Learning to work with my rival
By Tan Yi Ming • 6 minute read
Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash
Tall, dark and handsome.
No, this is not a love story.
Adam caught everyone's attention from the first day he joined the company. Everyone was talking about him, from same-level peers, to upper management, and even the office secretaries. His good looks, charm and charisma stood out, and soon, he was the centre of office gossip.
Adam could also really connect with anyone he talked to, and he always had a genuine smile for them.
By comparison, I’m soft-spoken, shorter, and ranked average in the looks department at best. As I stood quietly observing from the sidelines, I cannot deny the sense of jealousy rising from within. This jealousy affected my initial view of Adam, and I saw him as someone who was arrogant, attention-seeking, and unable to walk-the-talk. What made it worse was that Adam and I were both candidates competing to be promoted to the position of senior associate.
I knew I was behind in an important factor called "visibility". Basically, in larger companies where not everyone knew everybody, how “visible” or “popular” you were could affect your promotion. Senior leaders might have a better impression of you if your name were mentioned more often. For someone like me — introverted with a distaste for the limelight, and a preference to chill at home than to socialise at company gatherings — my "visibility" was unsurprisingly low.
Compared to Adam, I was a nobody.
Hope came when Adam and I were placed on the same project team. This was a complex project involving a big and important client that the upper management would like to keep happy. I knew that doing well on this project was a sure-fire way to raise my visibility. The nature of work this project required was also my area of strength and I was confident that I could outperform Adam on an even playfield.
Even though we never acknowledged a so-called rivalry, I sensed the obvious animosity building up between Adam and I as soon as the project started. During project meetings, we were eager to share our views but often had disagreements. We were also cautious about sharing information, careful to ensure that the other party did not gain an upper hand. This dysfunction led us to communicate with one another through our colleagues and even our clients.
What started off as a tinge of distrust developed into a full-on communication breakdown as our project performance began to suffer. With the lack of information flow between us, our deliverables were lacklustre, filled with obvious inaccuracies and misalignment. The situation became so bad that one of our clients eventually called us out as she was frustrated at having to repeat the same information brief to the both of us.
When this happened, our project manager pulled Adam and I into an isolated meeting to address our inability to cooperate. He acknowledged that both of us were working diligently and trying hard to impress. However, he was disappointed that we let our personal ambitions get in the way of the team's objective. He reminded us that if the team could not deliver well on the project, it will ultimately affect our individual gradings too.
To get us to learn how to work together, our project manager decided to put Adam and I on the same project work stream. This decision left us shocked! We went into the meeting thinking that one of us would be asked to leave the project and would never have to deal with each other again. This U-turn meant we had to work even closer together and really learn to put our differences aside.
I remember coming out of the meeting feeling like I was tasked to do the impossible. I knew that checking my ego and learning to work with a rival would not be easy. However, I also recognised that this was an important learning opportunity.
There will always be times when we will have to work with clients and colleagues that we do not necessarily see eye to eye with. However, learning how to excel in these situations would be essential for me in terms of my career growth.
Reflecting on the bigger picture made me feel a bit more at ease at tackling the task ahead as I knew I needed to take one step back in order to take two steps forward.
To help me, I decided to employ a technique I had learned through Dharma lessons called “Observing Merits & Appreciating Kindness” (OMAK). In short, by focusing only on the good points of another, you will be able to improve the relationship you have with him/her.
OMAK is an effective way to help two conflicting parties establish harmony. No matter how much you scorn and hate someone, you will definitely be able to still find something good about that person if you look hard enough. OMAK forces you to discover these merits and concentrate on them. This is the starting point of your journey to change your perspective of that person.
Initially, it was not easy for me to practise OMAK on Adam. Even though I searched hard for his merits, the negative points about him kept filling my mind. I realised this was due to my initial jealousy, which had me evaluate him through biased lens.
After much difficulty, I finally discovered something good about Adam and respected him for.
As described earlier, Adam was very good with people and could even connect with people he just met. This skill was a real asset to us on the project as he was able to get clients to willingly share data to help our analysis. Clients opened up about many of their issues to him, which allowed us to better assist them.
However, Adam was not as strong in working with detailed data and formulating solutions, so this was where I stepped in to lead. The work became much easier as there was an abundance of information I could work with.
OMAK helped me to realise that Adam and I actually had very complementary skill sets.
He would take charge of the data collection phase, and I would front the data analysis portion. I think Adam also began to sense that something was clicking and reciprocated, which helped our relationship to improve. We started to communicate professionally, and helped each other out where needed.
When time came to present our solution, marking the final phase of our project, Adam made it a point to acknowledge my contributions and gave me equal air-time to present the more complex portions of our analysis, even though he was better at presentation than I was.
Of course, we had a happy ending.
The client was very happy with our recommendations, and both Adam and I received superb individual gradings on the project. More importantly, though, we learnt to work out our differences and established a strong working partnership for the betterment of the team.
Adam and I haven’t grown into best buds. However, we have great respect for one another, and recognise the specific merits we bring to the table. Looking back, my decision to practice OMAK was a game changer. It helped to drastically improve the dynamics of my working relationship with Adam. Though it was not easy at first, it is definitely a very useful technique I will keep using in the future.
