Why Going to Work Should be like Competing in a Sport
Tim Mikhelashvili
Adding Energy Excitement & Character to Pharma and Business One Meaningful Relationship at a time!
FROM PERFORMANCE REVIEWS TO PERSONAL RECORDS
Let's suppose that going to work is the place where we can break our personal records, rather than merely meet goals and align to our strategy. What could replacing only one word in the phrases personal "goals" or "strategy" in our minds mean for our motivation to show up to work, and for the extent of innovation we would personally contribute?
Both personal records and performance reviews are sometimes abbreviated as PR, but our translations of each carry a completely different meaning and level of inspiration. Employees are essentially competitors in every industry or field through opportunities, training, information, technology, bonus or compensation they seek versus receive compared to others. But few organizations choose to approach this reality of competition head-on and instead guise it under glorification of alignment, goals, and strategy to not compromise collaboration.
THE HUMAN CONDITION AND AMBITION TO PERFORM
Repressing the competitive reality which is always present in the subconscious of the individuals on whom organizational success depends has serious implications on performance. Avoiding the integral components of human ambition or potential leads to:
ROLE OF IMPLICIT VS EXPLICIT COMPETITION IN BUSINESS
It is instead a conscious organizational choice to coat reality and accountability in what appears to be more comfortable yet subjective and vague. Individual team members are essentially told to go out to play and practice, only to learn at the end of the year that they had entered a race, and were being timed. Teams publicly take the grunt of the blame for failure or receive recognition for their successes, and more rarely individuals rewarded publicly in order to "not motivate unnecessary competition". Yet behind closed doors owners watch closely to see which individual makes the strongest contribution to the team's success and look for true competitors. As a result the message is lost in translation, and lacks integrity. After all, internal competition does not have to be a bad word in a business, and instead can build more certainty, accountability, and a critical connection to our company. When we are openly told we are entering a race, and then regularly reminded of the progress we are making relative to others as well as the contribution we are making to our organization's success, we begin to see and touch our own sense of belonging to the team.
Yet different divisions in an organization protect information from each other because it is of course much more "accepted to compete as a team against another team" rather than an individual versus another employee. Various departments or functions wrongly utilize humor that is often misrepresented by sarcasm and a "we versus they" attitude under the spirit of meeting a team or department goal. Such implicit competition is more common because in such a construct it becomes more difficult to trace outcomes to any individual person's accountability. Ron Carucci , a renowned organizational change expert, best-selling author, Forbes and Harvard Business Review editor, and two-time TEDx speaker whom I interviewed on the Alloutcoach podcast discusses the ultimate costs of internal "implicit" competition based on a 15-year longitudinal study of thousands of global employees at Fortune 500 companies. He explains in his book "To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice, and Purpose that when cross-functional rivalry or unhealthy conflict is left unaddressed, an organization is almost 6 times more likely to have people withhold or distort truthful information based on this research.
ADAPTING TRANSPARENCY AND OBJECTIVITY FROM SPORTS
References to competition and sports are abundant in every business. However, the difference is that the rules designed in sports unlike in business are fundamentally based on objective outcomes or results that are seen transparently in the same manner by all spectators and participants. So sports in most businesses remain mere analogies because the decisions that take place or the information that is shared regarding the results is often very difficult to explain and left to interpretation.
In sports events, commentators and coaches transparently disclose a personal record displayed on the TV screen when they compete against each other, yet in business our PRs are our resumes or projects seemingly have no concrete translation or specific value, and our PRs are usually not shared with the entire team in a competitive field of employees.
Essentially, most of our business leaders tell their employees to run a 100 meter sprint or a marathon through goals they assign yet the clocks they use all differ from each other and the finish line is invisible, particularly in the industries and roles in which the outcomes are not directly tied or easily traced to organizational profit. Thus upon further reflection, work in most organizations more closely resembles war than sports because war participants have less accountability than during peacetime for resorting to illegal weapons, tools, or skills if they are necessary to win. Sports on the other hand is a celebration of personal accountability for performance, results including records, and prizes based on transparent rules, and contributions to team's success.
Going to work as if competing in a sport we want to master can therefore bring just the kind of certainty and inspiration all of us are searching today and so many of us are missing in the world of work regardless of the economic climate or market volatility.
PRESSURE CHECKING BOTH THE MARKET AND INTERNAL OPERATIONS
Many argue that the pressure to perform and to produce today can be overbearing anyway in most industries, so why introduce more internal competition? The answer may lie in discovering which pressure is greater and more harmful, that of vague and artificial uncertainty about the "fairness" and relevance of how we are evaluated which we create by design ourselves as leaders and succumb to as employees or a sense of certainty that we build continuously through contests and the playgrounds we design at work?
A true sports view of work can spark life in the least competitive or driven employee because it eliminates questions, propaganda, and political "waste" freeing up all individuals to acknowledge the pressure in a tough market but focus on their personal progress relentlessly to create solutions rather than question why they received a particular end of year evaluation, missed a bonus, promotion or training opportunity, and whether or not their manager has their best interests, all of which are challenging to address during adversity. We no longer have to manipulate data, people and their emotions, lead them on, corner or crowd them, but instead can spend more effort coaching each other to break their personal records from one contest or time period to the next. Time spent on questions about motives, frustrations, or assumptions translates into significant lost productivity, and represents a daily reality of too many employees or industries which threatens the long-term resilience, innovation, and growth of an organization. Applying true sports principles rather than only metaphors in business raises both performance and behavior to a science and can completely reinvent our concept of work in healthcare, pharma, biotech, and beyond. Amedea Pharma is one organizational change agency that bridges the "perceived" gap between metrics and culture, performance and behavior, internal and external feedback, a medical department ("cost") and sales ("profit"), abstract information and exact science across a spectrum from competition to collaboration and innovation in healthcare.
BLENDING SPORTS WITH DATA SCIENCE PRINCIPLES
Amedea Pharma's most well-known application of its sports science philosophy is the first-ever global Medical Affairs Innovation Olympics event in pharma and biotech it hosted in 2022, set to take place again September 18 - October 4 (read more about the event and register here to compete for $10,000 - gold, $5,000 - silver, and $3,000 - bronze medal). The multi-stage global, virtual event features sports Olympians, coaches and executives as well as innovators in healthcare in a unique format of an ideation competition.
Currently, Amedea is generating evidence to build a new science of performance metrics/KPIs in life sciences
The company is continuing to demonstrate how adding the critical components of transparency to competition, and data science principles to measuring performance can immediately 1) create a community of "Olympian" athletes among pharma and biotech employees and colleagues, 2) accelerate innovation, and 3) build an important sense of continuity through engagement, and belonging even in the most desperate moments of uncertainty or adversity.
Most businesses measure performance and productivity and celebrate particular behaviors through interviews and espouse a mission or company culture statements which are usually single words or adjectives. If we want to inspire a particular culture, we must inspire a set of particular behaviors, quantify them through concrete measures, and reward them, while eliminating those that are undesired in the process. However most organizations do not quantify behaviors of their individuals leaving them less accountable for behaviors in the decisive performance reviews. Thus, the underlying problem of meaning, purpose, performance, and retention is summarized simply by a deficit in "practicing what we preach" via self-accountability, as we forget that this gap is ultimately best addressed by the concrete metrics/KPIs.
MEASURING INSPIRATION TO PERFORM IN BUSINESS
In the 1980s professors Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from the University of Rochester distinguished the?six main reasons ?why people work, which Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor adapted their framework for the modern workplace. The six main reasons people work are: play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia.
The first three factors are directly related to the work itself and positively influence motivation in descending order of most to least positive - play, purpose, and potential.
1) Play - simple motivation by the work itself
2) Purpose - impact of the work fits our identity,
3) Potential - promise of a promotion and career growth
The last three factors are not related to the work itself and inhibit motivation. They are considered negative motivational factors, from least to most negative, respectively - emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia.
4) Emotional pressure - "peer pressure" from family or friends, fear, other social, external forces
5) Economic pressure - gaining a financial reward or avoiding financial hardship
6) Inertia - work becomes a daily routine the reason of which we cannot explain.
Researchers have shown that the first three factors increase performance, while the last three decrease it. As a result, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor have designed a prospective ToMo motivational score, validated across tens of thousands of employees across the globe and used to rate a wide range of well known companies such as Trader Joe's and Southwest, among others. ToMO subtracts the negative factors based on responses to 6 questions rated on a scale of 1 - 7 each from the positive factors, and normalized to a maximum score of 100.
Interestingly, their research shows that various company operations influence overall employee motivation listed in the figure below. Some of the company processes that most strongly influence employee motivation are role design, organizational identity, career ladders, and community, among others. These findings highlight the critical role Operations and Human Resources divisions play in designing job responsibilities appropriately to optimally distribute responsibilities across different functions. Results provide concrete evidence to suggest executives need to prioritize the creation of a clear behavioral code, company culture, and mission statements and also point to the significant value of building talent management programs geared towards career progression as well as fluid exchange of information across the organization. Though the performance review process itself ranks low on this list other factors such as compensation or career progression are often direct outcomes of the feedback exchanged during this assessment period. Another reason why performance reviews may not be thought to play a role in motivation based on this research is because they usually only take place once a year and are rarely celebrated or recalled by most.
Immediate and continuous feedback of one's performance is what intrinsically inspires sports athletes to break their records. Yet in business, performance reviews have a notoriously bad reputation even though they represent a critical chance to inspire and incentivize higher quality and effort among individuals.
Research featured in Harvard Business Review from a survey of Fortune 1,000 companies conducted by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) indicates that 66% of employees are strongly dissatisfied with the performance evaluations they received in their organizations, and 65% of the employees believed that performance evaluations were not even relevant to their jobs.
领英推荐
CASE STUDY: NEW 2023 METRICS PHARMA INDUSTRY BENCHMARK IN MEDICAL AFFAIRS
These findings outlining major gaps in evaluating performance cross over many industries. In the previous issues of "InWeekend" I have shared that only about 5% of employees working in the Medical Affairs division across pharma which my agency surveyed in 2022 across the globe find the metrics/KPIs by which they are evaluated are meaningful to them. In the latest 2023 global metrics benchmark survey designed by Amedea Pharma for Medical Affairs Professional Society (MAPS) , more than 70% of 51 pharma companies across the globe stated that they do not use any methodology to study the relationship between their function's activities and outcomes, which questions the relevance, predictability, and ultimately the ultimate meaning of metrics (recent LinkedIn Live video discussion of the results by 5 industry leaders ). Secondly, though almost all the KPIs they use are externally-facing designed to benefit the healthcare community through patient outcomes, 96% of leaders surveyed communicate these outcomes internally compared to only 27% who share them with their healthcare customers. This stark difference in the communication of metrics raises an important question of the rationale for using them in the first place, which most likely is to satisfy an internal executive request, and justify the status quo, for example. Instead, if a function primarily serves a particular audience, it is its duty to transparently demonstrate its accountability to it and share the outcome of the information or education it generates in medicine. In addition, when we only share our metrics with our teams internally, particularly when they are external, we either lack confidence in our own metrics to share them externally, do not understand how they directly translate into improved healthcare quality, or are prohibited by our internal regulatory processes. The other important part of the deficit in this case study is near complete avoidance of measuring how colleagues work together or train each other, internally-facing culture and L & D (learning and development) based metrics, which have large implications on the ultimate sales, profit potential, and customer or patient experience.
Thus, the gaps in the perceived "meaningfulness" of the most common performance evaluations used and ultimate accountability to the community a Medical Affairs function serves can possibly explain the relative "invisibility" of this specialty compared to the better known functions such as Research and Development, Sales, or Marketing despite its critical role in education, new evidence generation and communication of complex scientific information.
Ultimately, our approach to measuring and communicating performance demonstrates how we view our own responsibility, which can ultimately determine and improve our reputation in our industry.
More than 90% of American companies provide performance evaluations at least once a year, which cost an average of $3,000 per person per year, and translates into billions of dollars and weeks if not months wasted on meaningless processes and subjective decisions. The Harvard Business Review article highlighted above by Jinseok Chun, a PhD candidate of Management at 美国哥伦比亚大学商学院 , Joel Brockner, Phillip Hettleman Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and David De Cremer , Provost’s chair and professor in management and organizations at NUS Business School , National University of Singapore, founder and director of the Centre on AI Technology for Humankind at NUS Business school and author of Leadership by Algorithm: Who leads and who follows in the AI era? (2020), cites 4 studies of over 1000 U.S. and Dutch employees who were either compared over their own performance over time (temporal comparison) or against their colleagues (social comparison). Results indicated that employees considered performance reviews more personalized, relevant, and fair when they were compared to their own performance versus to that of others. However, not all comparisons among employees are equal, and from an organizational vantage point they are indispensable in order to match the right individuals to the right responsibilities for decisions or roles. Therefore there are specific questions we need to consider asking to understand how objective and balanced comparisons of different employees are across different reference points based on the rules they follow.
With these variables in mind, the findings are likely not surprising on a philosophical level as we are told from childhood to become champions by simply trying our best to improve, yet most leaders particularly in large corporations do not find such approaches practical or feasible because their vantage point demands a global snapshot of performance at a given time without the individual details. Thus, as leaders who strive to inspire strong performance, we are caught between a dichotomy in competition that promotes competition against self versus against others.
When I interviewed a double Olympian swimmer and Commonwealth Swimming Champion Chris Cook on the Alloutcoach podcast , he shared an important breakthrough moment in his road to becoming a champion when his coach convinced him to finally start entering international competitions against much tougher, experienced, and higher ranked swimmers. Though he had already made important progress to become one of the top swimmers in his native U.K., competing against himself in his mind and beating his personal records, it was only when he started to compete against other and European champion swimmers that he began to stretch himself even farther and become a champion and represent his country at the Olympics in Athens (2004) and Beijing (2008).
THE COMPETITION PARADOX: COMPETE AGAINST YOURSELF AS YOU COMPETE MORE AGAINST OTHERS
Thus perhaps, the lesson to learn from sports in business is a "competition paradox" we have to learn to compete against ourselves in our mind even when we compete against others, but we are most likely to break our biggest records when we find other competitors who inspire us to compete more against others in more events and new categories. Therefore, the ultimate decision we make in how we design our metrics/KPIs or performance reviews depends on our ambitions to break our new personal records to contribute to the success of our organizations.
"We fail not because we aim high and miss, but we aim low and hit the target"
-Les Brown
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-Tim Mikhelashvili
CEO and Co-Founder of @Amedea Pharma
Host of the?@Alloutcoach Podcast ?and?YouTube Channel ?where sportsmanship meets the scientific method. Subscribe to both to stay tuned with global, multicultural and real world approaches to leadership, innovation across pharma and beyond, mentorship, company culture and organizational change and interviews with Fortune 100 and 500 Executives, Independent Thinkers, Innovators, Scientists, Olympians, Researchers and more!
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Dear Tim: I like your provocative dichotomy: Does PR stand for performance review or break our personal records. Yes, employees are essentially competing. The competition should be about striving for great results. You rightly quote the research that says when cross-functional rivalry or unhealthy conflict is left unaddressed, an organization is almost six times more likely to have people withhold or distort truthful information. Applying true sports principles rather than only metaphors in business raises both performance and behavior to a science and can completely reinvent our concept of work in healthcare, pharma, biotech, and beyond. The ultimate decision should be whether we want to fail because we aim low and hit the target, or because we aim high and strive to continually improve. You have opened up a great topic for thought and discussion.
Corporate Strategy & ESG | Organizational Transformation
1 年This is an extraordinary way to think about work, pulling other schools of thought in to maximize engagement. Love it.
2x Olympian, Keynote Speaker & Non-Executive Director
1 年There is so much rich conversation to be had from this article, well done Tim I love how you’ve drawn out some interesting comparisons. I’ve always wondered why sports people are sought after as keynote speakers for business events, but looking at your article lays it out clearly how aligned business and sport really is. Yes! There are differences, but when you couch in performance terms there seems like there are so many similarities. Great article! It’s really got me thinking ??????