Making Competing Employees Collaborate

Implementation of these 5 cardinal rules requires all of your 5-senses working in tandem. In order to implement 1st rule, you need to smell-in only the right people. Subsequently, while deploying HR policies, touch the right chords with people. Creating much great sub-culture would require a lot of listening first. Recognize your people so that they taste their success and learn to collaborate. And finally, work towards creating a bond which can't be seen - a psychological bond.

- Sunil Dubey

We live in a world where we invariably hire for functional competence and fire employees when they fail to manage people-dynamics. At workplace, common-sight is people who bully, disrespect, defect, demean and demotivate each other. But why is it that many people find it difficult to "work with and through people"? When a project succeeds, many people stake their claim and this tendency makes employees fiercely competitive - everyone aims for maximum credit points.

In this context workplace collaboration is a misnomer in many ways. First, because, employees constantly remain aware that they form a part of single bell-curve) and hence invariably compete for top ratings. Competing people often face prisoner's dilemma wherein everyone wants greater piece of the pie of a zero sum game. Second, it is difficult to collaborate because lot of bright employees makes their peers and superiors jittery - peers and superiors, who are subject to 7 deadly sins.

Now, with some learning and a few empirical evidences collected over the years, here are five cardinal rules of competing employees' collaboration:

1. Hire those who keep organization before self… hire people with strong value system…

Easier said than done, but not impossible. Give each hiring manager an inventory of tricky questions to assess core-values - "cost-cutting vs job-cuts" or perhaps "shutting down a store vs attempting once more" or may be "when did you feel most alive" or "under what circumstances you would ignore a customer complaint" or "when did you last time did something selflessly" or "job vs passion; and why" or "what's that one thing you learnt from your team member, in the last quarter" . Bring-in personal value tests into hiring process and make them non-negotiable.