How is competition better than cooperation?

How would you set individual performance metrics for a small team in a manner that would encourage cooperation and innovation rather than competition and "numbers chasing"?

• Each person on the team is tasked to work with individual merchants and tailor results to each business. Due to the nature of the work and not all merchants being the same size, it's difficult to track quality on the surface. Tracking number of accounts reviewed would be the easiest approach but would discourage team cooperation, stronger relationship building with the accounts, and further corner cutting. How would you hold the individuals responsible on the team in a way that fostered team cooperation and encouraged the individuals to innovate and improve the overall team?

• Answer:

  Given this particular situation, I wouldn't recommend setting individual performance metrics, at least not in the way that I think you mean.  Rather, I'd recommend that you set performance goals at the team level, and set development goals at the individual level.  Then, you empower the team to meet their performance goals in whatever way they believe that they can do so as a cohesive team.  And you review development goals on the individual level, to ensure that people are growing in addition to achieving. The best way to make people engage in achieving a goal is to empower them to do so, and the best way to do that is to put their fate in their own hands, and provide them with problems to solve or goals to achieve, then watch and oversee how they choose to achieve those goals or solve those problems. If this sounds a lot like Agile software development, that's because it is -- but the principals of that approach apply to any group of people who need to meet a goal.