SQUASH THAT COMPETITION

While building a business, competition is one of the factors that can make or mar the business. There are competitions that are healthy for businesses. When competition causes you as a business owner to think strategically and creatively on how to maximise your business potentials, then competition is healthy for your business. When you compete unhealthily, you further destroy your business’s core values and ruin your chances of achieving your organisation’s goals. Competition is like a double edged sword; on one hand it will help your business grow, and on the other hand, it can destroy your business.

There are two types of competition, external competition and internal competition. External competition helps you as a business owner to think strategically and creatively. External competition compels, motivates and spurs an organisation into action to penetrate the market, gain market share and actively engage in customer relations to retain customers and increase customer base. External competition triggers creativity and hard work. It causes you to improve. In how to eliminate competition, I discussed how you can maximise your business potentials to eliminate every form of external competition. But internal competition which is our major concern in this particle article is destructive, unhealthy, and so not cool for any business.

No business thrives in the face of internal competition because it is usually unhealthy.

This kind of competition is usually among team members, colleagues, management staff and even board members. It is usually a battle for supremacy within an organisation. Employees want to prove to each other that their strategies, methods, ideologies and techniques are better than their colleagues within the same organisation. They usually try to achieve this by every means possible even if it means destroying what they have built.

Internal competition does the following to an organisation;

• 1.      It puts employees, team members, management staff at loggerheads with each other
• 2.      It destroys teams
• 3.      It kills motivation
• 4.      It makes the work environment highly toxic and less conducive
• 5.      It weakens an organisation and makes it vulnerable to external forces.

An organisation that must grow to become a household name must squash every form of internal competition among its staff members.

Team members should learn to collaborate instead. Collaboration will ensure healthy growth of the organisation.