2. Taking advantage of competitive collegues. While competitiveness is often seen as a negative characteristic, it is also a great intrinsic motivator for your team. At our heart, as humans,  we are very competitive. In life we naturally we have to compete for everything, including jobs, partners and even restaurant tables! We all have a competitive spirit to some extent, and this idea forms the core part of the 2nd leadership technique. Before I divulge the details, it is important for you to understand that from an organisations point of view, there are two types of competitiveness. There’s is the positive and the detrimental types.

‘Good’ Competitiveness

This is the driving force behind the Team Leadership technique. This is the competitiveness with external forces or the self. Other companies, ’society’ and yourself are the competitors and in striving to beat them, you will positively affect your life or company. This is because the benefits of succeeding spread to those around you, creating an atosphere of success. This is in contrast with:

‘Detrimental’ Competitiveness

Detrimental competitiveness occurs between peers, collegues or friends and family. Where often the benefit of beating the opposition is balanced with serious negative consequences. A company that promotes heavy detrimental competitiveness between collegues will see a great increase in inefficiences as collegue begin to withhold infomation from one another, or sabotage each others efforts. In this kind of environment, success is only a selfish gain, and the overall effect is negative.

It is with this in mind that I describe how to use this technique. You simply have to set the right challenge!

I remember a conversation with my old sixth-form business studies teacher like it was yesterday. The exam results from the first round of examinations had just been released and I was exstatic to learn that I’d achieved full marks on my business exam. My teacher called me to his desk and said to me quietly;

“These results are outstanding, great work! It reminds me of Lucy. About 3 years ago she was a girl in my class who also did brilliantly in her exams. She wasn’t that nice though – a bit arrogant and up herself y’know, but she ended up getting full marks in her whole qualification. Lucy is the only person to have ever to have done that here, but I really think that you could do it too, while not annoying everyone at the same time! It’d be great to see a well-rounded person like you manage to do it.”

What a perfect thing to say! My teacher had set me a challenge to try and complete. I definately wasn’t going to become complacement and start underacheiving in class now! I was going to try and beat that girl. I badly wanted to get full marks without being ‘arrogant’ about it. And so for my 2 year course I put in extra effort in that class, and came out with a grade to be very proud of. Who was I to prove him wrong in believing that I could do this? He gave me a very good reputation that I didn’t want to let down, and he also gave me a chance to prove I was better than this unpleasant Lucy. It was a perfect combination of challenges that had one great result = dedication on my part.

So if you want to unleash the competitive drive within your friends or collegues:

* Give your employees a good reputation to uphold
* Compare your employees to their external rivals
* Set your worker a tough goal to meet, but enough praise to show that you believe they can reach it

Remember that if you give a team mate a ‘rival’ to beat, they must be outside of the organisation, or so remote from the individual that there will be no negativity between them. If you successfully set your own friends or team mates challenges such as these, you will fill them with a sense of focus and clear direction that would only come them accepting a competitive challenge and striving to achieve success in it.

Display your own enthusiasm and inspiration. You cannot expect to build enthusiasm and inspiration within the team you manage if you do not display these characteristics yourself. People hate obeying hypocrites, so you won’t make any allies by coaching your team to behave one way, and then ignoring those rules yourself. Lets be honest; if you really find that you’re so uninspired by the current task that that you cannot enthuse yourself, then how can you expect your subordinates to be driven towards the targets you have set them? Team Leadership aims to improve your leadership skills and techniques as much as possible, but applying those skills in practise must be a well thought out and genuine process. Enthusiasm is strikingly contagious, but if you simply desire to manipulate those beneath you, you’ll spread nothing but resentment among your team. If you’re in the situation where you have to pretend to be enthused; you really need to think about changing your career because quite frankly, no amount of leadership advice will make you happy.

How do I display my Enthusiasm?

1. By showing your eagerness in your tone of voice.
2. By dedicating time and energy to the project to ensure its success.
3. By following up and complimenting collegues when they’ve done a good job.
4. By generating and implementing new ideas and ways of performing your task.
5. By being punctual and organised.

Provided you are truely inspired by what you do, and you display this confidently to your team mates, you will find this will infect the culture of your team; spreading through your colleagues at a dizzying rate! This technique will hopefully allow you to focus on strategic and higher level work, and stop worrying about the gritty details of your subordinates. If they’re inspired and enthused- you can trust they’ll do a good job.

Talk to their Dreams. An unfortunate part of the concept of day to day teamwork is that usually teams are assembled to complete tasks that their members don’t truely want to acheive. Perhaps your teammates would rather working for themselves, or even retire early! They probably going to have a grand plan as to how they are going to acheive these long term goals as well. These alternative goals are wrongly viewed as ‘distractions’ by many team leaders across countless companies and institutions.

This truely needn’t be the case!

To put this team leadership technique into practise, you need to talk to each member of your team indivdiually, and either directly or indirectly,  show your team mates that their current task will take them one small step closer towards their dreams.

Easier said than done? Well allow me give you an example.

If a team mates dream is to own their own business; don’t let their motivation and focus fall as they come to terms with the gap between what they desire, and what they’re currently doing. Instead, emphasise on how working on their project will eventually help them in the long term. Describe to them how they will pick up countless new ideas skills from the current task, which will prepare themselves for the entrepeneurial life. Show that when they do become an independant businessperson, they will have an crucial edge over their competitors.

If a team mate’s dream is to rise to CEO within their company, then you should mention the transferable skills they’ll gain from this task and be able to put on their CV for their next promotion. Explain that this will give them a fighting chance at being noted by management as a potential leader.

In short; all work gives experience in one form or another. This means that whatever task you are assigned to, you will somehow be able to relate the benefits to your teammates in terms of their desires. Once your team leadership shows them that their current task actually slots neatly into their grand plan, they’ll gladly take care of the rest!