How to Help Individual Competitors Learn to Win Together

This story is about transforming individual competitors into a successful team. It is also about reframing problems into opportunities, creating something out of nothing, and creating safe-to-fail experiments for complex systems.

For reasons you’ll see, the original title was “If you can’t join them, beat them.” That was the lesson I took at age ten. After sharing this story, I’ll offer my new interpretation as I inch toward 50 and its relevance for leadership teams — or anyone ready to upshift a competitive Me into a collaborative We.

The tryouts

In the spring of 1979, the Ann Arbor Arsenal soccer team, comprised of 4th and 5th graders, held tryouts. Twelve boys showed up to compete for a single open spot on the team. I was one of them.

The morning started with demonstrations of individual skills. We passed, trapped, dribbled, and shot the ball. Bonus points went to anyone who could juggle more than ten times on his head. Truth be told, the specifics of what we did have receded into memory. The passage of twenty five years can do that.

What I do remember clearly is how much all of us wanted to win that spot on the team. So much that we fought hard to show that we were better, faster, and stronger than the kid next to us. For me, the other eleven boys were the enemy. If one of them got picked for the team, that would mean that I hadn’t. And I would be team-less.

The Arsenal was a “travel team.” Unlike the measly 4th grade team at my elementary school, it played against teams from other parts of southeastern Michigan. That meant taking bus rides, eating out after the games, and wearing fancy uniforms. Winning a spot on the team meant I would be representing not a school, but a city. It would be big time.

The second half of the tryouts was a scrimmage. The Arsenal coach decided to pit the twelve kids trying out against the current team. In other words, the scrubs versus the stars.

I remember thinking, “We are going to get destroyed. How are they going to know which one of us is best?”

As it turned out, one boy on the scrubs team did stand out — at least in the coach’s mind. He got the spot. However, the Arsenal didn’t destroy us. In fact, we beat them 2–1.

Reframing the situation

It seemed so unfair. Here we were, twelve boys who had never played together beating an experienced team, yet only one made it in. The other eleven of us sulked as only nine year old boys can do. I don’t think we did much swearing then, but I do recall a lot of bitching and moaning not only among the boys, but also among our parents.

Then things took an unusual turn. One of the boys — my father claimed years later it was me, but I don’t remember — suddenly had an insight. “There are eleven of us,” he said. “We have enough for a team. Let’s form our own team and beat them good.”

Suddenly, the sulking stopped, and the mood shifted.

“That’s a great idea!”

“Yeah, let’s do it.”

“We’ll get ‘em!”

We didn’t have a coach or a name, much less any idea of how to actually get into the league, but we were pumped up and ready to go.

Winning together

As it turned out, this was enough. A few parents stepped in to manage the logistics, and before long, the eleven scrubs were the Ann Arbor Cosmos. We stuck together, improved our teamwork, and ended the season winning the championship game 3–2.

Our opponent? The Arsenal.

This is an example of what I call “We Leadership.” It’s when a group of individuals realize the limitations of being a loose collection of “I”s, each fighting for his or her own narrow self-interest, and discover the power of “We.” It’s not that any of us stopped trying to do well individually. I kept hoping to be the star, to score the winning goal. But this perspective was joined by a sense of being part of something larger.

This desire to belong to a greater whole wasn’t new. It’s why months earlier we had all tried to land that open spot on the Arsenal. But when we were thwarted in that hope, it was back to each boy for himself. Until, that is, we learned a powerful lesson:

If you can’t win by competing against each other, look for a way to win together.

Learning to win together within leadership teams

I think of this story today when I work with leadership teams. Individuals who have much to gain through collaboration find themselves in competition with each other. This happens for a variety of reasons: performance incentives, interpersonal tensions, managers unwilling to intervene, and the human brain’s reliance on social needs like status and autonomy.

Sometimes people find their way through these challenges. Without negating the competitive parts within themselves, they transcend these narrow identities for the sake of something larger. Better results and improved health often follow.

However, the more common scenario is that they remain stuck in competitive habits until things turn toxic, one person leaves, or the whole team is split or disbanded. Finding ways to win together becomes the path not taken.

Helping individual competitors learn to win together is a complex problem

In the terminology of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework, teams are complex systems in which cause-and-effect are only visible in retrospect, if at all. So you cannot identify a best practice solution even with the help of experts. This differentiates efforts to learn to win together from simple problems where you use existing categories to identify known solutions, like fixing a clogged drain or correcting a payroll error. It also distinguishes them from complicated problems requiring specialized expertise, like rewiring your home’s electrical system or identifying the salary and benefits best matched to the position and market.

In complex systems, it isn’t helpful to recommend solutions with any hint of a promise they will work. Instead, as Snowden and Jennifer Garvey-Berger suggest, you are better off designing safe-to-fail experiments where the goal is to shift something in the system and see what happens. Garvey-Berger tells the story of two divisions in a company caught in silo-based warfare with each other. The leaders of one division decide to try something new. They offer employees in the other division a hundred dollars to have lunch with one of the offering division’s employees. The idea is to entice people who otherwise might not speak into an extended conversation (it’s a hundred bucks, so a long lunch!) where they can get to know each other as people. At least that’s what they imagine will happen. It’s a safe-to-fail experiment, so the proof (literally and figuratively) is in the pudding.

As Garvey-Berger recounts, about a quarter of the other division accepts the offer. This isn’t all or even half, but the acceptance percentage isn’t what they’re tracking. This is a safe-to-fail experiment, not a pilot project. What they observe closely is how these lunches affect the overall levels of trust, openness, and collaboration between people in the different divisions. In short, how a single experimental tweak impact the whole complex system. What they learn is that the results are quite positive.

What does this suggest for our challenge of helping individual competitors learn to win together?

We start by declaring this a complex challenge, admitting there is no simple cause-and-effect formula, and looking for one or more safe-to-fail experiments to try.

Design safe-to-fail experiments you can learn from

What experiments you design depends upon a range of factors:

• Where are you in this? Are you one of the individual competitors? Or are you their manager? Their manager’s manager? A concerned colleague or friend?
• What have you tried so far? This is one of the first questions I ask anyone who has come to me for help. I want to understand how they’ve conceptualized the situation to date, what choices they’ve made, what happened, and how they make sense of all this. This allows me to walk in their shoes and see the world through their eyes — to understand both the gifts and constraints of their point of view. If the person asking these questions is you, not a coach, similar principles apply. Exactly what is flavor of the competition between the two people? What habitual ruts have they/you fallen into? What have they/you tried to make things better? By asking these questions, you are “going to the balcony” — leaving the stage of action, climbing to a higher vantage point, looking down at yourself acting on the stage, and noticing what is newly visible. What you may discover is that the way you’ve looked at the conflict is just one of many possible perspectives on the situation. What are others?
• Who can you consult? Although you don’t always need a second (or third or fourth) set of eyes and ears, it often helps, for the reasons just implied. The more perspectives you hear on the situation the more access you have to different possible safe-to-fail experiments. The group mind isn’t always more creative than the individual — as Edward deBono says, ideas are born in individuals and matured in groups — but it can be when nourished through generative conversations that tap, not suppress, each person’s ideas.
• What is your mood around this? A mood is a predisposition for action. Some moods like hope and ambition (“we can do this!”) open up possibilities. Others moods like anxiety, resignation and resentment close possibilities? What is your mood around this challenge? The reason your mood matters is this: once you go to the balcony and consult other perpsectives, you realize that the range of potential tweaks you could make in the system is endless. However, your capacity to explore these choices depends on your mood. There are many practices and micro-haibts for shifting moods. One is to reframe the situation. That’s what we’ve done by calling this a complex system. There are no right answers, so there’s no risk of you missing them! What you’re creating, as we’ve seen, is a safe-to-fail experiment. The goal is to try something, observe, and learn. Failure is expected and helpful because of what it teaches you. Hopefully, this reframe frees you to enter a mood of hope or ambition.
• What potential levers or accupuncture points exist? If you’ve done what I suggest so far, it’s likely a number of ideas have already emerged. Here are a few other possibilities to whet your appetite. Even if you assess they aren’t worth trying in your situation, perhaps they will lead you to some ideas that are: shifting when or where the two people meet; having their manager join all or part of the meeting every other time; placing the two people on a new task force where the measures of success are inherently collective; practicing a conversation micro-habit like “Help Me Understand”, The Paraphrase, or apologizing; or taking a class outside of work together. Many years ago, a senior executive client of mine had a strained competitive relationship with a colleague. For my client’s own development (to build the quality of flexibility), I assigned her a practice of taking an improv class. She did this. But she did something else. For fun (which safe-to-fail experiments can be, though neither of us called it that) she invited her colleague to sign up for improv with her. The woman accepted. Three months later, they were attending yoga class together at work. And working collaboratively in their day-to-day jobs.

Where will you start in the next 15 minutes?

If you’ve read this far, I imagine that my soccer story and the lessons I drew from it have some resonance for you. What to do now?

There’s a saying that if you have an idea about something that matters to you, take the first action on it within 15 minutes, or else it will never happen. I remember hearing this associated with Buckminister Fuller. Although the exact source eludes me, the point remains: if you are wrestling with a complex problem — learning to win together, or something altogether different — what small action can you take on that problem within the next 15 minutes? It may be as simple as adding this topic to your GTD inbox or To Do list.