Use Competition To Reach the Top
Could a Competitive Cauldron, emphasizing challenge, competition, and accountability among your team members, help them reach new heights?
Doing the same thing over and over again won’t make you better. Asking your team to do the same assignments, the same projects, and push for the same goals won’t help them improve either. No, to really improve and make significant leaps in your abilities and accomplishments, you need to push yourself and your team. You need a challenge.
A challenge, or a wildly unrealistic target to aim for, can force you to work harder and push yourself and your team harder than you have in the past. But a challenge is only effective if there is accountability.
Often people quit when the work gets too hard and when the progress is too slow. As someone trying to reach the top, or as a leader trying to help your team succeed, you need accountability to keep you on track. You need to recognize when you aren’t making the progress you should be, and you need a plan to correct course.
In a team setting, you have a group of people who can support and inspire each other. Plus, they can hold each other accountable. But another great aspect of a team environment you might use to motivate them further is to encourage competition between the team members.
In these stories from the world of sports, you will see how great leaders use challenge, competition and accountability to spur their teams to greatness. You can use these same principles to reach greatness yourself or help your team be great.
Create a Competitive Cauldron for your team.
“Players tend to be more forgiving of their faults if it’s in a nebulous fog of subjective criticism. We wanted to make it very clear with numbers. Instead of me whipping them verbally, the numbers would be whipping them. It would not be personal. We wanted to create a competitive fury in practice so that once they got into a game it would be like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. We wanted our kids to feel at home in intense competition.”
– Anson Dorrance, head coach of the University of North Carolina women’s soccer team and winner of 21 NCAA national championships
University of North Carolina women’s soccer team head coach Anson Dorrance is widely known throughout the soccer community for guiding his Tar Heels teams to 21 NCAA national championships. But other coaches in sports know him better for a coaching strategy he uses to motivate his players.
Early in Anson Dorrance’s career, he sought to improve as a coach. He watched a practice run by UNC’s men’s basketball coach Dean Smith and loved how the practice was run. Every aspect of each player’s performance during that practice was tracked.
Dorrance implemented much of what he learned from Smith’s practices into what many observers have called his “Competitive Cauldron.”
Dorrance and his coaching staff record statistics on everything that happens during a practice — successful tackles, passing, shooting, speed, hustle and much more. Then Dorrance posts the statistics for every player during that practice on the locker room wall.
That list essentially ranks each player on their performance and effort –every single day. Each player sees where she ranks compared to her teammates and uses that ranking to motivate herself to try harder to improve.
Dorrance believes that these competition statistics motivate his players to compete better than if he simply yelled at them to try harder. The players can look at the list and see where they stand. As the saying goes, “The numbers never lie.”
Initially, it might be hard for players who have been among the best players at their level to now be at the bottom compared to their teammates. By essentially pitting the players against each other in practice, he encourages them to make themselves better.
He also believes that these rankings unite the team. Instead of players ranked toward the bottom looking at the top players and being jealous, they see the standouts as winners who they want to emulate and surpass.
Are there ways you can implement a Competitive Cauldron for your team? Can you create a public dashboard that shows the number of calls and the number of sales each member of your sales team makes? Can you collect and share each customer service representative’s customer ratings?
Many leaders worry that encouraging competition among their employees and team members will be counterproductive. They worry that it will discourage low achievers and possibly drive them away.
In truth, the opposite might happen. Seeing that they are at the bottom might encourage them to work harder. Seeing their coworkers at the top of the list might make them admire and emulate those achievers rather than envy or loathe them. And if you find someone who sees the challenge as pointless and doesn’t put in the effort to improve his or her results, that person might not be a good fit for your team anyway.
Find ways for your team members to compete.
“I…think about how I’ve gotten through every other disappointment and challenge in my career: By going back to work. By working when nobody is watching, and then working some more. You don’t back off. You don’t pay attention to negativity in your head. You refuse to give in.”
– Carli Lloyd, U.S. Women’s National Team star and two-time FIFA Player of the Year
Valorie Kondos Field is one of the most accomplished coaches in the history of women’s gymnastics. Her UCLA Bruins teams have won seven NCAA national championships.
Part of what makes her and her gymnasts so successful is how Kondos Field challenges her athletes on a daily basis. In fact, she compares one activity she has her gymnasts do at the end of practice to Dorrance’s Competitive Cauldron.
Coach Val gathers all of her gymnasts together and has them do a simple skill, such as a simple round-off, or a back handspring, or a layout back flip to a stuck landing, that each one must perform, ending with a controlled salute. She and her assistant coaches give each gymnast a score for that skill. She lines them up from highest score to lowest based on that first skill attempt.
Then Coach Val takes the Competitive Cauldron one step farther. For the second round, a gymnast can challenge one of her teammates who scored better than she did to a head-to-head battle performing the same skill. If she outscores the teammate she has challenged, she takes her teammate’s spot in line.
Kondos Field says she loves watching how competitive her athletes become during this challenge. She believes it strengthens the overall competitive nature of each gymnast and makes the team as a whole much stronger.
By making your team compete, you are aiming to raise the performance of every member. The goal is not to punish the low achievers as much as it is to inspire them to improve and become a high achiever.
As the leader, you wouldn’t want to collect and post the numbers for everyone to see and then publicly berate the employees at the bottom of the list. You would simply remind them that they can move up to the top of the list with focus and hard work, assuming they need that motivational message at all.
Add more accountability to your work.
“If you’re unwilling to leave someplace you’ve outgrown, you will never reach your full potential. To be the best, you have to constantly be challenging yourself, raising the bar, pushing the limits of what you can do. Don’t stand still, leap forward.”
– Ronda Rousey, first female champion in UFC history and Olympic bronze medalist in judo
Valorie Kondos Field has adopted much of Dorrance’s Competitive Cauldron because of what it can teach her athletes. “I think the Competitive Cauldron is a brilliant strategy because it teaches accountability, and athletes quickly learn that everything they do in sports — as in life — matters.”
She has created a strategy of pushing her athletes that encourages teamwork and accountability. She calls it the “Blue Light Special.”
Kondos Field and the other coaches give the gymnasts an assignment for each event in practice. For example, one day the balance beam challenge might be for each group of three gymnasts to hit three national championship quality routines. If they struggle with that challenge, the girls can create their own Blue Light Special.
The gymnasts can work together to devise an alternative challenge they must complete, as well as the consequence of not achieving it. Coach Val’s gymnasts become excited by taking ownership and designing the challenge they will try to achieve. But they also have to take accountability, knowing that they must accomplish their own challenge or face those consequences they suggested.
She has witnessed her gymnasts’ confidence skyrocket. They become used to high-pressure situations like those they will face in meets because they push themselves that hard or harder in practice. Not only does it help her gymnasts improve, but they reach new levels of strength and resilience.
How can you add more accountability to your work? When you set goals, do you state consequences for not meeting those goals?
We often talk about rewards we will give ourselves or to our team for hitting certain benchmarks or reaching set goals. But it’s important that we set consequences. We need to keep ourselves and our team members accountable if we want to continue to grow.
You have to push yourself and your team.
“When a difficult task comes your way, accept the challenge joyfully. Once it is finished, plead for more. Every sacrifice you make builds character. People with average skills often obtain greatness because they are willing to pay a price for it. You might not be able to outthink, outmarket, or outspend your competition, but you can outwork them.”
– Lou Holtz, national championship-winning head coach at Notre Dame, college football TV analyst, and the only coach to lead six schools to bowl games
If you want to truly excel in some endeavor, you have to push yourself. Set a challenging goal. Find someone whose results or accomplishments you can aim to surpass. And find some way to keep yourself accountable and on track.
As a leader, you want your team to produce and succeed as well. Yelling or criticizing them constantly probably won’t help them improve in the long run. Instead, try to find some challenge where they compete with each other. And set public consequences to remind them of what’s at stake and spur them to push themselves even harder.
Look to create a Competitive Cauldron in some way for yourself and your team. You might be amazed by the results.
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