Working with Colleagues: Should You Collaborate or Compete?

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2022

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Randall Peterson, founding director of the Leadership Institute at London Business School, studies coworker dynamics. He says lately, the idea of head-to-head competition for advancement has gone out of style in favor of a more cooperative ideal. In reality, he says, interpersonal relationships at work can be both. Sometimes you cooperate closely with colleagues. Sometimes you compete directly with them. And sometimes it’s most effective to work independently. He explains how to deal with each scenario. And he shares how managers can help their teams find the right balance. Peterson is a coauthor of the HBR article “When to Cooperate with Colleagues and When to Compete.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.9	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:49.0	We all know the trope, the ultra-cut throat work environment, where it's all about success
0:54.0	at the expense of those around you. That's supposed to be out of date nowadays
0:59.0	with all the celebrating of collaboration shared purpose, the teamwork that makes the dream
1:04.1	work. The reality is somewhere in between. We're all human, and the risks we carry and the interests
1:10.7	that motivate us are never one in the same as the organizations and our colleagues. Incentives like
1:17.0	promotions can be binary and like it or not, the people who tend to thrive in workplaces know when
1:23.4	to collaborate with their colleagues and when to compete with them. Today's guest has studied
1:28.8	cooperative rivalries on the job for more than 25 years. He says too many people think of work
1:34.9	relationships as simply negative or positive when virtually all are a mix of both. To effectively
1:41.8	manage them, he says, you first have to understand where you and your colleagues fall on the conflict
1:47.2	collaboration spectrum. Randall Peterson is the founding director of the Leadership Institute
1:53.6	and a professor at London Business School. Together with LBS professor Kristen Bafar,
1:58.6	he wrote the HBR article, When to Cooperate with colleagues and When to compete. Randall,
2:04.0	great to have you here to talk about this. Thank you, Kurt. It's great to be here.
2:10.3	Do people underestimate just how much they compete with their colleagues or maybe no really
2:17.0	in their heart that they do but don't like to think about it? I think it depends on the individual.
2:22.4	There are individuals who see the world and we know this from personality but their individuals
2:27.4	to see the world as a competitive place and what they see is competition everywhere and they tend
	...

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