In Small Business, a Team Approach to Competition is Best

Last weekend, I watched a documentary on The History Channel entitled "Spitfire Ace: Dogfight".

In this documentary, one of the Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots explained the difference between the British and the German fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain. He said that German pilots were trained to compete against each other for kills. In battle, the German pilots were competing with their own teammates for opportunities to shot down RAF fighters in order to gain recognition from their leaders and differentiate themselves from their peers.

Conversely, the British pilots were trained to work as a team against the enemy. There was one British pilot who discussed how he had to have a private ceremony for himself after shooting down five German aircraft. He said that in World War I five kills would have made him an Ace but in World War II the RAF leadership frowned on boasting about the number of kills an individual pilot earned.

Watching this show made me think about the two basic choices small business owners have to motivate their employees. One is to pit employees against each other and the other is to channel employee’s competitive energies into a team effort against the company’s competition.

I feel that the best choice for small business is the team approach to competition. When I owned my logistics company, I used quarterly bonuses based on company-wide performance to motivate employees and to foster a sense of teamwork among the employees. This was opposed to the standard of the logistics industry at the time which was paying commissions for individual performance (I did reward employees with a higher base pay if they earned it based on their individual effort and initiative).

Implementing performance bonuses kept employees from fighting over customers. It also created an atmosphere in which employees would help service customers who were not in their personal portfolio of customers. They did this because doing so would contribute to the profitability of the company as a whole, thus increasing the bonus the individual would earn.

With teamwork, the RAF won the Battle of Britain.

Comments

[panasianbiz]

The team approach to competition is definitely superior in my opinion. We have only to look at our competitors in Japan to see that their "group mentality" is much more constructive--and productive--than our usual individual-oriented, competetive focus.