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askamanager_feedSome years ago we talked about people who get weirdly competitive at work, and I’ve been sitting on this great collections of stories ever since, so here it is!
1. The game of tag
It was a company team-building event, they made us play tag. Some senior directors got so into it they ran FACE FIRST into a wall. And cringily after that, ANOTHER senior director actually went and tagged the poor man while he was nearly unconscious on the floor. I remember nothing about my very temporary work there, but would probably never forget that game of tag.
2. The raffle disappointment
At Christmas, we used to draw names out of a hat for small prizes. Soaps, $5 gift cards, small crafts, etc. One year an employee was very angry she did not get anything, to the point where she made a formal complaint to HR (?) that the game was rigged to give away prizes to a clique of people on the party-planning committee (?!!).
Fast forward a year: as we draw the last name out, she stands up and yells, “Bull#$%@! How did I not win?” She stormed out of the event location and left in her car.
Later someone said they had seen her messing with the hat before the drawing. We looked through the names and she had put her name in 10 times.
3. The Slack leaderboard
Slack has this thing where it shows the people who send the most messages for the past 30 days.
Someone thought it was funny and showed the Slack leaderboard on a slide during a meeting and we all had a good laugh about how everyone’s favorite Project Manager, Barney, sent the most messages BY FAR the past 30 days, because of course! Everyone pings him constantly and he’s super on top of responding. Yay Barney!
In second place for number of messages sent was Robin, who works in marketing. And this slide lit the fire of competition under Robin, who desperately wanted to be #1 in a competition NOBODY ELSE thought was a competition. She said, “I’ll take the #1 spot,” everyone had a good laugh thinking she was joking.
She was not joking. However, Robin doesn’t naturally send as many messages as Barney (her job simply doesn’t call for as much internal communication via Slack). So, for the next couple months, we were all treated to Robin sharing the Slack leaderboard in a shared channel as her message count crept up. And, because Slack counts number of messages sent, rather than word count, those of us who communicated with Robin regularly would get Slack correspondence like this (each line is its own message):
Hi
Question for you
for TPS report
can you send me your stuff early?
for review?
and then I’ll add on.
want to make sure we are aligned.
and not doing double work.
thanks
:)
I’d return to my desk and see 40 missed Slacks, think there was an emergency, and see it was only Robin trying to pad her Slack count.
After a couple months, she gave it up on her own because nobody engaged her.
4. The cornhole trophy
My old boss flipped his lid when his team lost in my company’s March Madness cornhole tourney finals. Like flipped the boards and everything. He even tried to ban the winning team from displaying the trophy (a red solo cup glued to a trophy base) on top of the cube wall even though they were in our division but not on his team.
He’s now second in command of the division. The winners were forced out.
5. The shove
There was a game of musical chairs at someone’s goodbye party. The guest of honor (who’d already received some generous gifts) was determined to win the cheap, silly prize. They shoved one of their colleagues out of the way so hard that she bruised her hip bones from the fall!
6. The darts
A few years ago we had a official but voluntary work gathering at a local bar; this bar had a few dart boards and people were playing casual games of darts mostly as a thing to do while talking.
Nobody was trying very hard, there were no stakes at all, and we were barely even keeping score since people kept drifting in and out of the games anyway.
It turns out one of the guys on a team that “lost” at darts was a hyper-competitive former college athlete who spent the whole evening seething with rage at his disgraceful failure to be #1 in everything always. He stormed away from the darts area and spent the rest of the event telling anybody who would listen that he only lost because the bar’s darts were in bad condition and his teammates weren’t using proper throwing form.
If he had just shrugged after the game and gone on with his life I don’t think anybody would have even really noticed that he “lost.” Certainly, nobody would have cared or remembered it five minutes later. Instead he drew so much attention to it that everybody knew that he was the guy who lost at darts.
7. The scavenger hunt
We had a scavenger hunt style competition at my office one summer. We took the whole afternoon, split into teams, and had to complete tasks. It was great fun! One of my coworkers on a different team than mine got SUPER competitive. His team came in last, and he spent the next week trying to prove that the order his team had needed to complete the tasks in had put them at a time disadvantage. He wrote a program to show that they’d had to walk farther. The funniest part was that the differences wound up being minuscule so even his “proof” fell through.
The prize was a free lunch.
8. Paul
I worked as HR for a startup that had a yearly softball game against another local startup. The owners of both companies had gone to university together and were pretty friendly. It was generally pretty fun and low stakes: the company that lost had to foot the bill for post-game drinks for everyone, but that was it.
However, the CTO of our company was insanely competitive and would stack our team every year (to the point of bribing some of our more athletic employees to participate with his own money). We had one employee who reported to the CTO and was an insanely good pitcher and acted as a bit of a ringer. This guy, we’ll call him Paul, was also a bit of a hot head. Two weeks before one of these games, Paul gets fed up with someone on another team, aggressively shouts them out in front of everyone in the entire company and rage quits while we’re in the middle of trying to fire him.
Well, game day rolls around and who is waiting on the field for us, but Paul. The owner and I immediately go over to tell him he has to leave (also to question what the actual fuck he thought he was doing there) and he tells us that the CTO had called him right after he quit and told him he still needed to come and play.
After we finally got Paul to leave, the owner and I had to have a long talk with the CTO about appropriate workplace relationships. I left the company pretty soon after, but I think the CTO was banned from participating after that.
9. The decorating contest
I was a government contractor at a government agency. One year, the social committee decided to have a decorating contest for Halloween. The rules said “cubes, office areas, common spaces, and conference rooms” were allowed, and the prizes were $5 gift cards for the top 5 people. My friend and I got the okay from the head of our department to decorate our department’s conference room with other people as a team bonding activity. Our department heads gave us some money for decorations, people brought stuff from home, it was great! We went all out and it was a lot of fun. Everyone LOVED the conference room and my team won the prize.
Then the fall-out for the Christmas (well, winter holiday) decorations.
Apparently, people that had decorated their cubes thought it was unfair that we won with a conference room. So the social committee made a team category and a single participant category. People had also complained about our team being too big and re-wrote the team rules. For winter, my team also got SUPER competitive. Other teams formed to decorate competing conference rooms apparently not for fun but so we wouldn’t win again. My team even started talking about sabotaging another team. Someone from our team bought in baked goods and set up his laptop in the conference room to make people vote for us for a treat.
I kept saying over and over, “The prize is a $5 gift card.” I just kept getting told, “It’s not about the prize, it’s about the win” and “Why would you enter a contest you don’t want to win?” I almost got kicked off my own team but they decided against it since I bought the decorations with our director money and did most of the decorating.
We ended up winning the $5 gift cards and there were a few decorated conference rooms, so I guess it turned out well in the end.
10. The hot sauce eating competition
For our Oktoberfest party one year, someone decided we would have a hot-sauce eating competition. Completely optional (thank goodness, I can’t eat spice).
So we start with a big group and mild hot sauce and it goes from there, not milk or water allowed, tap out at any time. There was a single gift card ($50?) as the prize. So people tapping out left and right, red faced but laughing. Everyone’s having a good time. Until it’s down to two people and the final hot sauce, some pure capsaicin thing that has an honest-to-god warning label on it.
The last two people (a guy and a gal, but mid-career) take their toothpick drop of this stuff. And neither quits. Uh, now what? Two drops. Neither quits. The guy running the competition is looking worried because the bottle says not to eat more than three drops in a day. Normal people would say “yay, a tie!” But there’s only one gift card. So one of the bosses keeps urging them on. About half the audience is expressing concern for the competitor’s health (though they both look cool as cucumbers). Finally someone starts literally passing a hat to get enough money to count up to a second gift card. A more senior person strolls through, looks at the whole tableaux and says, “I’ll get you another gift card tomorrow” to stop the carnage.
One competitor threw up in the bushes on his way to the bus. The other was up all night with GI distress.
And that was the last hot sauce eating competition.
11. The doily
A few years ago, our department banded together with a few others in the building to host a silent auction to benefit the local food bank. Each item had a sheet next to it starting with a 10 cent bid, and people could keep upping the bid on the sheet if they wanted that item. Note: most were going for somewhere between $1-15, so we’re not talking huge sums of money.
One coworker, who has very serious anger issues anyways, had made it ridiculously clear she wanted this (rather hideous) doily. She literally stood over the doily and glared at anyone who dared to look at it. As a joke, when angry coworker left for a few minutes, someone went over and put her name down for the doily and upped the bid to a whopping $1.
When said angry coworker came back and saw someone had added a new bid, she completely lost it. LOST IT. She started screaming at the top of her lungs about how “this is HERS!! and HOW DARE someone put in another bid.” She then escalated to physically pummeling the coworker on her shoulder and back. Repeatedly. In front of multiple departments (30 people?). Angry coworker was physically escorted out.
We have not had anything remotely competitive here ever since. And I’ve often wondered what happened to the doily, but am too chicken to ask.
12. The canned food drive
I used to teach at a high school that did a canned food drive around Christmas every year. The homeroom class with the most canned goods donated would get donuts one morning from the principal.
One very competitive colleague taught AP Calculus first period, so his homeroom was much smaller than required classes like, say, PE or English. He complained to anyone who would listen about how unfair it was, he tried to get the drive changed to another class period (what kids want to carry canned goods in their backpack until third period?), and he even offered extra points to his students to bring in canned goods until the principal shut that down because it’s considered grade inflation in my state to give points for non-academic activities. We thought he’d let it go after it was over, but the next year he asked for his AP Cal class to be moved to another period so it wouldn’t happen again.
13. The fake money
I had to attend a “leadership retreat” for work that included some competitive “survival games.” We were split into teams, and our teams would be able to win “money” (fake leadership dollars) for different events. I think the goal was to have a certain amount of “money” by the end of the retreat in order to win.
Our CEO was on my team, and was very competitive, as were a few other team members. One of the ways we could save our “money” was by skipping breakfast (because in this world, food and coffee cost money). I watched in dismay as the CEO and other coworkers got on board with this idea, which meant no breakfast for us (after a night of sleeping on the ground, by the way, because camping was a part of this thing), and another full day of physically demanding “leadership building activities.” My coworker and I were pretty pissed but we didn’t say anything. Later that day my coworker and I bribed the retreat staff with some of the “money” to get us a box of triscuits so we could at least eat something. I just wanted to shout “you know this ISN’T REAL, right??? It’s FAKE MONEY!”
14. The bakeoff
Our department hosted a dessert bakeoff to coincide with our winter holiday luncheon. My BFF coworker and I had been doing this about ten years when Lonnie (auxiliary) started working in our department. He is “that guy.” You know the one. He thinks he knows everything and will tell you all about how he does know everything even though you didn’t ask because well … he knows everything. Bragged about how he would be staff within a year (which never happens) and wouldn’t you know? He’s still an auxiliary.
But back to the bakeoff. BFF and I prepare the tables, appoint the impartial judges from other facilities, print the score sheets, and get ready to go. Prizes include bakeware, baking mixes, utensils, etc. No cash or gift cards because my BFF and I pay for this with our own money. (I’m a couponer and we work for the state. There are no funds for prizes.) We have about 30 entries, including Lonnie. I cannot remember what he made, but regardless of the entries or who we get to judge, it seems like a cheesecake always wins. He did not make cheesecake.
My duty after the judging began was to gather score cards and tabulate them in an Excel spreadsheet –— let the computer do all the work. Once the winners were announced, he cornered me, a heavily pregnant, slow-to-escape woman, and asked why he didn’t win. I told him that I didn’t know why, but I could tell him what place he received – 9th.
After the luncheon, he came by my office, threw his empty bowl at me — a non-judge who had nothing to do with the actual scoring of the desserts — and screamed, “Does that look like 9th place to you?!?” I was so shocked that I just sat there. He grabbed the bowl and left.
I can neither confirm nor deny that his dessert has never and will never win a bakeoff.
15. The escape room
Several years ago, my friend planned a team builder for her group (one director, four managers, ~20 individual contributors). She and her planning team decided on an escape room. They had several rooms and mixed ICs across teams and put all the managers and director together. All the IC rooms finished early and huddled around the manager room to listen to them struggle and all try to lead each other. It is still one of her favorite memories at work.
The post the cornhole trophy, the Slack leaderboard, and other times people got way too competitive at work appeared first on Ask a Manager.
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