Slow and steady wins the race - Sam's story

In The Nine to Five with Stacey Dooley on BBC iPlayer, Stacey takes five teenagers into four different industries for the ultimate work experience. Each school leaver spends two days trying out real jobs and if they impress, Stacey will pay them the national apprenticeship wage at the end of every shift. But she also deducts money for poor performance and so those who don't come up to scratch can find their wage packet empty.

Stacey reflects here on 17-year-old Sam, who was so super competitive, his feet didn’t touch the ground. But over the course of his experience, he recognised that slow and steady can actually win the race!

I have to confess that at times I am a competitive person – that’s one of the reasons I decided to take part in Strictly and I worked so hard learning a myriad of new dances to go on and win the glitter ball! As a personal quality, competitiveness can be the fuel to chase your dreams. It can get you up in the morning to carry on and give you the energy to push forward when you face setbacks. In the workplace, it can lead a whole team to victory. But sometimes, it can take over and without realising it, you are setting yourself against your peers when you don’t need to. The question is: does competitiveness always win in the workplace?

They say always keep your eye on the ball. That is the fundamental basis for our nation’s much beloved sport: football! Each player has a natural competitive streak inside of them, and each fan has it too. That’s why we holler from the sidelines to support individual players, to give them an enormous boost and spur on our chosen team to victory. There’s group adrenaline and the joy of the win is shared! Natural competitiveness is essential to any sport and the ultimate aim is to sprint to the top of the leaderboard, take home the gold medal or lift the final trophy aloft.

Channel that energy

But try and imagine if a player was so fired up that they couldn’t keep to their position and constantly tackled their own teammates to steal the ball… they would quickly find themselves on the side bench! There is absolutely nothing wrong with a healthy dose of competitiveness in the workplace but you have to know where to channel that energy. It isn’t about who gets something done the quickest, quality always comes first.

One of our teens, Sam, had a sports background and had so much energy and so much determination he was like a whirlwind at work. At the car dealership, he was speeding around the forecourt doing his checklist and bosses were standing back watching in amazement. He decided too that he wanted to ‘win’ over his teammate Bakr but over the two days he learnt he didn’t need to do that, he just needed to do the best for himself. It was a tricky lesson for someone who was so used to giving it his all to win on the sports field. Also his speed was actually a hindrance because even though he was talented and very capable, he was making mistakes as he rushed through things in his efforts to be first.

Pace yourself

So always try and pace yourself and put the quality first and speed second.By all means, let your natural competitiveness drive you and give you the oomph to get out there but also make sure you settle, take stock and let your natural talents shine through slowly – you will be seen!

At the oyster farm, Sam’s determination was clear in his work ethic and he never gave up lifting the heavy oyster bags to support his teammates Ellie and Tillie. There, his competitiveness gave him the zeal to keep going, to power on through, and he was using it to give his teammates the help they really needed. So always try and harness your competitiveness for the greater good of the team – people will always be grateful if you can do the things they are struggling with.

However, when we got to the boat building company, he fell back into old habits and was competing against Bakr again. It was precise and painstaking work, and working with expensive wood like teak is not something that can be rushed. Sam got caught up in doing it as quickly as possible and once again he made mistakes; the panels couldn’t be fitted to make a door and a day’s work had gone to waste. Attention to detail is a real transferable skill that will benefit you in the workplace. Sam learnt over time that his energy was a huge asset to himself and his team but he just had to direct it in the right way.

Walk don’t sprint

So compete with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today. Rather than using the person next to you as the measuring stick to your success, focus on what you’re doing and how to make your work better. In any industry, bosses will expect you to be able to reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses because someone who can think it through calmly themselves is someone who can improve. Some tasks take a lot of time to master and some races aren’t won by sprinting as fast as you can – developing successfully in the workplace is a long game!

The downside of seeing everything as a competition is to see everything as a win or loss. But that isn’t the reality at work. You may not be great immediately at everything you do and it’s important that when someone gives you advice on how to do it better, you don't see this as a failure, but as an opportunity to learn. Sam realised that he was focusing so hard on competing with everyone that sometimes he lost sight of the whole reason he was doing the work experience to begin with: to learn. Ironically, I think that was the biggest learning curve for him.

Don’t aim to be the best, aim to be the best ‘you’ can be. That’s how you build a long-lasting career. If you can see everything as a chance to keep improving rather than a win or a loss, then you will have a source of motivation that can nourish you for your entire career. Trust me, that is how you truly ‘win’.