Grandpa learned a skill and it carried him for a lifetime. Pop progressed up the ladder and then steered with cruise control. Today, John and Jane Doe are scrambling for economic survival. Author Gail Sheehy says that with the dissipation of traditional career progression, many people are experiencing adulthood unlike anything in previous generations.

Ask people, “Where will you be in five years?” and you’ll often be told, “I have no idea.” Guess what? A lot of companies have no idea where they’ll be in 5 years. Organizations of all sizes are being hit hard by the broad sweeping changes they encounter.Perhaps not so curiously, organizations that used to be in fierce competition with each other are looking for ways to participate in collaborative efforts.

In his book, The Death of Competition, James F. Moore observes that “suppliers of critical parts or services are becoming partners with customers,” and “the boundaries that once clearly separated computer markets have been blurring, clouding rules of competition.”

“These kinds of phenomenons,” says Moore, “are a result of changes in the traditional assumptions about commerce and industry. Once upon time, there were supposedly distinct, immutable businesses within which players scrambled for supremacy,” Moore observes, but increasingly “a company competes across a variety of industries–which together make up its ecosystem.

The companies within ecosystems compete, often operating on many levels, coming up with innovations, creating new products, and serving customers. Competitive advantage comes from understanding the business environment and evolving with it…”

Competition isn’t dead; it is taking on a new form in some places, while intensifying in others. How stressful is competition in your work place? Dr. Harry Olson, a psychologist from Reistertown, Maryland, is author of a book called The New Way to Compete wherein he says that the notion of competition has evolved over the past several decades in our society.

It’s harmful, deleterious to progress, and antiquated. Dr. Olson found that competition within an organization uniformly leads to less than optimal results. The top performers may thrive but other performers, those who might have made a substantial contribution, often are placed under tremendous pressure.

Dr. Aubrey Daniels, author of Bringing Out the Best in People, says that too many companies, particularly the sales division of companies, have a “forced distribution of rewards,” e.g., only 5 percent or 10 percent of the work force can earn an outstanding grade. “With zero-sum appraisal systems, one person’s outrageous success forces others into the mediocre or failure category.”

Worse, most performance appraisal systems introduce unhealthy competition into the workplace. “It’s no wonder,” says Daniels, “that performance appraisal is an anxiety provoking activity that is dreaded, misunderstood, and often bungled by managers; feared by and upsetting to employees; and rewarding to no one.

Like performance appraisal systems, Daniels observes, most recognition systems offer little recognition far too late after the behavior they’re supposed to be recognizing occurs. They also tend to promote unhealthy competition between employees for the little bit of recognition that is available.

Daniels says, “Our research shows that most of these systems demotivate more than motivate, or at best, workers are unaffected by them.”

Consider the time-honored recognition tool, “employee of the month.” Too often, one person is reinforced for their accomplishments, while everyone else is unaffected or negatively reinforced for not being selected. Daniels says, “Surprisingly, even the honored person may react negatively. Annual awards often work just as poorly.”

There is nothing wrong per se about giving recognition to outstanding performers. However, anytime a reward is for “best,” “first,” “most,” or “most improved,” by design, the number of individuals who could participate in the process is limited. “With an effective recognition system,” Daniels says, “everyone is acknowledged in some way for their efforts–ideally you take nobody, or no improvement, for granted.”

Dr. Olson believes that the most successful firms of the future will diminish the level of interpersonal competition within and instead rely upon procedures that emphasize collaboration and competition with oneself.

Compete With Yourself, Not With Others

Okay, so you may have little or no leeway in terms of changing your organization’s appraisal or recognition systems. However, you’re in charge when it comes to competing with yourself. What does it mean to compete with yourself? Certainly you can’t run a race against yourself and hope to score two different times during the same heat.

You compete with yourself when you challenge yourself to perform better than you have in the past, or to perform better than you ordinarily would based on your history to this point.This is not to say that you engage in unhealthy, workaholic-type efforts that deplete your mental, physical, and emotional energy. Instead, you lessen your focus on what others are doing in your industry or profession, and increase your focus on how you can be the best you can be.

John Wooden, the legendary coach of UCLA basketball, guided his teams in the mid 60’s and mid 70’s to ten NCAA championships in a 14-year period, a feat never likely to be duplicated, maintained the curious custom of not discussing the other team in practice sessions with his own team.

Superstar Bill Walton, in his book, Nothing But Net, says that during his entire three-year varsity career at UCLA, playing for Coach John Wooden, only once did Wooden mention a player on the other team–David Thompson of North Carolina State University. Other than that, Wooden simply didn’t focus on opposing teams at all. Instead, he got his players to focus on how they could best execute the plays they had worked on in practice.

Wooden found it far more effective, and his record bares out the wisdom in his logic, to have his players primed and focused, confident in their ability and skills, and ready to execute the right plays as the game evolved. Walton said that Wooden didn’t even do a lot of what is regarded has coaching from the sidelines during the game. Often he simply would say to his team, “Okay, gentlemen I’ve done my work in getting you ready to this point, now it’s your turn to perform.”

There are scores of other examples both in sports and business of people who chose to carve their own path, with little or no concern of the competition. Ted Turner in broadcasting, Mary K. Ash in cosmetics, Charles Schwab in the brokerage business, and Fred Smith in overnight express services, are among career achievers who not only paid little heed to what the competition was doing, but carved out completely new territory for themselves.

From Small Acorns…

I know, you’ve heard these stories before–what has that got to do with the stress you feel, where you are right now? Plenty. Practice what the Japanese call “kaizen,” continual improvement, by thinking about the ways that you can make better what you are already doing. Remember, small incremental steps, can lead to wondrous results and less stress.

Small incremental steps applied to your work, one fine day, three days, or a year will help to put you at the top of your field.I’ve found that competing with myself, rather than against others, to be a superlative way to proceed in work and life. When I worked for a management consulting firm in Washington, D.C. in the early 80’s, everyone was handwriting reports–these were in the prehistoric days, long before personal computers. I learned how to dictate and hence condensed six- to eight-hour assignments to 30 minutes.

To this day, I dictate everything, even this sentence, this article, and 25 published books. After dictating, I hand the tape over to a transcriptionist who puts it on a disk. I then make corrections to the disk, print out a hard copy, and have another person review the material closely, marking up the hard copy and handing it back to me. Hey, it’s not rocket science, but it works. While my contemporaries in the speaking profession moan and groan about how they’d like to write books and articles to enhance their speaking careers, I complete articles all day long — sometimes two or three per plane ride. This is one area where not competing, but simply seeking the best from yourself, can pay off in wondrous ways.

My best friend Peter, in Boston, will not compete with others. He’s in the commercial real estate business. He hardly ever answers advertisements listed in the paper. It’s his contention that by the time something hits the market it’s already too late. There will be lots of bidders, hence competition for property means that you’re not likely to get a good deal.

So, how did he become a multi-millionaire and not compete with others? He competed with himself. He compiled data on the key buildings in a radius from his location in the Boston area. Over the years, he has added to his database.

Today, he maintains data on the size and number of units, square footage, and so forth of these keys properties. He will sometimes submit an offer to an owner who had no idea that anyone was interested in purchasing the owner’s property. Enough times, he ends up making a purchase at a good price, since there were no other buyers.

Sometimes he even has his own purchaser lined up so he can flip the building then and have another buyer lined up, to whom he can sell it for a quick profit. It’s Peter’s contention that no matter what your industry or profession, if you keep your eyes open, opportunities will emerge whereby you can forge ahead by virtually eliminating competition.

Eliminating the Competition

On the job, you can eliminate your competition and not even go to jail for it. Take the case of Jim, the lowest level employee in a supermarket. He was just hired yesterday, therefore, if anyone is going to be fired first, it’s likely to be him. He’s a “bag boy.” No, that doesn’t mean he sleeps outside on the ground and collects rags and scraps.

He puts food in packages after people go through the check-out line. It is not a glamorous sounding job, is it? And, it doesn’t seem as though Jim’s career prospects would be that enterprising, do they? Let’s explore what Jim can do to make himself more valuable to his employer.Jim goes to the head of shipping and says, “I’d like to put in some overtime and work in shipping to understand how your department works.” And sure enough, he puts in a couple hours there.

Another time he goes to the manager of the meat department and says, “You know, I’d like to work with you a little to understand how you wrap the meats and preserve them.” At other times he goes to the bakery, works with the security people, is on the clean up crew, even helps out in the credit department.

After three months, Jim has had exposure to a dozen different areas within the supermarket, and when somebody from another department calls in at the last minute and can’t make it or is delayed or sick, guess what? Jim can substitute.

Several more months pass. Suppose there’s a downturn in business and the store has to layoff some people. Who are they going to lay off? It’s not going to be Jim, you can count on it. Suppose there’s an upswing in business and they need to make someone a manager. Who are they going to consider? They’re going to consider Jim.

The same principle applies each time you take the unwanted job or pinch hit for others. Work a little overtime, learn a little more about the organization you work in, and gain a greater understanding of total operations. In a matter of months, you can become one of the most valuable employees in the organization–with no exaggeration whatsoever.

What Jim essentially has done is eliminate the competition, without killing anyone, most of all himself. If the operation expands, who is one of the key people top management will want to have participate in the expansion phase?

You can moan and groan about the stress that you feel at work, the dead ends that seem to surround you, and the relentless grind of the competition. Yet, is it necessary to compete at all? Is competing even an efficient process?