In many organizations, competition can spawn productivity. Many institutions tend to therefore pit business units or even single employees against one another to see who can sell more, work more or be more efficient. However, competition can turn ugly. One of the best things you can do to keep this from happening is put in place as part of your competition a number that spurs teamwork. Teamwork should always be a metric, but it’s hard to quantify in many cases. But just look to football (as with many of my analogies) to see a good way to factor teamwork into someone’s “stats”. In football, an individual metric of, let’s say a defensive lineman or linebacker, can be the number of sacks they get. If two guys get a sack together then they are credited that sack as .5. In basketball, you can have an assist credited to you. In baseball a starting pitcher is credited with wins and a clean-up pitcher is credited with saves. So foster competition but also build a metric for teamwork and see productivity increase even more…