Want to motivate people to reach for a goal? Tap into the human drive to win and instigate competition. Whether there is an award or not, individuals and teams will most likely strive to earn bragging rights over the rest of their competitors.
Beware; when you instigate competition, you can turn teammates into enemies. You may further entrench silos in the organization if those silos are competing against each other. If you want to encourage collaboration between individuals or groups, don’t instigate a competition between them. Instead, put them on the same team against another foe (like the real competition in the marketplace!).
How might you instigate competition?
Read more of the 99 Ways to Influence Change.
Martin Fenwick
June 8, 2010 at 4:54 pm EDTI have often found that production teams say that they don’t want their KPI’s to be publicised as it creates competition between teams and they think that is bad. However I have found that once the competition is out there it is more about how you as a Manager handle that competitive aspect i.e the way you speak about it, answer questions and most importantly encourage it.
One client of mine publicised individual production levels in a warehousing facility. Everyone knew who was working and who wasn’t before that. When the stats went up the low performing individuals started to ask for help from their colleagues as to how they could improve. This hadn’t before, as ‘no-one cared’. Publicising the stats and setting targets meant that people did care and all of a sudden the low performers had a reason to perform.
So I would encourage, open, sensible competition to bring about workplace change.