Keeping Competition Healthy

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   Talent Management  

For as long as I have been involved in project management, there has been an element of competition between project teams. Whether it’s a determination to ensure that their project is more successful than the next project based on any number of metrics, or it’s banter about whose project is more important, there is an inevitability about the contest.

This can be very healthy, encouraging team members to give of their best in a good natured attempt to better their colleagues working on a different project. When this becomes a positive competitive environment, the organization wins and there aren’t any real losers.

However, sometimes that friendly rivalry can take on a bit of an edge, a more serious undertone that--rather than encourage competition--serves to undermine the motivation and commitment of team members. This must be avoided whenever possible, and dealt with immediately if it occurs--and that’s what I want to address in this article.

The early warning signs
The symptoms of unhealthy competition can be many--I have seen everything from cutting corners to try and show more progress to (in an extreme situation) outright sabotage of another project to slow it down. I have also seen some very personal and very nasty comments about the relative perceived unimportance of one project compared with another, and what the implications of that are…

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