What would you do?
This interesting email just hit my inbox and I found it to get at the crux of our event. What do you do with these feelings, and how could YOU create an atmosphere of collaboration when competition seems to help create so much action???
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I thoroughly enjoyed our GPS team building adventure. One question lingered with me as I drove home.
I felt great about the success of our "company" in accomplishing our overall goal of finding all the caches. It felt odd, however, to be rewarded on a team level with the Starbucks cards when I felt like our yellow team performance was basically equal to red team's performance in the overall success of the company. The major reason we won was because of a joint decision between both teams at the start of the game. Based on that, receiving a special award didn't feel right. I thus felt compelled to give my Starbucks card away to a member of the red team who deserved it just as much as I did. I also wanted to emphasize that yellow team's motivations truly were company oriented, not just team oriented. I didn't articulate that in our session because I couldn't figure out a way to say that in a way that wouldn't make my fellow yellow-teamers feel awkward for retaining their Starbucks cards. Does that make sense?
My question is how have you dealt with similar situations in your organizations? How do you reward teams for performance, maintaining the productivity that comes with friendly competition, but without undermining morale on both sides? In this case, you have yellow team getting rewards knowing that they couldn't have done it without red team (and so feeling a little guilty for winning). And you have red team seeing yellow team get rewards knowing they contributed just as much to the overall success of the company but getting nothing. Change the reward to a several thousand dollar Year End bonus and I can see a recipe for conflict.
Do incentives financial or otherwise really motivate high team performance over the long term? Or is it enough to give people the chance to accomplish a big hairy audacious goal and then be recognized for their contributions to it. The answer to this question would have implications regarding how a company provides stock options, year end bonuses, and incentive programs. Based on my reaction as a member of the winning team, I wonder if it may create the opposite effect of what was intended.
I don't know how to put my finger on it...but it somehow just didn't feel right to be singled out for winning as a team when our goal was to win as a company.
If we had played the game again, how willing would we have been to cooperate as teams? Would there have been more of a fight over which caches which team pursued?
In any case, these were some of the questions that rolled through my mind as I headed home on Friday. I was wondering if others had similar thoughts or insights in these areas.
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