Do You Have a Competition Mental Model?

Objective leaders identify their unproductive mental models and tweak them for greater effectiveness. The next mental model in the series is Competition. In addition, to the External Validation, Perfectionist and Control mental models, some leaders frame their world through the lens of Competition as follows:

COMPETITION: I CONSTANTLY COMPARE MYSELF WITH OTHERS TO DETERMINE MY VALUE.

Many of us do this and we often end up feeling badly about ourselves. Our sense of value or worth is relative, based upon how well others are doing. Based on initial findings from the Objective Leader Assessment, it appears that 69.7% of respondents reported “their self worth is often based on how good I am relative to others”. In order to feel good about themselves they have to be better than everyone else. Some people even go so far as to consider everyone in their office a competitor.

They have to appear more intelligent and achieve greater results than everyone else in order to feel good about themselves. For some this plays out as a need to always be right. Some people will keep arguing, ad nauseum, trying to prove their point, even though their position is tenuous at best. For others, every interaction is a competition. It is all about who is going to end up on top. The truth is many of us have been socialized to think that if we are not the very best, if we are not at the top 1 percent of whatever it is we do, then we are not good enough. To reinforce this already pervasive mental model, society has established a competitive hierarchy for just about everything.

Consider performance reviews. Many of us have learned the hard way that if we don’t get an “exceeds expectations” rating or something higher than a 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, not only will we not get the highest bonus, but we may not get the next promotion—or even a raise. Many high school students are under so much competitive pressure. They are sometimes taught that if they don’t have a 4.0 GPA, score in the 99th percentile on admissions tests, and demonstrate leadership in sports and participate in clubs, they won’t get into college anywhere. Even highly credentialed professionals get caught up in this. One very impressive senior leader of a biotech research firm felt that she was not good enough, because everyone around her had a PhD and an MBA, but she only had a PhD. She ended up enrolling in a part-time MBA program, which ended up compromising her performance at work and she ended up being passed over for a promotion. This competitive mental model can be debilitating, and it starts very young.

Here are two peoples’ descriptions of how this particular mental model plays out for them:

Juan is a 30-something male from South America who was not able to follow the traditional education and career track of many of his peers. Although he was just as good or even better in some cases than most of his peers in the engineering industry, he always compared himself to his peers and concluded that he was not good enough, in spite of his results. He felt the impact of the Competition mental model and expresses it this way: “I will do my best in life to achieve a better condition (earn more money) so I will not feel less than others anymore. The result of this is that I spend too much time working, not spending enough time with my family or taking care of my health.”

Suyin, an Asian woman in her late 20s always felt the pressure from her family and society to perform, talks about it this way: “Growing up in a culture where I was constantly being judged based not only on my own performance but also relative to that of others, I developed the habit of judging myself based on how others perform. I learned early on that if I was the best, I would receive many accolades from my parents and other authority figures which led me to the mental model that I need to be the best at everything and better than everyone at everything. One the one hand, I am considered a high performing individual contributor at work but on the other hand, I am not considered a team player which is holding me back. I never want to share information or seek other’s perspectives. It has to be me, all me. The tricky thing for me is that while I have to be better than everyone at everything, I also need other people to recognize it and say so. I have cultivated a biased view of good performance. I am not good enough unless other people say so. Based on these biases, I became addicted to external validation. For me, the Competition model and the External Validation model go hand in hand".

To be an objective leader means aligning your models with the needs of the organization. There is no question anymore that collaboration, seeking out diverse perspectives and developing new ways to look at challenges and opportunities, is a key leadership competency. Believing everyone is a competitor can undermine your ability to demonstrate this competency. What is another way to look at this? Remember, to tweak or transform a mental model, you and only you, must come up with new ways of thinking that you alone believe. Is it possible that needing to be better than everyone at everything sets you up for failure? Could there be an underlying mental model that is driving the Perfectionist, External Validation, Control and Competition Mental Models?

In my next and final blog about mental models, I will share the 5th mental model that appears to underscore and drive our need for perfection, external validation, control and to be better than everyone at everything.

Excerpt from: The Objective Leader: How To Leverage the Power of Seeing Things As They Are.