Leaders often blur or confuse the terms competition, cooperation and collaboration, resulting in a lack of clarity for their stakeholders about what’s expected of them. When those who follow you aren’t clear about expectations, this can cause unnecessary delays and stress in your organization.

Competition, cooperation, and collaboration all have a place in business, but it’s important to know the difference and speak clearly about them so that followers know which of these apply to the way they relate to stakeholders in, and outside of, the organization. This provides the clarity necessary for the proper actions to be taken in each circumstance.

Which will it be?

Compete: Competing means winning or being the first to achieve something. Last week, I heard a senior executive speak about what was important for his high tech company to focus on. His response, without hesitation, was “winning”. The problem is that he didn’t clarify the circumstances for winning. If he’d said “winning by being first to market”, perhaps some of the unnecessary internal competition between organizations within the company would allow them to win in the marketplace more frequently.

Cooperate: Cooperating is generally about going along, and more often than not, it is with a degree of having to give up something. Sometimes, individuals or teams cooperate by giving up their own interests for the greater good. For instance, we cooperate with TSA officials when we fly by taking off our jacket, shoes and unpacking our laptops for scanning. Most of us don’t particularly like doing this, but we do it because we want our flight and our country to be safe. There is a lot of reluctant cooperation in our organizations that we mistake for collaboration. If it’s collaboration you want, you may have to work harder to get it.

Collaborate: When we collaborate, we (sometimes unconsciously) leave our own vested interests behind in order to achieve something that is compelling, exciting, or extraordinary for the group, team, organization, or company. We may experience that amazing sense of time standing still when we are truly collaborating. It is rare, wonderful and fulfilling to collaborate; we want to contribute for whatever the goal of the work is, and for the people we’re working with. We don’t feel like we’re giving up anything to collaborate; we work in harmony with others for the greater good.

There is a time and place for each of these concepts at work. Collaboration is the holy grail of relationships; uncommon yet rewarding when it occurs. If that’s what you want for your organization, project, team, or employees, it begins with your clarity about what that means and your setting the context for it to happen. It may require you to repeat it, to foster conversations about it, and to step in when things aren’t as you expect.

I’d love to hear your stories. When have you experienced each of these concepts at the right time and the right place? What did you or others do to foster them?

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