Competition isn’t just winners and losers

This is what competition used to look like to me:

That’s me in the red, nearly getting my face rearranged at the Executive Fight Night charity event in Tokyo in 2017.

I think that last one probably did move some things around.

I grew up competitive, playing just about every sport imaginable (and some we invented) in the front yards, streets, and driveways around my neighborhood. I played baseball throughout high school but never felt competitive in school. My grades were always good (until university anyway), but I had zero ambition to have the best grades or go to the best school.

After eventually completing university I spent a number of years kicking around jobs, trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I had a degree in professional writing and was interested in film, but had already figured out that I wasn’t good enough, and almost certainly not lucky enough, to make it in that world. I wasn’t content to be a starving artist, so instead I was a starving retail clerk, barista, and waiter.

Let’s speed forward: met my wife, moved to Japan, got a job with a Japanese company, did pretty well, got promoted, had a kid, had another kid, then the company went bankrupt in 2010. I knew I didn’t want to work in a Japanese company anymore, and a number of friends told me that I should give recruitment a try.

Going into the job, I was skeptical. I didn’t view myself as a “sales” person. One week in, I knew I had discovered something that had been missing my entire career.

Turns out, I needed competition in my professional life as well.

Competition always felt like something personal to me. It felt like something that happened on playgrounds and in driveways, not in school or offices. But when I got into recruitment I discovered a lot of like-minded people that were driven to be successful and weren’t shy in wanting to be the best. It was an immediate challenge that I had been missing.

Competition is not one-size-fits-all

As an individual contributor in a company full of very outwardly competitive people, it wasn’t hard to find motivation. Things started to change when I moved into management and realized that my mindset needed to change to help people grow. For the team to be successful, I needed them to be better than me, because I was the coach now. And while there was still some element of competition across the business, it was no longer an apples to apples comparison that was just about my performance.

Whereas previously my motivation had come externally, now most of it was coming internally. How do I build the best team or business? How can we challenge ourselves to be better tomorrow than today?

As my career progressed, that mentality only intensified. Now, my professional mindset is very different from my personal life, where intense physical and mental challenges are still my go to for enjoyment.

Managing competitive people

First of all, it’s important to understand that a lot of people define competition like I did: winners and losers. However, that’s a narrow and limiting notion of what competition is. Just as I discovered through my own professional growth, the other side of competition is setting personal challenges and measuring your achievements against your own expectations, not that of others. Many people who don’t identify themselves as competitive are, in fact, fiercely competitive within themselves.

Before I learned this, my standard coaching speech would have been “rah, rah, team, let’s go out there and kick some backside, we’re #1”. That’s not an effective message for those that are more inwardly competitive or not competitive at all.

When I started using Attuned, I quickly realized that some people who I hadn’t thought of as at all competitive really were, but needed a refined message geared towards their goals. Additionally, it also added a lot of depth to our interview process as I learned what questions to ask to understand how someone’s intrinsic motivators might be similar to mine but show up very differently in their behavior.

On the flip side, I’ve learned that if I’m managing people that are also very outwardly competitive, I have to be mindful of keeping the competition healthy. (Hello, rationality.) And whether you are competitive or not, it’s important to realize that winning won’t look the same to everyone.

Personally speaking, that’s less of a concern, so if my kid says, “Dad, I bet you can’t drink that whole bottle of hot sauce,” I’m free to prove to him that I’m still the champ in the pound-for-pound dad rankings.