Competition

"Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time." -Henry Ford

---

Is there a certain amount of competition that is healthy for business? Yes of course. It can drive innovation and if it isn't the main focus of business it can unite the team in a common purpose. Too often though, competition is unhealthy. There many ways that competition can hurt your business but I am going to talk about two.

The first is internal competition. This is the competition that can happen between individual team members or between departments. This is unhealthy for a number of reasons but at the very least your team members aren't helping each other. Why would they help their competition? At the worst they are sabotaging each other and undermining  your business' progress.

The second is external competition. This is when you are looking at and focusing on your competition. This can sometimes be good but where I have seen it go wrong is when a company focuses so much on the competition that all they are doing is reacting to what the competition has done which means that they are always a step behind and they have lost focus of the customer.

---

Leadership Lesson

Beware of using competition to motivate. It can be done and it can be done well but you have to be careful that it doesn't devolve into something that hurts your business.