Collaborative Competition™: The New Approach for Making Risk a Winning Strategy

By Kathryn Mayer

Given today’s challenging economy, why would anyone want to be taking risks at work? According to Joel Deluca’s book Political Savvy, the top 5% of leaders in large multinational organizations do two things differently than everyone else: they constantly take smart risks and have three times the network. They are not smarter, more outgoing or charismatic. It is what you thought all along – success comes from knowing the right people and being smart about what projects you take on versus actually doing a great job.

The challenge with this view is that many women I have seen in my executive coaching practice believe that they are hired to deliver the best possible results and to accomplish this they tend to enthusiastically and aggressively seek perfection. And, what can happen is that they push their agenda directly onto a high executive with whom they haven’t formed a strong alliance, and this executive tends to be less likely to support their initiative even if it is a good idea. The fact is that those who act boldly or seek perfection before they've built the necessary support structure are likely to tumble. Why? The wider the network, the less likely people will make false negative judgments about you. This is especially true for women who are minorities at the management level and above. In fact, women who are seen as closely identified with traditionally masculine leadership traits (directive, authoritative, and aggressive) and don’t use their traditional feminine leadership traits (collaborative, approachable, emotionally expressive) were found to be the weakest of 45 women executives in a recent study by the Hay Group.

What’s a girl to do?

To succeed, you must come across as competent both task-wise and in building relationships with other team members—able to delegate, willing to engage emotionally, capable of going beyond your comfort zone—and laying firm groundwork for your own success while the rest of your team still feels valued and appreciated.

These two seemingly conflicting needs—to build supportive relationships AND to achieve perfection—have to be balanced. If the balance swings too far either in the direction of accommodating or aggressive, you lower your chances for success.

Becoming a Collaborative Competitor means that you are aiming to stretch yourself and strive for excellence which could look like:

• Striving to distinguish yourself in your chosen field


• Building a supportive and strategic network


• Enjoying the challenge of learning from mistakes

I interviewed about 40 women in highly competitive professions in the USA and Canada for my new book: Collaborative Competition™: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing. According to my research, women who rate themselves as happy and successful are skilled in Collaborative Competition.™ They understand that striving for perfection or doing “whatever it takes” might not be the best approach. They focus on figuring out the best way to get the tasks done. And the key is that all these women enjoyed the challenges.

With Collaborative Competition™, women can develop the mindset to thrive in and enjoy a competitive environment, to become self-challengers instead of perfectionists, and to work strategically to help build the relationships we need to succeed.

If you want to learn more about how to create an environment that will allow you to take more smart risks, enjoy yourself, and advance your career - sign up for the webinar on December: “Making Risk a Winning Strategy” and/or go to Kathryn Mayer’s website http://www.kcmayer.com/ to learn more about her and to purchase her new book: Collaborative Competition™: A Woman’s Guide to Succeeding by Competing which is available on Amazon.com.

A Follow-up From Last Year's Summit -- Register Today for This Important Online Webinar!

Fast Forwarding the Female Advantage:
What Organizations Need to Learn from Women Now
Thursday, April 2 - 12:00 - 1:00 pm eastern

In this webinar, Author, Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnson, Founder of The Reid Group will share topline conclusions from their groundbreaking research on gender differences in satisfaction and motivation in the workplace. They will put what they’ve learned in the context of the global economic crisis we are facing. And they will show how organizations can better address the crisis by learning from what women have to offer.

Click here to register today!

The Satisfaction Factor, Post 2

Following the financial meltdown, I’ve had many occasions to reflect on the research Julie Johnson and I have been doing on differences in how men and women perceive, define and pursue satisfaction in their work, how they are motivated and where they find meaning. Both our interviews and our quantitative research suggest that insights gained from our study can help us understand what has happened and help lead us out of the present mess.

I was reminded of this yesterday when, following the uproar over the bonuses paid out at Merrill Lynch in the waning days of 2008, I read a piece in the New York Times written by a former Merrill banker about the culture of the bonus on Wall Street. One of his observations caught my attention: that the people he worked with felt gigantic bonuses were required because they “justified the days on end of working into the wee hours, the months on end without a single day off, the never-ending ‘fire drills’ — when a client wanted something and wanted it now, whether it was 7 p.m. or 7 a.m. — that kept the stress and adrenaline levels high.” The writer also noted that, no matter how outsized the bonus, it was perceived as satisfying only if it was bigger than what was being handed out to everyone else.

This struck me for two reasons. First, our research suggests that the high adrenaline levels he referred to have a different impact on women than on men. Neuroscientists find that women are more likely to experience excessive adrenal stimulation as highly stressful rather than motivating. Men are more difficult to motivate—their motivation point is set lower and they are more prone to distraction—so a flood of cortisol really gets them going. Women are more easily motivated, less in need to adrenal stimulation, and more likely to be pushed by cortisol into overload.

Neuroscientists also find that women’s neural networks receive more positive stimulation from social interaction than from the prospect of monetary rewards. This data is supported by our own study, which indicates that women place a high value on affiliation and connection in the workplace and a lower value on material rewards than men in similar sectors and at similar levels. Women in our study reported that achievement was important to them, but were less likely to see it in the context of competition, whereas men associate status with winning out over others.

What does all this have to do with the meltdown on Wall Street or culture of bonuses? I would suggest quite a lot. The distinguishing aspects of pre-bust Wall Street have been a habitual reliance on adrenal stimulation to motivate people; an assumption that extremely high financial rewards can compensate the most talented individuals for a daily existence based on unremitting stress; and a belief that compensation had to be based on competitive measures. Julie had in fact seen evidence of this last characteristic in her work with financial services executives. One company she observed used to hand out bonuses of, say, $1,000,001—the $1 being the signifier that that confirmed the superior status of whomever received over coworkers who received a mere $1 million.

Our research suggests that the Wall Street culture that led us into the meltdown was in part the result of male values and measures of satisfaction run wild. It’s no wonder that women Julie and I interviewed who had left Wall Street before the debacle said they had done so because “it wasn’t worth it.” They didn’t need the adrenaline and didn’t find the money an adequate compensation for the stress.

The giant bonus culture today lies in ruins, which means that Wall Street is going to have to find new ways of motivating their people. Simply throwing enormous sums of money at employees—an outmoded tactic in the age of bailouts—will no longer work. As a result, companies will be less able to “justify” the kind of inhuman work hours to which the former banker writing in the Times referred. The nature of the people who work there will begin to change as the implicit terms of their employment contract adjust to meet the demands of a different world. The notion of working 80 hour weeks (and what, in the end, did those 80 hour weeks achieve?) will no longer considered acceptable. In reforming the out-of-whack culture that led to wildly exaggerated results, what remains of Wall Street would do well to look to women, and to the values they bring to the world of work.