When to cooperate with colleagues and when to compete

There are various tactics you can use to manage your relationship with colleagues. Photo / 123RF

There's rivalry in every work relationship. Have a strategy for managing it.

Let's acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about workplaces: The people who thrive in them are those who know how to both collaborate and compete with their colleagues. They understand how work relationships affect their interests and the organisation's, carefully consider the risks and trade-offs, and dispassionately decide how much to invest in each co-worker and when to walk away.

We've studied cooperative rivalries on the job for more than 25 years and found that the way professionals handle them can make or break their careers. We have seen how easy it is to view relationships as simply negative or positive. Virtually all are a mix of both and require careful thought to manage. To do so effectively, you must understand where you and your colleagues fall on the conflict-collaboration spectrum.

Relationships are negative when interests are opposed and the parties are in competition or in outright conflict over goals. Relationships are positive when people share interests and decide to cooperate or to collaborate. In between are relationships in which two people largely work independently.

Once you've figured out the type of relationship you and your colleague have, you can use various tactics to manage it.

Conflict

In an outright conflict your counterpart is trying to take something you want or need. Consider Jim and Jane, who are both being considered for a senior managing director position at a large private wealth-management firm. (All the case studies in this article are hypothetical but are drawn from various real scenarios we have studied.) Jane has worked for months to cultivate a prospective client, and if she succeeds, it could be a deciding factor in whether she gets promoted. She learns from a junior associate that Jim is also trying to land this high-net-worth individual, even though he knows that Jane is already in pursuit. He's done this before, which is why she has grown to loathe him.

To manage the situation, Jane can start by considering her counterpart's strengths. What might the client value in Jim that Jane doesn't have, and what could she do to change this? She also needs to revisit the importance of the issue in contention. Is the deal really vital to her promotion? Next she should consider workarounds or countermoves. Perhaps she could reach out to some of Jim's prospects and use that as leverage in a discussion about how she and Jim could create and abide by boundaries. In a conflict relationship you need to be clear about what you must protect and what's not possible, given the circumstances. Confrontation is both necessary and costly, so work closely with allies and do not engage your rival alone.

Competition

This type of rivalry is common in workplaces where pay and opportunities are routinely allocated by assessing and comparing employees' performance. Consider Michael and Ellen, who've been asked by their boss to co-lead a priority project: developing their company's new diversity, equity and inclusion plan. Michael would like to work cooperatively with Ellen but is deeply sceptical, since she has a reputation for throwing colleagues under the bus in difficult situations.

The right move in cases like this is to recognise where your goals and your rival's are compatible and work from there to improve the odds of good outcomes. For example, neither Michael nor Ellen wants this project to fail. In every conversation with her, he will want to emphasise those shared goals and the importance of achieving them as a team. Perhaps he can rein in her competitive behaviour by eliminating scenarios in which she might be tempted to undermine him. One option would be to persuade her that their bosses — instead of them — should present the results. By recognising what drives a rivalry, those in it can find a way to reduce competition.

Independence

In the middle of the spectrum is independence, which entails deliberately reducing your reliance on others as much as possible — evading the problem rather than trying to fix it. Consider Scott, who felt that his colleague Nigel often bullied him. To avoid having to deal with Nigel, Scott got his boss to restructure their respective responsibilities so that they would interact less frequently.

One challenge with this approach is that it is difficult to maintain over the long term. We don't highly recommend this approach. Instead, people in Scott's situation should consider treating the relationship as a conflict or a competition.

Cooperation

In a cooperative relationship you and your counterpart share key interests but also have separate ones, so you choose to work together on specific issues where your interests align and not to compete where they don't. Take Mohammed and Roberto, peers tasked with pooling their expertise on Brazil, Russia, India and China to produce an economic forecast for their organization. The risks here are much lower than in relationships where partners are in conflict or competition. The main danger stems from the fact that things can change.

For example, if Mohammed suddenly gets a time-intensive opportunity to work directly with the CEO of an important client in his region, he will have to decide whether to take it and reduce his commitment to the project with Roberto. To deal with such unplanned circumstances, Mohammed and Roberto might agree at the outset to a set of reasons for reducing or ending their commitment to the project and pledge to give each other a certain amount of advance notice should they do so.

Collaboration

Collaboration happens when two parties have many mutual interests. This is the situation that Sara and Maryam found themselves in when their respective employers assigned them to co-lead a small pilot venture that paired the coach-client matching technology of Sara's firm with the deep coaching experience and client list of Maryam's company.

While such relationships promise the most mutual gain, they are the hardest to disengage from if interests change, because the parties' resources are intermingled. So at the outset Sara and Maryam should take the time to understand their respective commitments to the endeavour. That should include developing detailed plans for different scenarios, outlining their implications for each co-leader and how they will be handled.

We all navigate a range of cooperative rivalries at work. The solution is not to find positive relationships and avoid negative ones. Conflict and competition inevitably arise among interdependent co-workers but can still be managed in ways that reap rewards; independence is rarely, if ever, a panacea; and your goals and your work partners' will evolve over time. Career success depends on relationship management as much as any other skill. Get it right, and both you and your organisation will benefit.

Written by: Randall S. Peterson and Kristin J. Behfar
© 2022 Harvard Business School Publishing Corp. Distributed by The New York Times Licensing Group