When prospective clients contact Quixote Consulting for team building, we give them two choices: if they just want to have fun and a memorable experience together, they can choose competitive team building fun. But if they also want strong outcomes that clearly relate to how business is most effectively done today, we recommend collaborative team building.

This article answers common questions that people have about collaborative team work and collaborative team building and provides some great ideas for helping you unleash the power of purpose by making your team more collaborative. Let’s jump right in!

Here are seven questions that we hear again and again about collaborative teams and team building:

1. What’s the difference between collaboration and competition?
2. Why collaboration?
3. Does that mean we’re not supposed to be competitive?
4. Isn’t competition better sometimes?
5. Does collaboration not work sometimes?
6. How does collaborative team building help us do better work and be a better team?
7. How can we collaborate more as a team?

Let’s answer these questions one at a time, looking through both the lens of work and team building.

Q:  What’s the difference between collaboration and competition?
A: When teams collaborate at work, they share ideas and resources freely with each other. There is one clear goal that can only be met by everyone working together. That one goal has one metric – how the entire team/division/company performs. How one individual performs over another or how one work team performs over another is irrelevant.

When teams compete, the output of individuals is measured against other individuals within the team/division/company, etc. Project teams or even divisions may be pitted against each other.

Collaborative Team Building and Competitive Team Building explained
In collaborative team building everyone works together to complete a goal, whether it’s completing a certain number of bicycles in the Collaborative Charity Bike Build, creating the world’s fastest and most fun roller coaster in Roller Coaster. There’s one goal, and that’s the most important focus point. Everyone works together toward that one goal.

In competitive team building such as Record Breakers or Secret Agent Team small project teams of 8-12 people try to beat other teams’ performances. Each project team member collaborates within the team but each team competes with every other team to be the best.

Q:  Why collaboration?
A: Collaboration quite simply leverages the power of purpose. Research tells us that one of the main paths to happiness is to connect with a ‘meaningful life’. This power of purpose ignites when you link your daily work with the greater good, helping to make some part of the larger world around you better.

Purpose allows people to work harder and with more passion than if the work were just for themselves. Collaboration allows people to work not just for themselves, but instead contribute to the larger picture of the team, department or company, all in service of something even more important, the customer.

And, people with purpose are happier. Happiness works as an emotional contagion, infecting everyone nearby. And not so nearby – happiness spreads beyond the initial contact to people those people know, and people those people know in a process that lasts up to a year. Beyond work, when couples, families, or neighborhoods collaborate, happiness spreads and the work becomes lighter, easier and more fun.

Turf wars, siloing, lack of communication are all common issues I hear from new clients. Even if management pays lip service to collaboration, if the reward and recognition system is based on competition, these issues are the inevitable result. There’s no incentive to be otherwise.

However, if your teams are interchangeable with a common goal that is the benchmark, you’re on your way to collaboration. As Ben Franklin said in the Continental Congress just before signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

Why collaborative team building?
Quite simply, collaboration needs to be practiced. I’ve found that it doesn’t come naturally to most people. Most people at this point will at least give lip service to collaboration, but if it’s not clearly stated as an expectation, people automatically default to competition.

Here’s an example. The most popular activity from Quixote Consulting’s collaborative team building program Team Quest is called On Target. Four teams stand on each side of a square facing in and try to bounce balls in buckets. The rules are very clear as to what they can and can’t do. The goal isn’t however.

The first round always (and I’ve led this activity hundreds of times) has teams wildly competing against each other, blocking other teams’ balls, knocking over their buckets, throwing other teams’ balls far away, and on and on. Always!

In succeeding rounds, the goal becomes clearer, their understanding of the project parameter gets clearer, and they realize they can only hit the extremely ambitious goal by a combination of collaboration, innovation and communication. It takes some teams longer than others to get there, but they always do.

Maybe someday, some team will collaborate in the first round and I’ll be out of a job. But I doubt it. Competition comes naturally to us.

Competition is natural. But so are all the natural things a baby does – crawls, doesn’t talk, uses a diaper. These are not helpful things to do as an adult. We can be guided to go beyond those stages and evolve as human beings. And the same goes for teams.

My time with teams is often brief. Off-site meetings are expensive because of the amount of human capital that’s tied up there, and there’s never enough time. This is why even when I’m doing public speaking I have people experience collaboration, the feeling of success that comes from successfully fully working together, rather than just talking about it.

Time spent team building is like a concentrate. Just add time and the experience gets larger. In Quixote Consulting’s Influencing: The Power of Persuasion participants learn that a story is perhaps the most important element in influencing.  Team building provides a story, and the power of an image of the team working together goes very, very far. I receive ‘thank yous’ from participants years after an event that lasted only two hours. That’s concentrated time!

Q:  Does that mean we’re not supposed to be competitive?
A:  No. Next question please.
Just kidding. Our competitive drive, our will to overcome, our persistence, our pushing and striving has gotten us wonderful things over the years. However, there’s a type of competition that I’d like to suggest is not helpful. I call it “myopic competition”.

Click here for Part 2 of this topic.