When Teams Compete Without Meaning To
A reflection on competition, trust, and missed learning
We played housie.
Nothing fancy. Paper tickets, a caller with a mic, and a room full of people pretending not to care too much. It was at a house party hosted by us — an evening meant purely for entertainment. No agenda. No outcomes. Just a game to fill the space between conversations.
At first, it was loud. Numbers being called out. Laughter. The occasional groan when a number was missed by one.
But after a few rounds, the room changed.
Some people grew quieter. Some stopped checking their tickets altogether. A few celebrated their wins, but almost apologetically — as if unsure whether it was okay to feel happy while others were still waiting.
I wasn’t playing as much as I was watching. As the caller, I had the vantage point to observe what followed every number call and prize announcement. Even in a game where no one could influence another person’s ticket, competitiveness surfaced. Not overtly, but unmistakably.
That’s when it struck me: I had seen this before.
Not during a game.
During the work itself — when outcomes mattered and time was limited.
Over time, I had begun to notice something similar unfolding there. People weren’t just focused on delivering work. They were also protecting themselves.
Not in obvious ways. No one said it out loud. But it showed up in subtle, human responses. Conversations became cautious. Feedback loops tightened. Neutral observations felt heavier than intended.
When delivery pressure is high, judgment — real or imagined — arrives early. Even well-intended input can feel like an attempt to downplay effort. Listening becomes selective. Trust thins, quietly.
Competition doesn’t announce itself in these moments — it creeps in, shaping how people listen and respond.
I started forming a hypothesis.
When people pursue similar outcomes in a constrained system — shared goals, limited time, visible impact — two walls tend to form involuntarily.
The first wall is built to avoid conflict. Conflict risks friction, and friction risks slowing momentum. So disagreement is softened, opinions are withheld, and silence starts to feel safer.
The second wall is built to avoid comparison. Not wanting to feel behind a peer, responses tend to oscillate between defensiveness and withdrawal.
Neither reaction felt irrational. In fact, both felt deeply human.
What the housie game clarified for me was this: even when outcomes are purely random, comparison still finds a way in — not because people want to compete, but because relative position quietly matters.
If competition can surface in a game of chance, it’s not surprising that it shows up more strongly in day-to-day work, where effort, identity, and outcome are tightly coupled.
The problem isn’t competition itself. That part is inevitable.
The problem begins when we forget what kind of game we are actually playing.
Much of our work is meant to be collaborative — a process of learning, iterating, and getting better together while moving toward outcomes.
Calibration, at its core, is meant to support that journey — to align on expectations, recognize progress, and reinforce behaviors that help the team and the business grow. Not to rank people against one another, but to set a shared bar for mastery.
When the system feels competitive, teams don’t stop working hard — they stop learning together.
That learning depends on a basic trust — trust in the competence of the people around us, and trust that the process will be fair even when outcomes differ. When that trust weakens, comparison takes over, and protection feels safer than openness.
Connectedness becomes the quiet casualty. Not because people don’t care, but because self-protection starts to feel necessary.
What stayed with me was not whether this parallel landed for everyone. It may have. It may not have.
What stayed with me was how easily competition slips into places it doesn’t belong.
Once you notice that, you start listening differently — not just to what people say, but to the pressures shaping what gets said, and what doesn’t.
And maybe that awareness itself is the beginning.
Not of eliminating competition — that would be unrealistic — but of remembering that this was always meant to be a team game.
Some games end with a prize.
Others end by revealing something about us.