Winning Together Beats Tripping Your Teammates

Winning Together Beats Tripping Your Teammates

TriUnity Strategies  |  5/6/25

A workplace should feel like a relay team—everyone running their leg, handing off smoothly, chasing the same finish line. Too often it turns into a demolition derby. Colleagues hoard information, undercut each other’s ideas, or dial down their own effort so they don’t outshine the wrong person. The result isn’t healthy competition; it’s corporate gridlock. Here’s why that mindset creeps in, how it quietly drains performance, and what leaders and employees can do to flip the script.

When Competition Becomes Collateral Damage

The moment people believe praise, promotions, or even basic job security are zero‑sum, self‑preservation kicks in. They start guarding files, withholding feedback, and rolling their eyes at anyone who dares to do great work in public. It rarely starts with open sabotage. More often it’s the subtle stuff:

• Leaving a high‑value colleague out of a critical meeting

• Sitting on data that could speed a project because sharing might shrink your spotlight

• Offering half‑hearted help so a peer’s deadline slips just enough to look bad

None of it shows up directly in performance dashboards, but you feel the drag everywhere—longer project timelines, stalled innovation, and a general “why bother” vibe that spreads faster than any memo.

The Hidden Price of Turf Wars

1. Operational Drag
   Duplicate work piles up because no one shares best practices. Onboarding stretches from weeks to months when veterans protect their tricks instead of mentoring.

2. Lost Innovation
   Breakthroughs thrive on diverse input. If people fear their ideas will be stolen or mocked, they keep quiet. The business moves at the pace of the slowest thinker.

3. Talent Flight
   High performers want to be part of a winning team, not an episode of Survivor. They leave, and you’re left rehiring and rehabbing culture at double the cost.

4. Customer Pain
   Clients notice the fallout long before leadership does—slower answers, clunky hand‑offs, inconsistent quality. They start shopping elsewhere.

Why We End Up Here

• Metrics That Worship Lone Wolves
  When every KPI crowns a single hero, collaboration looks like a risk to personal glory.

• Scarcity Storytelling From Leadership
  Limited raises, one promotion slot, praise handed out like ration coupons—it trains people to tackle teammates instead of problems.

• Unspoken Cultural Rules
  If the last employee who shared a bold idea got side‑eyed or shut down, the rest take notes. Silence becomes the safest play.

Building A Culture Where Success Is Shared

Start with the scoreboard. If bonuses and promotions still ride on solo numbers, you’re rewarding hoarding by design. Tie at least half of every key metric to team outcomes—shared revenue, project throughput, customer satisfaction.

Tell bigger stories. In all‑hands meetings, spotlight how collaboration made the win possible. Name the analyst who found the data, the engineer who refined the solution, the account lead who translated it for the client. People replicate what you recognize.

Make knowledge sharing non‑negotiable. Central repositories, playbooks, live demos—document it or it doesn’t exist. Managers should treat hidden know‑how like a security risk, because that’s what it is to your timeline and budget.

Protect healthy risk‑taking. When someone tries something bold—whether it lands or face‑plants—back them publicly. A team that sees leadership support experiments will keep pushing boundaries instead of playing it safe.

What You Can Do On Monday

• Write down one process you’re great at and drop it in a shared folder.

• Praise a colleague’s win on the company chat—by name, with specifics.

• Invite someone outside your bubble to review your next project draft.

• If you manage people, block 15 minutes to recognize collaboration in your next stand‑up.

Small moves shift norms faster than policy PDFs ever will.

The Payoff

Teams that celebrate each other’s strengths move quicker, hit harder, and hold on to top talent. They spend energy solving customer problems instead of office politics. Productivity climbs, creativity catches fire, and clients can feel the difference in every interaction.

Competition with competitors is healthy. Competition inside the walls is a tax you choose to pay—or choose to eliminate. Build a culture where people race together, not against one another, and watch how fast the whole organization gets out of its own way.