How to foster cooperation and healthy competition on teams

If you want to get ahead, you’ve got to be ready to take on your competitors. You might adopt an “every person for themselves” approach, doing whatever it takes to gain an advantage. But is this style of head-to-head competition really the path to winning?

“Oftentimes, we have a really narrow definition of what competition and success means,” says Jamil Zaki, Ph.D., author of Hope For Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness and director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab. “Many of us assume it means clawing your way to the top, not just past people in other companies, but even past people that are on your own team. It’s a hyper Darwinian way of viewing the workplace; eat or be eaten.”

This mentality toward advancement creates an environment within teams where colleagues become unwilling to share knowledge, information and perspective, says Zaki. “They’re unwilling to take creative risks and maybe even sabotage one another,” he says. “The workplace you get as a result suffers from lower morale and lower innovation. And it ends up failing even on its own terms.”

That’s not how success works, Zaki says. Research on collective intelligence finds that the most successful teams are the ones that cooperate most effectively within their teams. And it’s not just true at work; it carries over to other forms of competition.

“There’s an amazing study that looked at NBA players and their tweets, and found that teams with more narcissistic NBA players—people who were tweeting all about themselves and how great they were—tended to perform worse over the course of the season, because those narcissistic players pass the ball less,” says Zaki.

The Role of Cynicism

To create an environment that fosters healthy competition and cooperation, you need to measure the level of cynicism that exists in your office, says Zaki. Cynical bosses and employees can damage teams’ ability to cooperate. Start by looking at what leaders are doing that might be creating and spreading cynicism purposefully or inadvertently. For example, some managers create an environment that encourages people to fight against one another, such as publicly identifying top and bottom performers.

“It’s less common these days, but it’s called ‘stack ranking,’” says Zaki. “Stack ranking is a very fast track to cynicism, because people feel like the folks who are working right alongside them are not colleagues, but rather existential competitors.”

Another mistake companies make is not trusting their employees. During the pandemic, some leaders trusted employees to get their work done on their own time. Others, however, installed spyware programs that made sure people were at their laptops through facial recognition or mouse tracking.

“When you don’t trust people, they don’t trust you in response because we are a highly reciprocal species,” says Zaki. “Our beliefs about other people are self-fulfilling prophecies. What I think about you will shape how I treat you, and how I treat you will shape how you react to me. Cynics treat other people poorly and bring out the worst, most selfish version of them in a workplace context.”

Fostering Collaboration

While cooperation can happen organically between coworkers, companies can also introduce and encourage opportunities by setting up systems of collaboration at the workplace. One example is initiating task interdependence.

“This is where teams are evaluated and rewarded for the work they do together and their ability to synthesize their perspectives into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts,” says Zaki.

Another way to foster collaboration is through the use of 360-degree evaluations, gathering input from an employee’s colleagues, as well as their manager for performance reviews.

“Even if a company doesn’t use stack ranking, it will still suffer from what I call a ‘culture of genius,’ especially in Silicon Valley,” says Zaki. “If a person is really talented, they are evaluated only for their individual talents and not for how they affect the people around them. A 360 evaluation allows you to say, ‘What do your colleagues think about you? Are you helping people? Are you a good person to work with?’ Those can be useful metrics as well.”

The power of collective intelligence

A spirit of cooperation opens the door for collective intelligence. Zaki likes to refer to research Google conducted in 2012, dubbed Project Aristotle, to understand the characteristics of its most efficient and innovative teams.

“They thought that the talent of individuals would be the strongest predictor of team success, and they were wrong,” says Zaki. “It turned out that there was a collective feature of how people come together that was more definitive of their success than what any individual brought to the table. It became known as collective intelligence—this idea that not just people, but groups of people, have their own aptitude, and that every combination of human beings is like a super organism with its own qualities.”

Successful teams combine healthy competition and cooperation, creating a vibrant back and forth, where people share their perspective and listen to one another, says Zaki. “If you build a cooperative team environment, you’re going to build a more intelligent team environment,” he says. “And you’ll be better equipped to compete in the world today.”