Competitiveness Vs Sabotage

Welcome back to the Australian Institute of Inside Australia. And in this video we're going to discuss the line between competition and sabotage in the workplace. We're going to examine how these forces can impact organisation dynamics and security. And we know that healthy competition can lead to performance and innovation, but when it turns toxic, it can lead to harmful behavior. So with me, I've got my trusty colleague, Peter Natra. Welcome back. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Let's dive in. What do we mean by competitiveness and sabotage? So we've got a shade of grey in between?

Well, actually there's quite a black and white differentiation. A bit of a saying, you cheat if you feel you can't compete. Okay, so look, if you're in the race and you have to be in the race but you feel you can't compete, most people will resort to cheating. Which for this video we're talking about sabotage.

Yes.

So sabotage is just as much more highfalutin word.

Yes. How do we describe sabotage then? Because it can mean a lot of things. There's self sabotage, there's sabotage against others, but it's also sabotage against organizations.

So in terms of competitiveness, to get a competitive edge, quote unquote, the sabotage is more directed at pulling down the person that you are the most afraid of. I mean, sabotage is actually a fear driven situation in a competitive environment. Yeah, I feel I can't compete with this person, so I'm going to sabotage them. I will white ant them, I'll pull their clients, I'll say naughty things about them in there to their client base so they'll come back to me. These all are sabotage activities. Self sabotage is literally you're playing the game against yourself. So literally you're realizing that you have a high degree of probability that you are going to achieve something, but that does not align with your own worldview. So self sabotage basically says, see, I told you so.

Yeah. Okay, okay. What are some of the warning sides that one can see that maybe going from sort of competitiveness to sabotage?

So the person doing the sabotaging or the cheating will never, well, very rarely flag that they are. The person that is being affected by the sabotage will start acting uncomfortably. And look, let's bring it back down to basics. You have two kids, you've got a family with two kids and one kid is sabotaging the other kid, I don't know, favors or lollies or whatever the case may be. The person that's going to arc up the most of the person that's being on the Affected end. But this is happening. But little Johnny did so and so that's your warning sign. Now expand that back out into an adult environment. Look for the person that is trying to compete properly and is feeling and is expressing a view and is performing in a way that is not expected of a competition person.

How do leadership or management sort of foster environment of growth and competition, but with that they're also enabling the propensity of being sabotaged. And then on the flip side, how can they do it without enabling? Yep, it being risky or so there's.

There are some managers out there that. That look at the area, the arena of competition as a bit of a bullpen and their theory is that if I throw the biggest, baddest dogs into the bullpen, they'll sort themselves out. Yeah, that might work for some instances, but in many cases it'll lead to sabotage. It'll lead to a dynamic that is not a healthy situation for the organisation. From a leadership point of view, competitiveness is not about the individual team or your sales team or your performance team. It is about the whole organisation as a whole. And there are new organisations emerging now that focus on the whole of the organisation as being a competitive unit as opposed to star or gun performers within that organisation. And if you want to look at a management perspective, that might be the better way of doing it. Perhaps another good analogy is that if you've got two football teams, they're playing off on the championship. The one that will win the competition most is the one that functions best as a team and leaves their egos in the locker room.

Yeah, I often heard the term that a championship team will always beat a team of champions.

Really good.

What do. How does personality. So maybe ask this question in two parts. One is how does personal personality traits impact someone that is highly competitive to become may proceed down the track of being helpful, but the other side. I want to ask a question which is more around the external or the environment, like pressures and the environment, you know, is the organization really a toxic environment or not? How does that impact.

Strangely enough, both of those answers fall back onto the one focus, which is ego. So in a competitive situation, if the ego is threatened in one way or shape, and that can also be a sense of self, not only a sense of standing inside of the organization. If that ego becomes threatened, then people can and often do take strange routes to get there from an organisation. They need to be able to understand that this person needs to be recognised for what they do, but also at the same time make sure that everybody Else is also recognised for what they do as well too. Because in a competitive, if you have competitive players inside of a team, ego is a part of it. It's actually what drives them forward. But that also needs to be managed as well too.

So how do organizations then identify when competition is becoming way too toxic?

When there's more time being spent internal with internal politics than there is about externally getting the job done. And it gets back to who's the quietest and who's making the most noise.

Yeah, correct.

The person doing the sabotaging will probably be very quiet unless they're busy big noting themselves, which is another sign. But let's just take it from that perspective. The person that is having the sabotage acted on them may not know what's happening, but they'll go, I don't know why I had this set up. This was going so well and next thing they just went blah. And the other person got this. And so look for those signs.

So is it easy for an organization to look for such signs?

No. Because we're not trained to look for it.

No.

We'Re not trying to look for it. I mean, maybe this is preempting a question of yours, but we have things in place where you have offices that you can go to and you think you're not being fairly. People will not do that. Their egos will not let them do that.

No.

As an organization, it needs to be an organization crafted from the outside in so that the DNA of the organization comes from the outside in and from the top down. That there's a culture of fairness, that there is a culture of reward for what that team player can bring to the table. And you might have two parallel team players, but one team player is really good in this particular stream. In that particular stream.

Correct.

And work to that strength.

What are the long term impacts of a situation or an organization that has an environment of being highly competitive, but it's also becoming somewhat toxic as well. So where is that going to end or where is it leading?

Look, the ultimate end of any real full blown sabotage is disaster for the organization. Sabotage always means disaster. Can you recover from it? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But at the end of the day, if your organisation is subject to sabotage from within, and I'm not just talking about, you know, deliberately somebody going in there to, you know, crash the mechanism, that organization will struggle A to survive or B to be competitive in the larger environment.

So how do, how do we get organizations then to collaborate? Because that's one of the keys. Collaborate. And within an Organization to build a sort of like a healthy environment. It could be still competitive. But how would they then go about it?

It's much easier to create a. To create an organization from scratch like that. It's a whole different mechanism to change the culture. But it is possible to change the country culture. And the culture has to do with starts with management and recognizing that the team as a whole, the organization as a unit can function in a much more efficient way, in a much more competitive way. And then work a bit like onion rings. Work through work into the onion rings until you get some of the DNA of the place.

What do you think are sort of the key thinking like behaviors like I would think for example respect would be. Respect understanding would be one of the sort of absolutely foundational if you want to call norms you would expect to.

See and also inclusion. So you may have a win for an organization.

Okay.

That win needs to be felt by everybody from management down to the person receives the post. That's really. Or does the process work? Everybody needs to be part of that because everybody is a part of that. And that's where the cultural change can. People will be resistant if there's been oh, why am I getting this one now? Why is so and so correct.

Correct. But.

The high level view of that is that that organization needs to be cohesive from the inside out.

Yeah. Is it easy for an organization to detect the sort of that line as they're moving forwards to sabotage their situation or does it just basically say well we can't do anything about it? When do you mentioned that a little bit early on about employees putting their hands up and such. When do they start putting their hands up and saying okay, we're going in the wrong path when it's really bad. Yeah.

And this is just human. We're so busy doing what it is that we do that we don't see the forest because we were busy focusing on the tree that we're working on at the moment. When do organizations get a wake up call? It's oftentimes when somebody from the outside comes at the hey, this and this is this did you know this and this is going on? And did you know that's what it looks like on the outside? And that can be a bit of cold water in the face for a lot of people. But the answer to your question is more often how do people recognize that changes when somebody from external comes in and says did you know this is going on?

Yeah. One area that we haven't talked about is fairness and that's Quite a critical care. How does the perception of it in terms of rewards, recognition and so forth, encourage a sort of environment where it's healthy and safe versus when it's quite harmful?

Yeah, if. Okay, let's take it back to the. Let's take it back to the family. With two kids, if one kid is unfairly singled out and the other kid is already always singled out, one low and one high, then that dynamic will pervade through that, through that little unit. The same will happen in a larger environment. Fairness needs to be egalitarian. It needs to be. And that can sometimes be with management turning up and saying, we goofed. Sorry, guys, we let you down. You did everything. You did. We let you down. That doesn't happen often, but that kind of fairness, that kind of being able to say, well, we're all part of this. And by the same token, if you create, if you get an absolute gem of a win, be fair about it. You did this, you did this, you did this. Fantastic, guys. More of it.

Yeah. Here's a side question. Can a culture of relentless competition turn or inadvertently turn someone who is in a high performance to a high risky person?

Yeah, absolutely. If somebody comes back to the sabotage, fear, connection, if somebody is afraid of being able to perform to their own personal standards and possibly also to the standards that is expected of them from the. They will. They will very quickly look to ways, you know, if you can't compete, you cheat.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, with that. That's our last question, so we're going to be leaving. Thanks, Peter. Much appreciated. And stay tuned for the next video.

Thank you.

Cheers.