Peers - competitors or collaborators?

It’s at a peer level that a lot of organizational collaboration happens or should happen. It’s also at a peer level that most competition or perceived competition happens. This means you immediately have a complex dynamic that needs to be considered carefully. There’s nothing wrong with healthy competition that drives the business to a good place, but when it moves into an ‘outdoing each other’ dynamic, it becomes unhelpful and disruptive to the business. Any short-term individual gain is a lose-lose in the long-term. Collaboration is at the heart of successful physical and virtual workplaces.

Having watched the UK version of the reality TV-series The Apprentice on and off over the years has frequently made us reflect on what leaders and organisations can learn from their trials and tribulations.

In The Apprentice the participants are a peer group divided into two competing teams. Each peer team really needs to work together to achieve tasks, with someone being chosen as the leader for each project. The two teams’ results are then evaluated at the end of each project and one team wins, and at least one person on the losing team gets fired.  

Here’s our recent reflections on the peer dynamic.

Watching The Apprentice is sadly often entertaining for all the wrong reasons. A lot of it is like a “how not to behave in business if you want to impact others in a powerful and constructive way” master class that’s being played out in all its glory.

We do understand that it needs to be entertaining and that participants are chosen with this in mind.

Here are five things The Apprentice candidates generally got wrong in one of the most recent seasons, from a teamwork, peer to peer and winning collaboration perspective. Most of these observations are trends that have been consistent over several seasons.

1. Egocentric behaviours

Who wants to work with someone who's all about “me, me, me”? Egocentric behaviours where people keep promoting themselves, saying things like “I’m a natural born leader”, “no one is here to make friends” and “I know I can beat anyone in this competition” are examples of this. Would you give it your all for someone who spoke like that? This egocentric outlook easily creates resentment in others and does nothing for team spirit.

If you have to say “I am a natural born leader” then you are likely not. 

2. The Blame Game

As soon as things start to go badly, the candidates are quick to point the finger at each other, at their peers. Sometimes this happens when the actual task is going on, but even more common is that it happens in the boardroom when people want to deflect negative attention away from themselves. The problem with the blame game is that it lacks personal responsibility and therefore leaves the person pointing the finger looking powerless. Respect is always possible in the boardroom, it is simply a choice of behaviour, and the best team members and leaders will always be respectful to others. As a peer you never know when your peers will end up in a new and different position and even end up as your boss in the future.

2. Lack of Planning

Many of the tasks are poorly planned. The teams quickly throw themselves into action mode, before first figuring out how they should operate together, how to communicate, report back etc. There’s not enough alignment between team members and sub-teams, making sure they know they are all working in the same direction. One example of this from the current season was when the teams were arranging the evening events and team members were off selling tickets at different prices and with different contents. Taking the time to plan, organise and align efforts are important parts of teamwork and collaboration. The best and most successful teams invest time in this critical part of the process.

4. Not recognising each other’s strengths

People are not fully listening to each other or figuring out how to best use the resources of the team. They all think they are there to promote themselves – and that’s obviously to some degree how it’s been sold to them, but no one is an island, no one can win a task on their own, just like in real life! For example, in this season, when the teams were creating a virtual reality game, the person who had most experience in branding and graphic design was not put in charge of that task, and the outcome could potentially have been much more successful if those strengths had been valued and utilised. Using strengths in teams is a winning formula; using the people with the right skills for the job and acknowledging those strengths means the task is performed quicker, more productively and a better result is achieved. Within your peer group you can always use each other’s areas of expertise or strengths to get you to collectively achieve more.

5. Poor Communication

In pretty much every task, the sub-teams don’t communicate enough with each other in order to align their purpose and their approach. As an example in this season, when presenting their virtual game Magic Shells, no one knew who did what. It was chaotic and looked unprofessional. Feedback as a tool for great performance is also largely overlooked. They either don’t give feedback at all (they just roll their eyes), or they scream in frustration; there’s very little in between. And as a result, no real change can happen, just conflict and friction. Finally, levels of listening are low, with candidates speaking over each other, resulting in them not hearing each other. Communication – or more importantly two-way communication – is crucial. In a peer group relationship two-way communication can be used to ensure you are efficient and more aligned together. Really listening to others is the component to watch out for here.

The Apprentice is a great example of human interaction and how people impact one another in a high-paced, competitive environment. The candidates are all peers, where one of them now and then need to step forward and take a leadership role. Hence there’s a lot to be learnt from watching these interactions and reflecting on the impact they create, negatively or positively. 

Peers can be an invaluable community for airing your thoughts on challenges and frustrations, when you can’t share them with your boss or your direct team. So trust between peers is of massive importance. There’s also a lot of opportunities for learning from each other, when the guard is down and trust is high. You need your peers, it’s a simple as that.

Edited excerpt from "The Leader's Guide to Impact", FT Publishing 2019, by Mandy Flint and Elisabet Vinberg Hearn. All rights reserved.