If you’ve ever wanted to use your leadership to fill your team with energy, enthuasiam and motivation. Look no further than these Team Leadership articles. In the next week I’ll be writing about a few key strategies to enthuse your teams. Today’s article is on how to take advantage of the competitive nature of your team to drive them into wanting to work harder and longer!

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.

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Tags: Competitiveness, Enthusing Teams

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