56. Healthy Competition in Life and Business with Dr. Kim Perkins

 
 
 
 
 
 

Crush the competition.

Why have so many sports metaphors, and a language of competition in general, become so commonplace in business?

Once you begin to notice it, it’s everywhere. But is that atmosphere of competition even helpful in a workplace setting? Or does it damage relationships and our ability to build strong teams and show up the way we want to for the long haul?

Dr. Kim Perkins joins India to discuss the pervasiveness of competition in business. They dig into how it shows up on social media, how it feels in the body, and define healthy and unhealthy competition. They’ll also discuss ways to positively use competition to foster relationships and build cohesive teams, and how to use competitiveness to show up and be visible.

In this article:

  • How the language of competition shows up at work and in our lives

  • Why people tend to either love or hate competition

  • How competition can turn toxic at work, and ways it can bring teams together

  • How competitiveness and rivalries manifest and what to do when you get caught up in it

This article is based on a Flaunt Your Fire episode called Healthy Competition in Life and Business with Dr. Kim Perkins

Meet Kim

Kim Perkins holds a Ph.D. in positive organizational psychology. A former journalist and pro athlete, Kim works on purpose, culture, and communication with leaders at cutting edge science, tech and entertainment companies. Her first book, Winner Take None (2022), explores the role competition plays in our lives.

Kim says she was drawn to organizational psychology because of the similarities she saw to her career in sports and the challenges of group dynamics and leadership.

The language of sports and competition is everywhere.

Kim says that as she delved into business and organizational psychology in graduate school, she noticed just how common sports metaphors are in the business world, and that business owners and company management were particularly interested in her own sports background.

But she noticed a distinct disconnect between what the metaphors describe and what she was actually doing day to day in a business.

“I found business was much more collaborative and much more open-ended, as it’s really practice.”

Where many of the sports metaphors reference scoring or winning, that kind of competition–with clear objectives and clear roles, within a set time limit–is not a mindset that works in the long term of business and entrepreneurship.

“The competitive mindset that makes that really fun, where you can get all fired up in that period of time, it’s just not something that you can do in the 24/7 nature of entrepreneurship.”

How Competition Feels

Everyone reacts differently to the energy of competition. People either love it and are motivated by it, or they hate it and don’t want anything to do with it, and Kim says those feelings tend not to change a lot.

While most people tend to fall on either side of that line, how you respond is related to a whole network of associations that is highly individual.

To illustrate, Kim uses the example of a friend who plays pickup basketball and loves to trash talk. Some people will be distracted by someone getting in their head and lose focus on the game, giving Kim’s friend an edge. Others, though, will focus more intensely because they respond positively to the challenge inherent in the trash talk.

In both of those situations, Kim says, the body will respond with a flow of cortisol, in what is essentially a threat response. And depending on their individual network of associations, their past experiences, both positive and negative, their level of focus on the game will increase or decrease.

Competing for Likes

India asks Kim about the air of competition on social media, for attention, for likes, or for business.

Kim responds, “The thing with competition on social media is that the goal is kind of abstract and it doesn’t end.”

When you’re competing on social media, there is no buzzer that goes off that ends the game and sends you home to rest or gives you a break from a constant state of readiness.

And, Kim says, “There’s so many different ways to demonstrate what we’ve got going on, and it’s when we’re trying to demonstrate our identity is where we find that competition gets more toxic.”

Healthy competition requires consent to play the game. “If you're forced to play the game, you never going to feel like you're winning, even if you are.”

And it also requires an understanding that the outcomes, good or bad, will affect your identity. “If your identity is really based around winning all the time, that's going to make it very toxic for you.”

Kim also urges us to remember that “most of the world is based on cooperation and community. And that competition is just this tiny, tiny little peak on the iceberg that is very visible because it makes for a good story.”

How Consent to Compete Helps Teams

Consent to compete is one of the areas Kim says workplaces frequently get wrong. Sales competitions are a common example of an exercise imposed by management that can encourage poor behavior and toxic environments.

However, she has seen remote teams build relationships through cooperative online gaming. When the team meets to play a game where they have to cooperate and play to their individual strengths to achieve the objective, it helps them bond.

Some studies have shown that a positive aspect of online gaming is learning more about how other people’s minds work.

As a team building exercise “gaming can be fantastic about that because then you can, you can see how people are operating in this other play environment. And then that gives you some more information about how they operate in a work environment.”

Knowing what each other’s strengths are and how they think leads to happier, more productive teams.

Competition As Fuel

India asks Kim if she feels competitiveness can be used as fuel for helping people show up and be more visible.

Kim says that can be true for some people, but there are a couple of key questions to ask. “How clear is the goal? And how good are people at getting the goal?”

If anyone on the team is still learning or developing skills, competition can undercut the vulnerability required by a learning process and can lead to shortcuts and poor behaviors.

For example, running a sales team contest, “If you have a new team beginning out, you've got a really big prize, not everybody knows what they're doing, we’re not all sure what the rules are–this is a time when you definitely don't want to do sales, because this is when people will start taking shortcuts.”

Competition imposed by top management teams on frontline workers is also something that Kim notes can be “really toxic and unfair even,” when lower seniority staff are just trying to make ends meet.

“If you're just trying to survive and I put you in a competitive situation, you may see this as a war and not a game. And that is when a lot of really bad things happen for both individual humans and for organizations.”

What Does Competition Look Like?

You’re more likely to get competitive with someone you have a lot in common with, than someone you don’t.

Kim tells the story of quickly developing a rivalry with another participant at a retreat who had a very similar educational and professional background.

“His wife had to come in and say, ‘Okay kids, play nice.’ One of the hallmarks of competitiveness is that it escalates until somebody figures out how not to do that because it's very contagious.”

Many times it can start before either party even realizes they’re doing it.

It could start with one-upsmanship of your professional credentials and what school you went to, as it did for Kim and her rival, or it could be compliments laden with barbed subtext.

But, Kim says, when you realize someone is competing with you, killing them with kindness is always an option. Refusing to acknowledge the barb in the subtext and affirming only the compliment “is both very annoying for the people who want to take you down…and will also preserve your sanity.”

And she wants people to know that she struggles with competitiveness too. “It’s always easy when you're telling other people what they ought to do….But I still have trouble putting it into practice.”

How Kim Shows Up and Flaunts Her Fire

“We talk about how authenticity comes from within, but authenticity is also something that we give others the opportunity to have by being nonjudgmental, and by going first and being vulnerable.

And allowing people to see us means that it's okay for them to see, you know, for everybody to see each other. And so that's something that I'm really grateful for and that's what comes to mind here.”

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Listen to Dr. Kim Perkins on Pause On the Play® with Erica Courdae, discussing positive psychology and creating change.

 
 
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