actually Tracey who asked the question of this gentleman, "What do you put the change down to? Like, what happened in the last twelve months? You didn't necessarily win this award last year. You won this amazing award this year. Like, what changed for you and your team?" And he said, "Probably the biggest thing that happened is our team went from competing with one another to collaborating with one another."

Jen: Oh.

Pete: And I just was like, "Ooh, ooh, ooh. Tell me more about that. I love that idea, from competition to collaboration." And we had a conversation about it specific to his particular organization, but I've been thinking about it far more broadly now. And how...I've been thinking about this as it relates to your industry, and I know you can add far more context than I can...but how we could, in some ways, perceive others in our area, in our field to be competitors. (And we've actually done an episode before on competition.) But what does it look like to actually start to think of them as potential collaborators or collaborators? And how does that change the way we show up, and the work we do, and the culture we build, and etc., etc., etc.?

Jen: I'm just obsessed. It feels like the thesis statement for a TED talk, or it feels like the cover story of Harvard Business Review, or like something where it's like, "Wow. Your business will be so much more successful if you eliminate competition and focus on collaboration." And it seems so obvious. And yet, I'm thinking about like when people within organizations have metrics they are striving for in order to be eligible for promotion, etc., so much of it is about "beating the competition".

Pete: Right, i.e. beating one another.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Yeah. And I think there's an interesting tension...and I'll put, in the Box O' Goodies, the episode we did on competition, because actually, I think we talked about some of this tension. Which is, there is part of being a competitive leader or individual which is actually really healthy and serves us in some ways. But I think in that episode, we talked about the distinction between basically being a dick and being someone who is using competition as a way to motivate themselves. And I think that that still applies here. There is a world where some form of competition is helpful. I mean, I was at an awards night. And I'm sure that part of what helps people in those events, or get to the place where they're even invited to those events, is framing certain things as like a competition. I get that. However, I think, to your point, sometimes we almost subconsciously take it too far. And we have this scarcity mindset of, "It's me vs. them. Me vs. you. I want this promotion, so I'm going to have a competitive mindset. And I'm going to start to either not tell that person certain things, or, you know, tell someone something that is actually different to what I'm doing," and like start to adopt these kind of unhealthy competitive behaviors that don't fuel the broader purpose of the organization.

Jen: Yeah. I remember in that Competition episode, we talked about the difference between work being competitive, and then, engaging in competitiveness as like a philosophy or behavior.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. So some of the things he shared...I'll just throw some out there, and I'm sure we could come up with more to unpack...was like, you know, "The team would not share ideas for how to, you know, improve the marketing of the organization or increase customer awareness of the brand of car that they were selling, in years gone by." And then all of a sudden, they realize, "But if we talk about this together and collaborate on this, oh, we can actually come up with way better ideas about how to improve our marketing, how to increase the amount of customers coming in." And then, you know, the other example is around, "If we have a business target or business objectives we're trying to achieve, yes, that sort of filters down to, 'I have individual targets.' But if I essentially help the business succeed, then aren't I not playing my role and helping myself succeed anyway? So like, what does it look like to collaborate with my peers to achieve the business vision, rather than only focus on my own success metrics?" And so, he had like two or three examples that I thought were just really nice ways of not necessarily completely revolutionising the way that you have to work, but shifting your mindset to, "What does it look like to collaborate, as opposed to compete?" In my mind, it feels funner. Actually, if I was someone who started to make that shift, it feels like it would be more enjoyable to collaborate. I don't find competition and those like aggressive competitive mindsets particularly enjoyable, at all. Maybe that's a personal preference. But this idea of, "Let's collaborate and create better," as opposed to "Compete and, you know, create almost like scarcity, and not necessarily better," in my mind is just a really nice, helpful way of thinking about these things.

Jen: I have heard more than one person say this, so I'm not sure who to attribute it to. But it's the idea that, "If I have $1 and I give you $1, you have $1 and I don't have $1. But if I have an idea and I share the idea with you, now we both have the idea. Or if I have knowledge and I give you my knowledge, we both have the knowledge. Nobody's lost anything. We both gain."

Pete: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Abundant mindset vs. scarcity mindset, I love that example. I absolutely agree. And so, I've come across this...it's funny, I think it's confirmation bias. Since I've had this conversation, I've been really noticing this pop up in various parts of my life. And I've had conversations with other people in the leadership development and executive coaching space, for example, and a couple of them have actually said something along the lines of like, "Oh, well, you're a competitor, so I need to be careful what I tell you." And I'm kind of like, "Oh."

Jen: "What?"

Pete: I've literally never thought about that before. I'm like, "Here's what I'm doing with this client. And I talk about a lot of the ideas on my podcast, which is freely available. Like, you're welcome to listen to it." And so, just these different ways of thinking, I find particularly interesting. And in my mind, it feels, again, more generous. It feels less zero sum, if we can adopt a more collaborative mindset and realize that, whether it's a leadership development or whether it's, you know, working at Toyota or whatever it is, there is a broader vision, a broader purpose, a broader change we're trying to make in that industry. And so, "Can I align myself to that," in my mind, feels a lot more empowering.

Jen: Oh, yes. 100%. Two things come up for me in relationship to the population I'm working with mostly.

Pete: Yes. Hit me, hit me, hit me.

Jen: Okay. So if I forget to say the second one, remind me.

Pete: I'm writing it down.

Jen: The first is that my clients who have...easiest isn't the right way to say it, but who gain momentum and success in a way that feels like it's full of traction, typically have coaches, agents, managers, who, we all talk to each other or we all know that we're working with the same person and we share information about that person. And conversely, I have some clients whose agents really don't want to hear my take on anything and really feel like that they are in competition for who knows the most about what's going on in our industry, and like, "Who can help this person best?" And the client is the one who suffers in that situation. And my most thriving clients are the ones who have these teams of people behind them, and we all share our information because it benefits the client.

Pete: Yes. Love it.

Jen: So, there's like this elitism that ultimately hurts every single person involved.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, the question that comes to mind is like, "Who is that serving?"

Jen: Right.

Pete: Right.

Jen: And then, the other thing that I'm thinking of is, it's not that there isn't competition or that the industry or that particular space isn't competitive. Because, of course, any industry is competitive. Last week, I was doing a master class for a group of college students, a pretty large group. And because of the size of the group, they had to rent a pretty large space. So we were at one of the New York City audition and rehearsal centers, which have these huge rooms. (I've taken you to one of them before, so you know what I'm talking about.)

Pete: (Yeah, so cool.)

Jen: And one of the students said, "What do you wish people understood about the theatre industry before they entered it?" And I was like, "Oh, that's such a great question." I said, "I wish people understood that right now, we are sitting in a rehearsal center, in an audition center. There are more people on the three floors of this audition center than there are jobs on Broadway."

Pete: Right.

Jen: "It is a competitive market. Like, we have to understand what that means. It doesn't mean I want to take you out."

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: "But it means I want my work to be at the level where I can see myself with that small group of people who get to work at the very top."

Pete: Mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm, mmm-hmm.

Jen: "And then interestingly, the best way to get there is by being part of a community that helps each other get there."

Pete: Right, collaborating. So good. So good, I knew you would have good thoughts on this. Okay. So the other thing that came to mind while you were sharing that is, so I was a coach and a head coach in Seth Godin's altMBA. (Long-time listeners know this.) And I still stand by this statement, that the team culture that we built is easily the best workplace culture, collaborative culture that I've ever been a part of and ever witnessed. And I literally worked in an organization where we studied workplace culture, so like I know a thing or two about what it looks like to have effective workplace cultures. And this was like far and away the best. We had hundreds of coaches from around the world, working asynchronously, working remotely before Zoom was even a word that people understood was a piece of software, like all those things. And one of the reasons I think it was such an effective culture is we used to use Slack, which again, people are now familiar with (or Microsoft Teams, for those that are in corporate land). And we had a channel and it was called how-are-we-handling, and this channel was magic. It was absolute magic, and it was basically collaboration in action. And so, the idea was, if (i.e. when) you feel stuck at any point on anything...so if you're coaching a student and they are having a hard time, or if you're thinking about something that you'd like to present as an idea to your cohort and you want to get some feedback, like, "I'm not sure this is the right thing to do. What do you think?" Basically, the idea is to put anything you want feedback on in this channel how-are-we-handling and, as the title kind of suggests, any coach who's online at that time will share, "This is how I would handle that. This is how I would think about that."

Jen: Wow.

Pete: There was no right answer. There was no hidden intent. It was literally like a whiteboard of, "Okay, well, have you thought about this? Here's how I would think about this," and then Jen would say, "Have you thought about this?" And like, sometimes you'd get twenty responses in the space of twenty minutes. And then, the coach who put it there basically got to do whatever they wanted with all that information. They processed it, they thought about it, sometimes there'd be some back and forward, and then they would go back to the student or the situation at hand, having just collaborated with like twenty or thirty people from around the world, and present this idea. And it appears that the coach is presenting it as like, "The question that I'm going to ask you is this," and what you don't see is the twenty coaches that are standing behind you, kind of like supporting you and like, "You got this. Here's some ideas." And every time I tell the team that I'm working with in a corporate about that channel, they like run away and go, "Oh my god, we need to create this channel. We need to create this channel in our Slack or in our Teams." And so, I just think that is, in my mind, the most beautiful example of collaboration in action. And it's all asynchronous.

Jen: I frickin' love that. That will be added to all of my Slack channels moving forward. Thank you for that.

Pete: I've got the channel named as whiteboard in some of my Slack groups, because sometimes I'm like, you know, "whiteboarding" is a term that I really like and that other people are familiar with, because it invokes that there's no right answer. It invokes imperfection. It invokes like, "This is us, just scribbling stuff on the board. And hopefully, you can take that and put it to use."

Jen: What I love about how-are-we-handling is it eliminates the assumption that I'm the only person who would possibly be struggling with this.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And it just takes all of the shame and the fear, and almost deletes it in favor of empathy.

Pete: Right. And it was remarkable, every time we had a new coach join the team, which was often, it would take like a while for them to understand there's no hidden intent behind this channel. Because it feels so funny, like, "Oh, I can't share a struggle that I'm having, because that would show that I have a struggle. I don't want to say I've got a question, because then I'm, you know, I'm someone with a question." Because in so many cultures, workplace cultures and organizational cultures and societal cultures sort of invoke that, sadly. And it would take like an example or two for them to realize, "Oh my god, no, this is like, 'How are we handling? How are we?' Like, this is actually collaborative, in the interests of," again, to your point, "serving the person that we're trying to serve. The student, in this case."

Jen: I love that so much. What I love about this in relationship to the awards that you were talking about, I have a friend who has said, "Can you imagine if someone won an Academy Award or a Tony, or, you know, one of the very-watched awards shows, and got up and said, 'I deserve this. I did this all on my own.'" Like, you would just immediately not like that person. So what I love about this in relationship to the awards show that you went to, is, what an amazing team triumph, as opposed to one person collecting the award. It really is something that can be celebrated throughout the entire dealership, throughout each department, because everybody had a part in it. I just, I love that so much, just the feeling of being acknowledged, of achieving a victory must be so much sweeter when you've done it as a team.

Pete: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It says, "I see you and you belong in this team." And in fact, what happened when the award recipient went up is, they actually called on three or four more people to join them. And in doing that, then extended that to the people who were also sitting on the table but also were in the room. So it was like a collaborative receiving of the award itself, which is sort of a nice way to start to wrap this up.

Jen: At the Oscars this year, I can't remember which film it was but there was a film that won for something...I'm going to see if I can figure out what it was and drop this moment in the Box O' Goodies. And when the person came up on the stage to receive their award, they said, "If you worked on this film, will you please stand up?"

Pete: Amazing.

Jen: I had never seen anyone do that before.

Pete: That's so good, yes, collaboration vs. competition. So, that example is such a good one because it reminds me that the thing I love most about this idea is that it doesn't require a bunch of new knowledge. It doesn't require you to completely change the way you think, necessarily. It just requires you to adopt a slightly different posture, a slightly different attitude that focuses more on collaboration and less on competition, more on abundance and less on scarcity. And I think everyone listening has the capability to do that.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.