From the NFL to software: competition is all around us
Treat competition as an opportunity to improve yourself and your team
This is part two of three in a mini-series comparing elements of sports teams to software engineering teams. Each part of the series will be released weekly.
In this second part of From the NFL to Software, I’ll explore a contentious comparison between sports teams and engineering teams: competition exists within your team as well as without. For many of us, it’s not a pleasant thought to consider our peers — even our closest teammates — as competition, but we perpetually compete. Thankfully, this competition does not have to result in a zero-sum game; we can use this competition to better ourselves and those around us.
Allow me to hydrate this perspective using sport. A common trope in NFL teams is one of the team being a brotherhood or a family. No individual player is considered more important than or above the team. And for the most part, this is true. Teams that do not act as a united group are unlikely to find themselves lifting the Lombardi trophy in early February. But if a team’s first-string quarterback gets injured, does the team stop competing? Of course not. The group continues to operate, and the second-string quarterback takes the field. There is sympathy for the injured player, but this doesn’t stop play. There is now a new player on the field with an opportunity to shine and prove himself. The charitable hand of brotherhood can only extend so far.
This is not to say that football players are constantly at each other’s throats, with each player willing to stab his fellow player in the back so that he might gain an advantage. Teams that do this fail. “America’s team” knows this all too well. In 2008, the Dallas Cowboys were touted as Super Bowl favourites. They had a stellar roster and a win-loss record of 8-4 going into December 2008. The playoffs were a likely reality. Unfortunately, during this time, reports of rifts in the locker room began to circulate. These rifts would soon manifest as accusations of players creating play schemes to benefit themselves, coaches blamed for making bad calls, and players going after each other. The Cowboys finished their season 9-7, failing to qualify for the playoffs. Dallas had imploded, and as a result, they had sabotaged their season. In this example, no one on the team won.
Whilst those of us reading this article are unlikely to be part of the fifty-three-man roster of the Cowboys, we will likely be part of a software team. There is a degree of competition between a group of engineers. We must recognise that we all carry out a function that the company deems us capable of executing. For example, whilst I might be a competent engineer capable of writing software to solve problems, my team lead is considered more valuable than I am in leadership and management. This recognition should engender a healthy spirit of competition amongst us as engineers. If one of my teammates steps up their game, I can either see that as a threat — I become a shark — or treat it as an opportunity to force me to improve my game. In this sense, everyone wins. In this situation, I have improved as an engineer and the team benefits; two engineers are now more competent than yesterday.
Competition is healthy when channelled appropriately, but it can be detrimental to a team when abused. Competition does not endow us with carte blanche to create an environment where everyone is out to depose everyone else to further their interests. We are responsible for using competition to build up all of those around us so that we may one day, like the Dallas Cowboys of 1995, lift our own Lombardi with our teammates.