Competition is good for your team
Using the 4 types of competitions for your advantage
“Competition? Are you crazy?? We are one big and happy team!”.
Yeah, yeah, I know the objections. Competition is for ‘Greedy managers who want to exploit poor employees.’
I’ve decided to take my chances, and explain why I think it has great parts.
I’m going to cover:
The 4 types of competitions, and how can they benefit you
The dangers of each
How does it feel to be a competitive team leader?
Being competitive as a TEAM
Around a year ago, I wanted to spice things up, so I made a bet with my manager.
My team started to work on a relatively short project, which should have taken us a month. I bet that if we finish a week earlier than we promised - we get an afternoon out as a team, expenses covered.
(For the gamblers out there - the best bets are the rare ones where you can’t lose 😂)
The point was not to work more hours, but to be more focused. Once the team had a ‘prize’, we were more aligned on the goal.
It helped us get what we needed from other people in the organization as developers were more assertive, and people were swept along. The team members were also more interested in each other’s work.
It can also work with velocity, or any other metric - using a goal your team can unite behind.
The dangers
Competing against other teams - sometimes it’s ok to compete against other teams, if it’s done in a good spirit. For example, in a Hackathon.
In the long term though, if teams start to compare metrics - it will create resentment and conflict in the organization.
It is much better to ‘compete’ against a challenge - deliver a feature faster, improve performance by X%, reduce the amount of bugs received by X%.
Competition INSIDE your team
What happens when developers compete between themselves?
Earlier in my career, I thought it was a great idea.
You know, like in sales teams - people have clear goals, and competition makes everyone better.
In an engineering team, it can manifest as the amount of tickets completed, bugs solved, or code written.
Don’t kill me, but I still think it’s not such a terrible idea. It just depends on the people.
Junior engineers who arrive at a high-performing team will usually feel the urge to step up faster, to be up to standard. A few years ago, I started a job with a long (3+ months) onboarding process. I did it in parallel to other developers, and it gave me a drive to do better and increase my pace.
I LOVE any sort of competition. It gets the best out of me. But I know that each person is wired differently, and for a lot of people it can be an awful experience.
“Competition makes us faster; collaboration makes us better” - and sometimes, we want ‘faster’.
The dangers
Tons of them. It can create a toxic environment, stress, resentment, and burnout.
See the other types of competition for a safer choice 😊
Developers competing with THEMSELVES
Comparing yourself only to your past self is what everyone tells you to do (even though it never works 😅).
If you have competitive developers on your team, it will usually manifest itself in:
Promotions - they’ll fight hard for that. They want to rise, and fast. Use that energy! Some small companies even create “Staff Engineer” roles just for that purpose (which I’m against btw, but whatever works for you).
Scope of work - they’ll want bigger and harder projects.
Salary increases.
A fun and harmless competition for a junior developer could be reducing the amount of comments in PRs. Challenge them to find the most strict reviewer, and get the minimum comments. It’s fun to see the progress with time.
The dangers
For people who are happy with a slower pace, it’ll just add unnecessary stress.
Not always the changes are fast, and when people reach the ‘plateau’, they’ll be frustrated.
Being competitive as a COMPANY
This is the BEST expression of competitiveness. When your whole company feels like a big team - it’s you against the world (and your competitors).
In my opinion, it requires:
Having well-defined metrics (aside from revenue - like active users or app downloads)
Making sure the metrics are highly visible to everyone
Making sure people know how THEY contribute to those metrics
Celebrating milestones!
You’ll see, competitive people will start to be obsessive about those metrics.
The dangers
Unethical behavior - falsifying numbers (like the story of the student loans startup), harming competitors, lying, stealing. I’ve wrote an article about how Theranos CEO fell from a valuation of $10B to 11 years in prison.
Losing the bigger picture - numbers are nice, but your first priority should probably be to make your customers happy…
What about competitive team leaders?
So we covered the 4 basic levels of competition. What about us? The team leaders?
As you probably noticed by now, I’m very competitive 😅. I always want to be the BEST at my job. When one of my developers mentions something good another team leader did - I immediately want to do it myself too.
I use it to my own advantage - to take the best from other team leaders, and incorporate it into my team.
The dangers
You are just never satisfied, constantly critiquing yourself, constantly comparing yourself to others.
That hunger for trying to be the best can be draining.
Summary
Often, competitive people are great engineers. They have a drive to be better than everyone else, and they work very hard to improve.
I’ve used the term competitive, but it applies also to people who are ‘achievement-driven’ - who are about personal goal attainment rather than outperforming others.
Being competitive is neither good nor bad. It’s just who you are. Maybe people who hate competition are happier. I wouldn’t know 🤷♂️
For my fellow competition junkies - let’s go win some stupid contest!
Very well thought out topic. Appreciated the read. So competition is good until it gets ugly.
I do worry about the first one getting out of hand sometimes.