Winning at Work Doesn’t Have to Be a Zero-sum Game

As I say happy New Year, I have one favor to ask of you, this year seek less of your personal goals and aspirations and for the very first time in your life, try and let others win over you. Difficult, right?

For Public Relations professionals, this may not be anything new because we do it every day. Our job is to make others glow and constantly use your best psychic and sometimes physical resources to project a brilliant picture of your client or organization. 2020 is a year for everyone else to join PR people to do this! 

I know some may even say I have finally lost it – if they had not said this of me already based on my previous writings! This is the New Year and more than any time, this is when people are most selfish. And broke! Brokeness (if there is such a word) and greed makes for a deadly combination!

This is the time when people look at their humiliating bank balances and begin to imagine ways of replenishing them. During this first month of the year, many will do a quick arithmetic of their time spent on earth and blame December for all failures of the past decade - this annual ritual makes January the most reflective month of the year.

In retrospect, part of the reflection includes looking over your neighbor’s fence and wondering just how fast he or she was able to complete that humongous bungalow in such a short period, while your simple structure is still struggling to get past the plate high stage.

“He must have stolen money from the county government,” you say to console yourself but go ahead to vow, “I will finish mine before the end of the year.”

That one piece of reflection gives birth to the first New Year’s resolution – to complete the house, or finally get to buy that new car. A selfish goal! At this stage, these are far from resolutions but merely ingenuous acts of wishful thinking - lust even - drawn from the fountain of raw and primitive competitive nature of the human spirit.   

However, what we tend to forget when coming up with resolutions for a new year is that this word was coined from the verb ‘resolve’, which is a firm determination to do something. Usually, backed by an airtight plan, assured source of income, and a supportive network of people who share a similar resolve to get it done.

But soon, February will be here. The month of love! At which point the annual financial benefits begin to trickle in, which signals the start of a replica of the previous year’s spending cycle. With February comes a renewed brand of appetite, and this being a leap year, it will have that and more. But let us not jump the gun, at this stage, we will stick to January.  

There is something about a new year that makes all of us adopt new schools of thought. For me 2020 has given me a knack for statistical trends and thirst for numbers - that notwithstanding the fact that the only statistics I can competently comprehended is 20:20. But if I claim it, I could easily be the most numerate economist the world has ever seen.

Turns out, that this is the nature of winning at the workplace. In a place where teams are made of competitively merged individuals, each with unique skills, capabilities and bifurcated aspirations, most times, an individual’s achievement corresponds to a similar loss in another, with a net effect of zero to the organization.

Take for instance my claim to financial proficiency, if this claim lands in the right ears, I may just be given the job of determining the financial direction of our country. I may be given the codes of the famous black briefcase that contains the country’s GDP to manage at the expense of a more competent Kenyan who could have done a better job but since he or she was not loud enough, his loss became my win!

This example may seem wild and even far-fetched when juxtaposed with localized workplace examples which obviously have less devastating effects to the country’s economy but nevertheless equally catastrophic to the organization.

Still on national leadership, over the past few years, we have seen it all. Individuals who were loud but lacking in both skill and experience end up being elected into some of the most important offices in the world. The interesting thing is that this trend knows no civilization, it happens in the United States the same way it happens in Nairobi.

In fact, the cut-throat nature of work life has in a way normalized competition to the point that winners are glorified and rewarded handsomely irrespective of the means they applied to get to the top. The winner takes it all!

This obviously is the reason why individuals may score highly in performance appraisals even as the company continues to perform dismally, with numerous customer complaints occasioned by poor service delivery or complete absence of it.

While the poor customer experience may only be the visible symptoms of a failing system, a peek behind the scenes, reveals an avalanche of vicious fights among teams and jostling of individuals, elbowing to outdo one another in the race to the finish line. A finish line that only admits one at a time. No pacesetters!

Unfortunately, those who win at work are not always winners at the home front as well. At the end of the day, when the corporate race is over and we all clock out and retire, those who may not be considered winners at work may just be the winners at home.

It takes a double dose of extra-terrestrial brand of magic for an employee to win both at work and at home. But in most cases, professional winning is a zero-sum game in that one aspect of the employee’s life will have to suffer. May I be clear at this juncture that I am open to a lecture on work-life balance!

But, could 2020 be any different? That this year would be that turning point in the history of the workplace, where individuals will momentarily abandon their singular investment aspiration otherwise known as vested interests, for the broader purview of corporate performance? Well, 2020 has just started and 12 months is such a long time! May be this year will be that year. Only time will tell!

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