Why treating your peers as rivals will hold you and your team back

Hi {{first_name|there}},

Last week we started our series on leading up and across with organisational politics. This week we look across the organisation, at your relationships with your peers.

Your peers are probably the people at work you have most in common with. They sit in the same leadership meetings as you and they are dealing with many of the same problems.

When we looked at building relationships across the organisation, I said that it is much easier to build strong relationships with your peers than with people where there is a power differential. That is true, but it is a lot harder when the peer in question wants the same thing that you do and is possibly competing with you for budget, headcount, the best projects or, even, the next promotion.

So, it is tempting to treat these colleagues with polite caution. You are friendly enough, but you keep your plans to yourself and make your case to the boss without involving them.

But there is a way to deal with this more intentionally, and it links back to a lot of what we covered in our series on strategic leadership.

So, this week we'll look at what some of the research tells us about competing with your peers, and how you can turn the people you compete with into allies without giving up what you need.

A lot of the competition we feel with our peers comes from what researchers call zero-sum beliefs. This is the belief that one person's success can only come at somebody else's expense, so if they win, you lose.

Here is what the research by Shai Davidai and his colleagues tells us:

Perhaps the most useful finding for our purposes is that we tend to overestimate how zero-sum other people are. People consistently assume that others see the world as more of a contest than they do, and that makes them less cooperative (Yang et al., 2026).

In my experience, the nakedly competitive peers I have worked with have always been fairly obvious and, if I am honest, I've never built very strong relationships with those people; maybe because they are usually quite hard to like.

But it is worth reflecting on the Yang finding because the peer you perceive as a rival may well see things rather less competitively than you assume.

In my experience, competing with your peers does not necessarily get better results. A meta-analysis (study of studies) by Dean Tjosvold and colleagues supports this to an extent. It found that where people saw their goals as linked, they had more open-minded discussions, and that went with better performance, more creativity and better working relationships. Where they saw their goals as competing, the opposite was true (Tjosvold et al., 2022).

Rivalry also has an ethical cost. Gavin Kilduff and colleagues found that people competing against a rival were more likely to use deception and unethical tactics than people competing against an ordinary competitor (Kilduff et al., 2016).

Rivalry can affect your team too. Leaders who influence people by being assertive and competitive pass a zero-sum mindset on to their teams, and those teams help each other less (Kakkar & Sivanathan, 2022).

So, the overall performance of your team can be negatively impacted by unnecessary rivalries. And you have a big part to play in this in the way that you behave. Whether you and your team see your goals as competitive or not is something you can directly influence, and if you adopt an unyielding approach with your peers, that is likely to shape the way your team members treat each other and co-operate across the organisation.

And think about what your own boss's perception might be. You may know from your own experience of managing others that spats and squabbles between team members are some of the most annoying and dispiriting things to manage, and they permanently colour your view of the people in question. That is the last thing you need in relation to your own boss.

The obvious answer is to build better relationships with your peers. But, on its own, this may not work when you are competing for the same resources.

In a well-known study of a large multi-unit company, Wenpin Tsai found that informal social contact increased knowledge sharing between units that competed in the market, but made no difference between units that competed for internal resources (Tsai, 2002).

What you (and your organisation) can do to help this is be more careful and deliberate in the way the competition is set up. Julia DiBenigno's 30-month study of US Army brigades shows how. The commanders wanted soldiers ready for deployment and the mental health providers wanted to give soldiers the care they needed to recover; so their goals clashed regularly. But two of the four brigades managed to achieve both, through what DiBenigno called anchored personalisation. This involved:

Where people only built relationships, the stronger group tended to take over. Where they only stuck with their own group, each side pursued its own goals at the expense of the other (DiBenigno, 2018). But the groups that developed these relationships of 'anchored personalisation' fared better.

This is an important point for anybody who worries that working closely with a peer will mean giving ground. Being an ally is entirely compatible with standing up for your team. It is very close to the idea of dialogue that we looked at in our series on strategic leadership, where exploring the tension between two views can lead to a bigger and better shared perspective, rather than a compromise.

Here are five things you can do.

1. Check your own zero-sum thinking. Before your next budget discussion or planning meeting, ask yourself questions like:

Notice whether the situation looks less like a contest once you have answered them.

2. Look for the goal you share, and the different things you each bring to it. Shared goals that both groups can only achieve by working together have been shown to reduce conflict between groups (Sherif, 1958). But shared goals may help more when each group has a distinct contribution to make. Where groups were doing the same thing side by side, a shared goal could increase the rivalry (Deschamps & Brown, 1983). So, look for the outcome that you and your peer are both trying to deliver, and be clear about what each of your teams brings to it. The perspective mapping exercise from our strategic leadership series is a good place to start.

3. Help often, in small ways, and stop keeping score. Francis Flynn found that people who were seen as generous with favours had higher status among their colleagues, while people who kept their exchanges balanced were more productive. But the people who exchanged favours frequently got both benefits (Flynn, 2003). And peer relationships that start with personal support early on, rather than a trade, are the ones most likely to grow into strong alliances, involving personal and career support (Methot & Cole, 2023).

This latter point has always been my experience; situations where I have reached out and offered help first have always led to better, more balanced relationships. I think that in some workplaces (certainly some I have worked in) people are conditioned to expect that others are going to be difficult or obstructive. So, when you act differently, it comes as such a pleasant relief to your counterpart that the impact is lasting.

So, try doing things like this:

Over time, notice whether the help starts to come back the other way.

4. Get to know your counterpart, and be open about what your team needs. Pick the one or two peers whose work most affects yours and get to know them as people, not just as the heads of other teams. Be open about what your team needs and why, and ask them to do the same. You could also agree to work out any disagreements with each other before they come up in front of your boss.

5. Keep any rivalry friendly. Some competition between peers is probably inevitable. A recent study by Valentino Chai and colleagues found that friendly rivalries increased people's motivation without making them more likely to consider acting unethically, while hostile rivalries increased both. Much of the difference came from whether people focused on winning or on what they got out of competing (Chai et al., 2026). So, if you notice that you care more about beating a peer than about the work itself, it may be time to step back.

In our series on strategic leadership, we looked at how the move from hands-on to more strategic leadership depends on your ability to understand other people's perspectives and bring them together. Your peers' perspectives are among the most important ones to pay attention to. Research on middle managers has found that those with more strategic influence tend to be the ones who work across the boundaries between different parts of the organisation (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1997). That is much harder to do if you treat the people on the other side of the boundary as your rivals.

Turning peers into allies takes time, and it will not work with everybody. But most of your peers are facing the same pressures that you are, and they probably want the same thing you do, which is to get good things done for their teams.

If you can be the person who makes that easier for them, you are likely to find that they do the same for you.

And you will get a lot more done than you could on your own.

References are in the website version of this post.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching. If there is a peer you find yourself competing with, and you are not sure how to work with them without giving up what your team needs, I can help. It is often much easier to see a way through with somebody outside your organisation.

There are more details here.