At work you should choose your colleagues carefully, but what about your adversaries?
You should choose your adversaries at work carefully too, because they can bring out the best in you, or the worst in you.
We can gain an informative management perspective on this principle through sports rivalries. The competitive architecture of sports encourages rivalries that often elicit extraordinary performance.
Tennis players Roger Federer and Any Roddick provided a prominent recent example in the 2009 Wimbledon finals.
Roddick pushed Federer to the maximum five sets including three pressure-laden tie-breakers. The match culminated in Wimbeldon’s longest and most dramatic final set, a record-setting thirty-game nailbiter.
In addition, with this victory Federer won a historic fifteenth Grand Slam singles title, setting a new high in tennis and achieving the greatest number of victories in major competitions in all of sports.
Roddick was Federer’s short-term adversary for this match. In addition, Federer has another rival, a long-term adversary who has pushed him to greater performance for several years: Rafael Nadal.
Between the two of them, Federer and Nadal have won nineteen of the last twenty-one men’s major singles titles.
Last year Federer lost a close contest in five sets to Rafael Nadal in another extraordinarily hard-fought, breathtaking final. Nadal was unable to compete in this year’s Wimbledon competition due to tendonitis in his knees. But hopefully he will return soon to push Federer and in turn be pushed by him.
When it comes to managing conflict and dealing with difficult people at work, do you have people who elicit greater accomplishment than you thought you were capable of achieving?
Who is your Roddick? The person who pushes you to your best effort in the short-term?
Who is your Nadal? The person who motivates your long-term competitive excellence?
A word of caution: Sometimes we are tempted to make excuses for coming up short against our competitors. But finding fault in others or in circumstances is unlikely to lead us to better performance. Vitas Gerulaitis provided a memorable, humorous example of persisting despite being overmatched. After losing to Jimmy Connors sixteen times in a row, Gerulaitis finally beat Connors at the 1979 Masters. In the press conference afterward, he asserted in mock-earnest: “Let that be a lesson to you all. Nobody, nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis seventeen times in a row.”
Who are your greatest adversaries in professional life? Are they pushing and motivating you to greater results? Or are you using them as an excuse to explain your diminished performance? Either way, the choice is yours, not theirs.
