Workplace Competition - Securing an Advantage Over Colleagues
We humans were made to compete, but there's healthy competition, unhealthy competition and downright toxic competition. The first keeps us on our toes and sharpens our skills. The second harms other people, and the third harms other people, our business and us as well.
The single key to workplace competition is this: Show them the money. Therefore, those who drive revenue, generate prospects for revenue or enlarge the profit margin by reducing costs are key employees to any company. Most people, even company employees, think it's the job of the sales department to bring in the money. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It doesn't matter if you're mail room clerk, the receptionist, the custodian or the fourth widget-twister from the end of the production line. If you put yourself in the mindset of always looking for ways for to increase your employer's profitability, you will gain an advantage over other employees who don't.
Once place to start is by learning how your company's sales operation works in general, then start feeding it leads through any appropriate channel. Always be on the lookout for someone who might need your company's goods or services, and be sure to collect their contact information. If you're a manager or team leader, give your employees a stack of your business cards and invite them to use the backs to get contact information on sales leads. You might even offer some kind of reward or incentive for the co-worker who brings in the most leads in a month. Then give the leads that your team generated to the sales manager on a regular basis, like once a week. Pretty soon the word will get around the company that you're a "rainmaker" - someone who's always on the lookout to generate more revenue and who motivates his or her team to do the same. Sales is a numbers game; the more people who are gathering leads, the more likely sales will increase.
In addition to generating revenue, maximizing the profit margin by cutting costs is a good path to job security. This involves thinking before you spend the company's money, whether it's a purchase for office supplies or reducing production errors. You don't have to count paper clips to cut costs. The best way to save your company's money is to learn how to analyze processes. This involves breaking down any task into its component decisions and motions and calculating how much time and materials it takes to accomplish a task. Then you look for better ways to accomplish the task with maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness by reducing time, motion and/or materials.
Whether generating revenue or saving on resources, the competitive advantage in the workplace is the same: making money, the heart of business.