Negative Competition

In every corporation every executive is competing in some way with his peers. We all want to move up the corporate ladder and there’s only so much room at the top. But since the rules of fair play are seldom written or clearly articulated, there are some common competitive strategies that corporate leaders have an obligation to address and prohibit.

A CEO can set the stage for either of two types of executive teams. In one, without clearly articulated values and goals, the executives will be preoccupied with infighting and act as individuals. In the other, they can form a team that conscientiously strives to make the sum of the parts greater than the whole. The ethic that separates the two is the leader’s belief and assertion that adversarial behavior that serves an individual player while undermining the progress of the team and the company, is intolerable.

That ethic can be translated into a very simple statement and fundamental principal; you don’t succeed by undermining or going to war against or injuring your peers.

Many of us have probably had the experience of working on a team with a person who spent more time pointing out the mistakes and weakness of other team members than attending to their own responsibilities. Mine was a new CFO for whom we had great expectations. She was intelligent, articulate, incisive and decisive but within a year we let her go.

Within days of joining the company she worked her way into the CEO’s office with a list of “problems” she had discovered in other departments. The issues she described weren’t typically of concern to a financial officer. The CEO appropriately commended her for her interest in company wide continuous improvement and suggested that she direct her concerns to the director of operations and the vice president who were directly responsible for managing those issues.

Instead of privately contacting either of them, she brought the issues up in an executive team meeting. Days later she returned to the CEO’s office with another similar list of the “sins” being committed by her peers. Within weeks the pattern was clear to the CEO and others. She really wasn’t interested in allowing her peers to develop solutions for the very real problems she’d identified. Instead, she was jockeying for position and favor by attempting to undermine the credibility of her peers. She was planning to win by making them lose the favor of the boss.

At the same time she was nurturing hostility and distrust. Communication and cooperation with her office began to deteriorate. Within months the finance department was the company’s first new “silo” and she was on the outside of the executive team looking in.

It takes time and energy to undermine others or fight wars. In some ways those that do so are stealing from the company. They’re converting company resources, time and money to personal use, and they’re robbing the executive team of goodwill, cooperation and vitality in a twisted game of self promotion.

For the most part we think of competition of the right kind is good for us. It’s part of the basic fabric of business and American culture. We not only love the thrill of the game; we love the long term results; better products, better services, stronger players and continuous improvement. But the healthiest competition in corporate life is never “win-lose” it’s always “win-win” and it’s up to the CEO to set that standard.

Tom Aranow is a former CEO who now consults with CEOs and other executives as a Senior Advisor with Harrington Daniels Advisors, LLC. He may be reached at Tom@hdadvisors.com.