Team Building

Linking to this article on BNET, which talks about how Apple's Steve Jobs motivates his employees, SmartBrief on Leadership advises, "To fire up employees, give them an enemy." ("Enemy" in this case refers to one of Apple's chief rivals, Google.)

I don't know if I agree with this assessment. While it's certainly important to watch what the closest competitors in your space are doing, after taking in marketing lessons from the likes of Seth Godin I liken business much more to sports like golf, where ultimately you're competing with yourself, than to football or basketball.

Whether managers are assessing their supervisees' performance relative to their goals, or everyone comes together in a regular meeting to open up the books to see how the company is doing on expenses and revenue compared to the benchmarks leadership has set for the company, competing with yourself can be just as good a motivator.

Employee engagement and workplace team building certainly factor into this question. For one thing, competing against yourself in the ways I mentioned above can prevent the business from having to deal with possible litigation that might arise from brand vs. brand sniping via advertising, or even from employees dropping unfounded, negative comments about their rivals on review websites like Yelp.

Next Step: Read the full BNET article on Steve Jobs' leadership style where competitors are concerned, and then drop me a comment below with your thoughts. I'm very interested to see what you think here.