What does “make each other good” mean?

Part of my philosophy about teams is that each member should strive to better the other members, even at his own expense. This may sound weird, and in most cases it is in fact counter intuitive. That’s also why it deserves its own wording – making each other good, as well as its own blog post.

Let me give an example: consider two classmates that are applying for jobs after finishing their studies, they both have a lot of the same interests as well as the same educational background. This is a good example, because these individuals are not in a team, in fact they are competitors, it’s likely that they will apply for many of the same jobs. And just like them quite often team mates may find that what is good for one may not be so good for the other. Otherwise of course they would make each other good because there's no conflict of interest. But back to our example: So should they tell each other about interesting job postings they find? The intuitive answer is of course no, after all they are competing with each other for most of these jobs. Hmm, let’s look at some simplified math.

Let’s say these two have very specific interests, so that there’s not a whole lot of jobs, and they have to shift through a lot of information to find good prospects, now let’s say both find 10 jobs that are not overlapping, and that there are on average 30 applicants for each job (which I would say is a conservative estimate for good jobs these days). If they don’t tell each other they have a 1/30 chance to get each of their 10 jobs (assuming all candidates are equal of course) which means:

      1-(1- 1/30)^10 = 0,29

29 % chance for each of them to get at least one of the jobs. If however they share their information so that both apply for all 20 jobs, they only have a 1/31 chance for each job:

      1-(1- 1/31)^20 = 0,48

48 % chance each to get at least one of the jobs. The math here isn’t that important, it’s the principle that cooperation beats competition that is. This is transferable to other situations, but the issue however is how not to get locked in to a prisoner’s dilemma game where everyone wants everyone else to share but doesn’t share anything themselves. Nobody wants to share with people that don’t share back, and thus a negative spiral can reinforce itself until everyone walks around paranoid and keeping everything they do a secret. Sharing is a learned skill, one that involves reciprocity – quid pro quo. Teams and companies should be built on trust, we all know that, and one of the best reasons is that trust enables sharing, and sharing at (or despite) the expense of one individual creates synergy for the entire group.

Edit: I just thought of a little digression I should have included: When I was in the army I remember our sergeant would always ask for volunteers, and when nobody out of the 30 soldiers in our troop raised their hands the tension got so thick at times that you could cut it with a knife. One day we all decided that the next time he asked for volunteers we would all raise our hands, and the odds of having to do something would still be the same. This became a habit and later that summer it must have looked pretty neat when the officer in command of the entire base asked for a volunteer and saw 30 young boys eagerly raising their hands in the middle of about 1200 recruits that didn’t. We made our sergeant look extremely good that day, and that was not a bad thing for us.

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