Scrapping a Country-Wide Sales Contest

As part of a motivation campaign for its 100 licensed business coaches, the umbrella organization announced a Canada-wide sales contest. The contest featured a lucrative prize of a holiday vacation, worth about two thousand dollars, which would go to the coach with the highest sales. The stated intent of the contest was to build interest and excitement, and, of course, performance.

Now, this organization is all about mentorship, and collaborative teamwork, with each coach helping the other coaches to grow and succeed. They hold weekly teleconference meetings to share success stories and ask for help on the challenges of the week. Their coach-the-coaches model works well, and provides excellent support to these largely-independent professionals.

Upon announcement of the contest, several of the coaches had reservations about participating. After all, they were used to helping each other weekly, they coached each other on how to improve, they were all in this together. Yet this contest would pit them against each other, and seemed to go against much of what they were trying to accomplish together. Thankfully, the organization was able to hear the coaches' concerns, and was wise enough to scrap the contest before it started.

The available research is quite conclusive about the deleterious effects of structural competition on performance. Despite our unthinking reliance on competitive management models, it is well-established that "trying to beat the other guy" does NOT produce excellence. In fact, such structural competition hampers performance, damages relationships, increases anxiety and damages intrinsic motivation. Not the kind of things you want to encourage in your organization.

So, scrap the contests. Instead, build systems that foster cooperation (assuming you're interested in getting better results.)