Welcome to Executive Resilience Insider, where we examine the leadership systems that help organizations make better decisions under pressure.
Today: Internal rivalry can make one person’s numbers look better while the team performs worse. Before the next promotion call, separate the visible win from the uncredited work keeping everyone else productive.
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THE EXECUTIVE DEEP DIVE |
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Think about the last time you named a rival to sharpen someone's edge.
You split one account between two people who already did not love each other, told both the number was open to whoever closed it first, and waited to see who moved faster.
By the next review, one of them owned the account on the slide, and nobody checked what the other had stopped doing to make room for it.
The rival gets the headline account every time
The fast one answered every message within minutes, nights included (the quiet one had two kids and a four a.m. flight that same week, and still answered, just slower). By the next quarterly review, they owned the account on the slide.
The quiet one had also covered four client escalations with no name attached, kept training the two juniors their rival had stopped mentoring, and kept the pipeline current that the same rival had stopped updating, none of it reaching the slide.
The firm did not pick the stronger operator. It picked whoever the contest lit up, then rebuilt next quarter's staffing around them, backfilling the work they had stopped doing without assigning it to anyone.
A rival is a decent proxy for effort and a poor one for value, and most staffing plans cannot tell the two apart under deadline.
A 5% gain that costs the team a third
A 23-season analysis of roughly 35,000 player-game observations, published through IMD, found that a personal rival raises a player's own scoring by 5%. Their team's performance with them on the floor falls by nearly a third over those same games.
Coaches hand a player facing a rival about a minute and a half more court time and one extra shot a night (the extra shot comes out of a teammate who was open).
A 2024 goalkeeper study published by De Gruyter found the same asymmetry inside European soccer: the weaker rival's output drops under personal competition, the stronger rival's does not.
A separate Strategic Management Journal analysis of more than 3,500 matches found that colleagues who personally compete against rivals outside their affiliations collaborate less with the team around them, even away from the competition that caused it.
Three sources, two sports, three seperate research teams, and the same result: whoever is locked in a personal feud with a rival contributes less than the box score shows.
This is not a private equity problem. Any manager who ever named a competitor to motivate one person is running the same trade.
Two sales reps chasing the same account, a steady performer put up against a louder one to see who blinks first.
One of them looks better on paper.
The uncredited work still needs someone doing it, and that someone is now busy chasing a rival.
The operator who built the contest owns the gap
This cost skips the fund entirely. It lands on the operator who staged the contest and now has to explain, quietly, why the quota holder gets the promotion while the one who kept four relationships alive gets a rating that reads "meets expectations."
Who decided the slide was the whole story?
In last year's calibration meeting, the committee weighed the rival's box score over the engagement scores before anyone raised a hand to ask why. The same operator now has to sit across from the quiet performer and explain a decision that was never really about performance.
That conversation costs more than the quarter it saved. It costs the operator's own read on who is actually good, and the next twelve months of decisions that get made on the same bad signal unless someone catches it first.
The quiet performer notices the gap too, eventually (the exit interview six months later will name it, politely, as "better fit elsewhere"). By then the operator has lost the one person who was holding the rest of the floor together while the contest ran its course.
Before the next calibration, separate the score from the contribution
The fix is not banning competition. Contest theory backs it when the prize is shared, and the horizon is long (Komatsu's engineers chasing Caterpillar for a decade built a genuinely better company).
The damage shows up when the prize is personal, the horizon is one quarter, and the only measure is whoever is loudest on the slide.
Before the next calibration meeting, run three checks:
Price what the competition actually costs first: what did the quieter rival stop doing, and did anyone log it anywhere?
Pull the CRM activity for both people, not just the one with the account, before deciding who gets the next territory.
Ask the overlooked performer directly what they stopped doing this quarter, and write the answer down before the review cycle writes it for you.
This takes no new process, just the account history already sitting in the system, read for once.
The competition can still produce a winner. It should stop costing you the person who kept the rest of the floor running while it played out.
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Mario Peshev EXECUTIVE RESILIENCE INSIDER |
Need Clarity On A Decision You're Carrying?
The next promotion call shaped by competition is not one for the box score alone.
The written brief is built for exactly this.
