This is particularly necessary within the organization, where collaboration may be considered beneficial in theory, but in practice, the rules of engagement still revolve around competition: colleagues become rivals over promotion opportunities, recognition, and advancement. The competition within the organization makes it harder to navigate the disruption and certainty on the outside.

How do leaders banish in-house competition? They create and model a culture that uncompetes. To uncompete is to intentionally choose to reject competition and actively design for collaboration.

Here’s how.

Harness two types of envy

Team collaboration increases when we feel psychological safety—like our team has our back. Competition and envy among colleagues can reduce psychological safety and create a hostile environment if not managed well by leaders. Managing envy to motivate teams—not sabotage each other—is a skill.

Organizational psychologists broadly characterize envy as falling under two categories: benign and malicious envy. Benign envy motivates us to work harder toward a goal when we see someone else achieving it, malicious envy can be destructive and often results in us wanting to sabotage or undermine a colleague’s success.

A powerful way to cultivate benign envy is to focus on the hard work a team member did to achieve a goal, rather than just focus on the achievement itself. Leaders can harness benign envy to create a culture of motivation and collaboration by highlighting the effort it took over outcomes, particularly team-based efforts.

Implement rewards for collaboration

Many workplace cultures are individualistic, where only individual wins are celebrated. This makes it more attractive for employees to prioritize gaining individual success over collaborative ones. Instead, leaders must implement recognition and reward systems that emphasize collaboration and teamwork. Leaders can verbally name collaboration as an organizational value. Collaboration must also be defined explicitly as a metric for rewarding career development, advancement, and recognition.

For promotion and other career development conversations, list “examples of collaboration” as one of the metrics being considered. In addition, group incentive programs are another way to operationalize collaboration, when rewards are pegged to team performance and meted out among the group rather than just individually.

Incentivized teams increased their performance by 45%, compared to a 27% increase for individual incentives, according to a study by the International Society for Performance Improvement. Organizations that implement a peer-to-peer recognition program also benefit from creating a culture of shared success.

Set reasonable work boundaries

In the race to beat competitors, more organizations are normalizing “always on” work cultures. Silicon Valley, in particular, is popularizing a “996” work expectation of working 12-hour shifts six days a week in the race to innovate on AI. When leaders model that workers must be always-on, it creates and exacerbates a scarcity mindset—that there’s never enough time or resources in a day to complete tasks, so we have to keep working more.

It also often fosters the belief that employees must compete against their colleagues to demonstrate dedication and competence. When leaders model reasonable work hours and expectations, the message gets communicated that employees don’t have to hustle for rewards.

This looks like visibly and vocally taking time off, working reasonable hours, and not penalizing employees when they don’t respond immediately. Hustle culture often leads to burnout, another side effect of competitive environments. By comparison, in collaborative work cultures, employees feel supported to work reasonable hours without fear.

Consider job-sharing and other collaboration models

Nobel prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin discovered a surprising way to reduce the gender wage gap—job-sharing. A lack of flexibility (also a challenge in always-on cultures) impacts women’s earning potential. But when they’re able to work part-time and trade off their shifts—particulary common for pharmacists—the wage gap almost disappears.

What if more leaders could explore some roles at the organization being set up for “job-sharing”—such as two colleagues who work closely together and could substitute for each other easily when the other is out? This can help foster team ownership and collaboration versus individual priorities.

One company, Jotform, moved to create small, cross-functional teams when their leaders noticed the company was growing but output wasn’t. These cross-functional teams of 3–5 people each would focus on a single product instead of bouncing between priorities. Each group was paired with its own designer and given ownership.

“Almost overnight, the quality of our work improved. The teams moved faster, communicated better, and felt more motivated. Since then, cross-functional teams have become a core part of our culture—and one of our biggest competitive advantages,” writes CEO Aytekin Tank, reflecting on the past decade since the company moved to this model. Of course, establishing a number of collaboration norms, particularly around communication, was key to making it a success.

Co-leadership models

A compelling case for co-leadership, particularly organization co-CEOs, is emerging. One study of 87 public companies led by co-CEOS between 1996 and 2020 found they had better shareholder returns (9.5%) compared with similar companies who only didn’t.

Co-CEOs are not common nor without controversy, but done right, there’s evidence that collaboration at the highest levels can truly drive innovation. Take Netflix, where Ted Sarandos and Reed Hastings were able to leverage complementary skills to grow the company. Management professor Michael D. Watkins lays out seven norms of how a successful co-CEO partnership could operate, including designing clear conflict-resolution mechanisms, creating a leadership charter, and dividing responsibilities by expertise, not convenience. This is even more necessary as AI continues to disrupt many industries.

A nonprofit organization I was involved with in the past, Upaya Social Ventures, also transitioned to a co-CEO model last year. Collaborating with their complementary skills has been necessary to serve the organization’s mission of creating dignified jobs for people living in some of the poorest regions of India.

Left to chance, many organizations default to competitive norms, where collaboration is often stalled because of internal rivalries. That’s why it’s necessary to uncompete—for leaders to intentionally prioritize and design norms that make collaboration supported, rewarded, and institutionalized. Only then can we reduce inter-organization competition and move towards true collaboration.