The Problem with Crowning Champions: Building Cultures Where Everyone Wins

Written By: Boyd Levitt

November 11th, 2025

“If your team has to compete with each other to win, you’ve already lost.”

We love a good competition. Sales leaders especially. There is something thrilling about the idea of two reps stepping into the metaphorical arena, sleeves rolled up, scripts sharpened, and the leaderboard glowing like a scoreboard in the dark. It feels bold. It feels cinematic. It feels like leadership.

But here’s the quieter truth: if every win requires someone else to lose, your culture starts to feel like a colosseum. And in colosseums, people don’t build each other up. They perform until they break, until they die and eventually put their resume on a new desk.

The companies that scale don’t elevate a single hero to the mountain top, cape rustling in the wind.

They build a round table where the entire team sharpens one another. Not because it’s softer. Because it’s smarter. Progress has always belonged to groups who share tools, not those who hide them behind their backs.

This article is about learning to compete in a way that makes the system stronger, not just the person holding the trophy. The goal isn’t to remove competition. It’s to design it so the room gets better, not just louder.

In theory, one-on-one sales showdowns sound thrilling; clear rules, clear winners, instant energy. In practice, they often drain morale, distort focus, and push reps toward the very behaviors that erode trust, learning, and long-term revenue.

If you want a high-performance culture, you don’t build a mountain-top for one—you build a round table for many.

The Hidden Costs of 1v1 “Tryout” Cultures

Before we congratulate ourselves for “raising the stakes,” we need to look at what those stakes actually cost. 1v1 competitions don’t just create winners and losers — they create psychological weight.

The rep who wins walks away with a boost, sure, but the rep who loses walks away carrying doubt, urgency, and the pressure to prove they belong. That pressure doesn’t usually sharpen performance — it bends it. And over time, it bends the culture, too.

What looks like motivation on a scoreboard can quietly become insecurity in the bullpen. And insecurity has a way of shifting behavior in ways most leaders don’t see until it shows up in churn, inconsistency, and fractured trust.

Here are the hidden costs we don’t talk enough about:

1) They invite sabotage and sandbagging.

Relative performance “tournaments” increase the odds that people focus on beating each other instead of serving customers. Lab and field studies show that when rewards hinge on rank, sabotage and gaming behaviors rise—especially as prize gaps widen. That means delayed orders, withheld help, and riskier bets to leapfrog a rival.

2) They suppress the learning behaviors you actually need.

Top sales orgs iterate quickly: they share talk tracks, compare notes, test objections, and debrief losses without fear. That’s psychological safety—and it’s one of the strongest predictors of team learning and performance. Rank-heavy, zero-sum contests reduce the safety to ask for help or admit uncertainty, which slows improvement.

3) They amplify “expendability” signals.

When every day is framed as tryouts, people read the subtext: I’m replaceable. Job insecurity is consistently linked with lower task performance and organizational citizenship, and higher strain—i.e., the opposite of discretionary effort. That’s a tax on pipeline quality, customer experience, and retention.

4) They skew effort toward risky sprints over durable gains.

Rankings and tournament incentives push underperformers toward higher risk-taking (swinging for home runs to catch up), even when a steady, consultative process would win the quarter. That’s how you get bloated late-stage deals and roller-coaster months.

5) What are you willing to lose? Long term confidence or right now commissions?

When a rep loses a head-to-head competition, it rarely lands as “just data.” It hits their identity. Confidence takes the hit first, and confidence is the engine that powers process. The moment a salesperson starts to feel like they’re behind, they begin to press instead of perform. They skip steps they normally follow.

They rush discovery. They over-explain features. They chase deals that don’t fit. And the very habits that help them win in the long run get pushed to the side under the weight of “I can’t fall further behind.” So instead of sharpening consistency, 1v1 losses actually erode it. Not because the rep is weak — but because the system is asking them to perform under stress instead of grow under coaching.

And we can’t ignore what happens to the winner either. When someone takes the top spot in a 1v1 showdown, the ego bump can feel like rocket fuel at first. But the danger is that it often shifts the mindset from contributor to conqueror. Instead of asking, “How can I help the team improve?” the inner dialogue becomes, “How do I stay on top?” That’s when reps start guarding talk tracks, withholding small insights, and treating knowledge as currency to maintain status instead of something to be shared.

Over time, the team stops learning from each other, and instead starts performing for each other. The culture moves from collaborative to competitive posturing. The winner may wear the crown today, but the long-term cost is a weaker system, a brittle culture, and a talented salesperson whose confidence now relies on staying above others—rather than growing alongside them.

Bottom line: 1v1 contests can be exciting—but they often trade away collaboration, consistency, and customer focus for short bursts of adrenaline. If your aspiration is Glengarry Glen Ross theater, they’ll deliver drama. If your aspiration is compounding revenue, they won’t.

Round Table > Mountain Top: What to Run Instead

The shift is from scarcity to shared standards: we still recognize excellence but structure the game, so the system gets better when any one rep improves.

1) Multi-Segment Contests (Fair Fights, Real Growth)

Instead of “everyone vs everyone,” group reps by comparable baselines (tenure, territory maturity, average cycle length) and compete within segments. Recent research shows multi-segment designs outperform single-segment contests because they’re motivating and fair—rookies see a path, veterans still feel challenged.

2) Team-Based Goals with Shared Playbooks

Tie part of the pot to team achievements (e.g., total stage-to-stage conversion, collective NPS, or time-to-first-meeting) and require winners to publish the call outline, email cadence, or talk-track snippet that got them there. This rewards outcomes and codifies the how, strengthening the operating system.

3) Personal-Best Ladders (You vs. You)

Run monthly “PB” challenges: beat your own 90-day win rate, average deal quality score, or first-meeting set rate. This flips competition inward (healthy) and turns top reps into coaches: if they want the team prize triggered, they must help others set—and hit—PBs.

4) Skill Tournaments, Not Just Dollar Tournaments

Rotate short sprints around controllable skills: objection handling, discovery depth, next-step clarity, multi-threading. Score with calibrated rubrics from call reviews and peer panels. Cooperative goal structures like these outperform competitive setups for deeper problem solving and transfer of skill.

5) Contribution Currency

Create visible credit for system-level contributions: writing a killer objection tree, building a territory dashboard, hosting a teardown session. Spotlight these in all-hands. You’re teaching that helping others sell is part of how leaders win here.

6) Guardrails That Reduce Gaming

• Reward mix of leading and lagging indicators (quality + revenue).

• Pay partials for documented handoffs and rescued deals.

• Cap prize gaps to reduce sabotage incentives; variable “team-dependent” prize pools dampen zero-sum behavior.

  
  

What “Round Table” Looks Like in Practice

• Weekly Deal Roundtables (60–75 min): Three managers + rotating peer chair. Everyone brings one win, one stuck deal, and one learning artifact (email, snippet, sequence). Outcome: a shared “What changed this week” note shipped to the whole org by end of day.

• Monthly Playbook Update: Best three ideas from roundtables become redlines in the official playbook, with author attribution.

• Quarterly Skill Cup: Two-week sprint on a targeted capability (e.g., multi-threading). Winners are the rep and the manager whose team improved most, aligning coaching behavior with contest design.

• Segmented Leaderboards: Reps see progress vs. peers with comparable context and progress vs. their own trailing averages.

  
  

The Leadership Test: Are “Everyday Tryouts” Real or Rhetorical?

It feels inspiring to say, “every day is an audition.” But if your systems don’t let people practice, get feedback, and be safe to iterate, then it’s a poster—not a process.

A 7-point audit for leaders:

1. Psychological Safety: Can a rep admit “I blew this call” without fearing status loss? If not, your learning rate is capped.

2. Structured Feedback: Do managers run weekly call-listens with rubrics, or only chase end-of-month numbers?

3. Shared Playbooks: Are improvements documented and redistributed within a week?

4. Fair Contests: Are competitions segmented by context and balanced across quality and revenue?

5. Security Signals: Do your rituals and language communicate that people are investments, not expendables? If not, expect lower performance and higher burnout.

6. Manager Enablement: Are leaders evaluated on the consistency of coaching behaviors—not just their team’s rank?

7. System Integrity: Do rules discourage sandbagging and solo hoarding? If not, you’re paying a sabotage tax.

   
   

Scripts & Phrases That Change the Culture (Steal These!)

• “Win together, learn out loud.” (Every contest requires a short write-up of the ‘how.’)

• “Beat your baseline.” (Dashboards default to personal bests and segmented peers.)

• “Quality first, dollars follow.” (Scorecards weight discovery depth, next-step clarity, and multi-threading alongside revenue.)

• “If it helps the system, it counts.” (Contribution currency is eligible for prizes and promotion.)

  
  

What You’ll See When It’s Working

• More cross-pod help, faster onboarding, fewer “hero” saves, smaller forecast swings.

• Steadier pipeline hygiene, stronger first-meeting quality, more “quiet wins.”

• Managers coaching behaviors instead of pleading for end-of-month miracles.

• A culture where ambition scales because trust scales.

Final Word

If your goal is to crown a single climber, build a mountain. If your goal is to multiply climbers—build a round table. The research is clear: cooperative structures, fair segmentation, and psychological safety create more learning, more consistency, and more durable performance than 1v1 cage matches. That’s not softer leadership; that’s smarter leadership.

Key sources for the curious: sabotage and gaming in rank-based contests; psychological safety driving team learning; job insecurity harming performance; cooperative vs. competitive goal structures; and the effectiveness of multi-segment sales contests.

At the end of the day, the goal isn’t to build salespeople who can out-sprint each other. The goal is to build a team that can out-sprint the market. That means creating a culture where knowledge flows, where support is seen as strength, and where growth isn’t something, we do at each other but with each other.

Competition should sharpen the blade, not swing it at the person standing next to us.

So, before we light the torches and cue the dramatic soundtrack, let’s take a breath and ask: Are we building champions, or are we just building survivors? Real leadership lifts the room. Real systems multiply skill. Real culture is felt, not announced. And the companies that win the long game? They don’t build colosseums. They build round tables. Where everyone has a seat. Where everyone has a voice. And where winning is something we do together.