Teammates or Competitors - second-hand-tigers/badocter-career-learnings GitHub Wiki

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Teammates or Competitors?

The answer is "Teammates." It is a lesson that I learned only at great personal cost after a decade of help from several mentors and supervisors, and the clarity provided by a structured feedback system where I was both the "reviewee" and "reviewer."

My biggest early career developmental challenges were poor interpersonal skills and inadequate team engagement (see Lone Wolf at Air Products), and despite candid feedback from my co-op supervisor during college that it was a problem, I did not readily accept it and work to close the issue until much later. Those behaviors did not start in college; the foundation had been laid much earlier, all the way back to middle school, and perhaps earlier.

What changed in middle school

I was a good student in elementary school (K-5) and had a diverse group of friends. I was a part of formal group activities like Cub Scouts and band, and informal ones like the "under-10" construction crew I talk about in Extracurriculars. I don't recall having interpersonal behavior gaps with my peers in that period and I looked forward to hanging out with just about anyone. What changed in sixth grade was that I began to view them as my competition rather than teammates. Looking back, that view became a barrier to establishing a healthy network and slowed progress on interpersonal development, and it is not something I could have self-identified at the time.

I don't know for sure what the trigger in sixth grade was, but I became hyper-competitive with respect to grades about that time. Sixth grade was when class ranking metrics like GPA became advertised. Honor rolls were published in the local newspaper. Later, in the high school, there was a bulletin board in the foyer that showed the rank list of everyone in the class relative to everyone else. I finished 6th in my high school's graduating class of 250+ -- everyone knew exactly who was ahead of them, and those at the top were all gunning for each other.

I started to view my classmates as the competition to beat and consequently adopted a strategy of working by myself rather than with them -- after all how was I going to beat them if I was helping them get better at the same time that I was. Looking back this was the worst possible strategy, and it cost me many friendships that I had in earlier years. Despite being in a large group activity like band throughout high school, by graduation I had no close friends, and in the decades since, no more than an occasional Facebook message from any of them. I had become the lone wolf that could function at a high level of skill in a group but was not a team player in the holistic sense. This pattern continued through college and grad school, finishing both without any relationships with my peers that persisted and essentially no network of peers. The only relationships that persisted were with mentors.

Mentors began to intervene

The first ones that I explicitly remember confronting me about my interpersonal and teamwork gaps were my supervisor, S.L., and the senior technical expert, J.H., who were directing my work as a co-op student at Quantum Chemical. S.L. gave me candid feedback during my performance review that I argued with him about (see I Learned This One the Hard Way), while J.H. took a kinder/gentler approach. It is clear looking back that despite their efforts I did not learn the lesson fully and did not correct the behavior whose foundation I had spent almost a decade laying. The mentors that came after them in each stage of my career all took steps to raise the problem and start working the course back toward where it needed to land, and I now appreciate their patience and dedication to helping the somewhat resistant me back to the right path over the next decade.

Winning in a ranked environment

The winning strategy in a ranked environment is not intuitive -- lifting your competition up triumphs over trying to beat them. This is not obvious to the student looking to climb to the top of the GPA list (and I was by no means the only lone wolf near the top there), and it is not obvious to new employees entering a hyper-competitive ranked system like the one ExxonMobil is famous for. That being said, for all the gripes about the ranking system at work, ExxonMobil provided a level of clarity that had been completely invisible in my schooling: the Knowledgeable Others (KO) feedback forms.

Every employee was required to provide KO feedback on 6 to 8 coworkers every cycle, and the feedback was given with respect to stated performance and behavioral standards, including teamwork, mentoring and influence, laid out right on the forms. The KO form was also not a single form; it was a different form for each grade level in the organization (i.e., the pay and responsibility bands employees are promoted through). The KO form for the more senior technical positions had more behavioral and less technical feedback fields than the entry level positions. The 6-8 others you reviewed each year were a mix of career stages: peers, those junior to you, as well as those senior to you. With their KO forms in hand, you not only had line of sight of what you were being held accountable to now, but also to how the accountability focus shifted over the course of an entire career.

The differences between the grade-level-tailored forms were also a warning: promotion to the next grade level up increases the relative weight of organizational effectiveness over individual technical capability, and you need to similarly shift your work focus and priorities with each promotion accordingly. A highly ranked individual prior to promotion can easily become low ranked after promotion if they do not make those adjustments. There is no such thing as a highly ranked senior technical professional who is only good as an elite individual technical contributor -- you are being highly paid at that level because you are an organizational force multiplier that effectively leverages the entire suite of Leadership, Business, Interpersonal, and Technical (LBIT) skills through many others. It is the difference between the organization having the delivery capability of 20 of you instead of just 1 of you.

After the forms were submitted and reviewed by management, the supervisor feedback sessions followed and focused on both the technical feedback as well as the behavioral feedback. At that point it became impossible to deny that behaviors mattered, and the metrics were now in front of me side-by-side with the criteria of "what good looks like".

From feedback to a plan

The process did not stop with the feedback sessions; it formalized the path to "what good looks like" by transforming that feedback into set goals you would be held accountable to, matched with tangible work items that required those behaviors: the annual Individual Development Plan (IDP). The following year, your performance would be assessed by both feedback from others as well as progress on last year's plan. You knew the criteria for success at the beginning, you knew who the mentors were to support you, and the IDP was yours to own.

"What good looks like" was overwhelmingly reliant on strong interpersonal and team skills, and a majority of the constructive feedback and developmental goals I was given each cycle across my career was behavioral and non-technical in nature. I don't think any supervisor told me I needed to build more technical depth as a priority because I naturally took care of that on my own. In my case, supervisors sometimes listed just a single objective under the technical section of the IDP; however, the wording usually carried a heavily non-technical overtone in one or more of the other dimensions. For example, a typical technical objective on my IDP during mid-to-late career might look like this:

Successfully commission project "X" piloting new technology "Y" with engineer "Z" shadowing you so that they are ready to lead the next commissioning of a "Y" based application.

There is a hint of technical growth in that IDP item (i.e., piloting new technology "Y"), but the thing I would be most held accountable for next year would be the mentoring of engineer "Z", and that part was emphasized by my supervisor when we sat down to align on the plan. Once we were aligned on the plan, I was responsible for implementing it, and we would have periodic touchpoints through the year to ensure the plan stayed on track. My supervisor would ask me both about the project status and engineer "Z"'s development progress. There might even be mention of which project engineer "Z" would lead in next year's plan, reinforcing how urgently I should treat their development.

When I later became a first line supervisor and was helping team members craft their development plans, I kept the objectives short, concise, and balanced. Engineers would frequently ask for more technical objectives to be added to the plan, but bowing to that invites technical being prioritized over everything else. If they have only been given one or two objectives in each of the LBIT dimensions and they are accountable to accomplish everything on that short list, then it's clear that doing only the technical items earns a score of 25%. Letting the technical list swell would wrongly signal that technical carries more weight, and that it alone could earn a good score. They will probably develop many of those technical skills along the way without them being on the plan, but those items will not distract them from what the plan holds them accountable for developing in the other dimensions.

Every one of my IDPs identified significant non-technical objectives that were clearly communicated and understood. My supervisors held me accountable, but more importantly I held myself accountable and worked the plans. I sometimes fell short and received the necessary corrective direction to keep me on track, and over a decade (or two) the developmental wins chipped away at the mountain of gaps that I started with. The lone wolf gradually became an effective teammate, a transformational team lead, and a passionate mentor of developing team leads. That trajectory continues even into retirement with this very wiki page (see Stage 3 and 4, Applied as a Volunteer).

What you can do now

The LBIT performance dimensions, and the approach to strategically grow them in balance at any stage of life, are discussed at length in Setting and Accomplishing Development Goals. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to apply that process to developing teamwork skills now regardless of the stage of life you are in.

If you've treated the best students or coworkers around you as rivals to beat and avoid, you now know that strategy works against you.

You can reverse that course today to start connecting, collaborating, and lifting your classmates or teammates. Start engaging with them instead of avoiding them. Start treating your teamwork performance as something you are being graded on (see Getting Graded on Group Projects is Fair).
You will need help to stay on course and develop the new skills that you don't yet know that you don't have. Tell a coach, teacher, supervisor, or other trusted mentor that you recognize the problem, and ask for help building a development plan that positions you and your team for success.
It takes practice, time, and feedback to develop teamwork skills, so check in periodically with your mentor to ensure the developmental plan is being implemented effectively and kept up-to-date. As you demonstrate competency on the first plan objectives, the plan updates will provide new objectives to continue growth to the next level. Over a career, that progression turns you from a great team player into a great team leader, and eventually into a mentor who develops team leaders yourself.

Correcting behavioral challenges is among the toughest challenges to overcome, but with feedback from mentors and systematic objective setting backed by real work that exercises those skills, it can be accomplished. It is a marathon, not a sprint, and it is a journey that you will be on your whole life. When you master those behaviors in yourself, continue that journey to become the mentor of tomorrow, guiding the next generation through those same challenges.

License: © 2026 William Docter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, remix, and build upon this material, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit to William Docter and indicate if changes were made. The Second-Hand Tigers logo is not covered by this license. All rights in it are reserved.