Want to know the secret of success? Help your competitors

Winning can be exciting and exhilarating. It can also be a relief: there is a lot of tension involved in the pursuit of success. Most people know the thrill of competition and the rush of emotions when you realise you have beaten your competitors.

Some of us also enjoy collaborating with others and achieving something that would never have been possible to do alone. So when the opportunity for co-opetition (cooperation combined with competition) comes along, there are obvious benefits for everyone involved.

Co-opetition is an approach that involves competitors pooling their knowledge, skills and resources to co-create a new solution or add greater value to all parties. Amazon’s Marketplace is a good example: according to researchers at Finland’s Lappeenranta University of Technology, by engaging in productive competition with its rivals, Amazon has created entirely new markets for both itself and its competitors.

Sadly, this approach does not seem to have caught on to the same degree when it comes to women in leadership. Some of the groups I come across whose aim is to support female leaders or entrepreneurs seem to be more focused on competing with other women’s groups than collaborating, which I find disappointing.

As part of a broader movement to inspire and support women in leadership roles, I believe we should look for more ways to introduce co-opetition, which can benefit both the organisations and women they seek to serve.

Back in 2004, I took part in the Channel 4 series Superhuman. This was a competition that followed a group of 10 exceptional men and women as they were put through a series of tough human performance tests.

You might assume that co-opetition wouldn’t feature at all in something that was so clearly a competition; but you would be wrong. This was particularly noticeable during the sleep control test. Men and women competed separately. Competitors had to remain awake for 48 hours in a Big Brother-style room, before undergoing six hours of tests, which involved consecutive bursts of 30 minutes of sleep and 30 minutes of completing a mundane vigilance test online. Definitely the sort of task that would normally send you to sleep. The aim was to discover who could perform the mundane tasks consistently well after intermittent periods of rest.

When we (the women) were trying to stay awake over the 48-hour period, we worked together by scheduling activities to carry out during every hour such as drawing, singing and exercising. We even prepared and ate our meals together. If anyone looked tired, the others tried to grab their attention and keep them focused. We agreed that it would benefit everyone if we did not fall asleep during the 48-hour period, as points would have been deducted.

Then it would be down to individual performance in the subsequent battery of tests over the remaining six hours. So, in other words, collaborate initially and then compete later.

By contrast, when the men were put together for 48 hours, they went into competitive mode from the outset. They all worked individually to stay awake. They prepared their own meals, ate separately and did not help one another. When one person fell asleep, nobody woke him up.

Overall, the women all fared better in the sleep control tests. This approach was also noticeable in some other elements of the competition where we (the women) would share tips on how we had approached a particular test, which enabled both the men and the women to improve how they performed.

Surely it would help both men and women to reach the top as leaders and entrepreneurs if we were all more willing to enter into co-opetition.

How to embrace co-opetition

Begin with a mindset of abundance. When we look at the world through the eyes of abundance, we see there are more than enough opportunities, roles or clients to go round. This makes us more willing to look for opportunities to work together. Contrast this with approaching the world from a scarcity mindset. In this state of mind, we are less willing to share information or to be open in our approach.

Look for opportunities that bring greater value to all. The Canadian Excelerate Conference later this year is a great example of co-opetition in practice. Women’s organisations GroYourBiz, Professional Women’s Network, WBE Canada and United Success, which all provide different aspects of business support, are working together to put on this event. It’s a great example of leveraging individual organisations’ strengths and enabling everyone to gain greater value.

Without competitors, your market may not thrive. We all need competition. It helps businesses to improve and encourages us all to build our knowledge and skills. Being prepared to work with your colleagues, some of whom you might have previously viewed as competition, can help everyone to develop. That’s why if you walk down any high street, you will find lots of similar businesses grouped together. As humans we find safety in numbers but we also want to differentiate ourselves.

Learning to manage the tension between competition and collaboration is a skill worth acquiring because it can bring greater value and success to you and others. Is that a risk that you, or your organisation, is willing to take?