“Why be a star when you can make a constellation?”

“The biggest innovations and breakthroughs in society are a direct result of collaboration, not competition.

Whether it’s from a workplace standpoint, whether it’s in our social relationships, whether it’s in our culture, I think we do need to challenge this idea of competition as the thing that gives us the best results.” — Ruchika Malhotra, author of Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success

I asked Ruchika to come chat about her new book Uncompete with me, because my own research while writing The Ambition Penalty led to many of the same conclusions — particularly in relation to gender dynamics. As I write in the book:

“By optimizing for men’s relative outcomes — power over women — rather than their absolute outcomes — security, safety, autonomy and well-being — patriarchy undermines these fundamental needs, for everyone.

By contrast, a commitment to cultivating our collective wellbeing turns out to be associated with all kinds of better outcomes:

• In an analysis of nearly two decades of data across nearly 140 nations, the International Monetary Fund found that gender equality is associated with lower income inequality and lower wealth inequality more broadly.

• According to data analysis of 156 countries over a decade, greater gender equality was also associated with longer life expectancy for both men and women.

• Gender equality is also positively correlated with GDP per capita — so when gender inequality is low, people tend to enjoy both higher incomes and higher standards of living, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index. These correlations also appear across metrics of work-life balance and well-being, with greater gender equality associated with more of both.

By contrast, greater gender inequality is associated with greater income and wealth inequality, lower standards of living, lower work-life balance and well-being, and shorter life spans.

The more we all realize that we all benefit from enabling more equitable outcomes, the more we can come together to push back against the patriarchal, racist, and other discriminatory practices and systems that actually exploit us all.”

Share

In spite of these data, Ruchika and I agreed that our pitch for collective power remains a hard sell. Not because it’s not effective, but because our cultural environment is so deeply saturated with beliefs like rugged individualism and zero-sum thinking —the idea that another person’s gain is your loss. See:“men are falling behind” headlines while men maintain 83% of senior leadership in corporate America, hold around 75% of positions on corporate boards, and made up 75% of the US senate and over 70% of the US House of Representatives.

“I’d be at a big conference and I’d be talking about some of the work I’d been doing and some of the interventions that really help in creating a more inclusive environment and how we advance women in more leadership roles, and then at some point, invariably, someone would say something like, “Yeah, but what about the men?,” Ruchika told me.

“I just couldn’t help this feeling of like, why are people seeing this as zero-sum when the data is so clear around how a rising tide lifts all boats? There’s so much good, strong evidence to show how diversity is very, very good for society. It’s good for business. It’s good for us personally. It’s good for our movement forward as a species.”

Even so, men outnumbering women 5 to 1 in positions of senior corporate leadership is characterized as “women taking over” and a gender wage gap that’s as big as it was twenty years ago is reframed as “men falling behind.”

Under this zero-sum world view, even one woman in a position of leadership or power, is enough to trigger backlash against all women, as I shared in this fascinating case study.

Share

It’s clear that to meaningfully challenge unequal outcomes — across gender, race, ethnicity and other forms identity — we’re going to need to tackle more than the myths that underpin misogyny, racism, xenophobia, etc. We’re going to need to challenge our even more widely held cultural myths around competition, meritocracy and what really serves the collective good.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Ruchika and check out her book Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success.

Here are some more highlights from our conversation (edited for length and clarity):

Ruchika: For a competition to be really the best way to succeed or the best way to bring out the best innovation, the best in all of us, you have to really start from the same place. You have to have rules that everyone accepts and everyone plays by the rules.

That works in professional sports (to some extent). Everyone knows the rules, we know what a foul looks like, we know what a goal looks like, depending on the sport you’re playing. But that’s not true in real life. It’s not a level playing field.

And so competition, the way that we see it in today’s world, is really creating a lot of anxiety, burnout, stress, lack of cohesion in our workplaces, in our society.

I know among people who have marginalized identities that often we feel it. And justifiably so, because throughout colonial history, we’ve been told there’s only room for one so you better be the unicorn. And to get to be the unicorn woman, person of color, Asian woman, Black woman, whatever it is, you need to elbow everyone else out of the way.

Unfortunately, what that does is only ensure that power remains concentrated among a very, very small elite and everyone else feels like they need to elbow each other out of the way.

Uncompete rejects that. It’s the rejection of the idea that everything in life needs to be zero-sum: winner take all. Like either you win or I win. It’s one promotion. It’s one job. It’s one book.

It is deeply embedded in the philosophy of: we have more agency than we think, but we need to be in lockstep, in solidarity. We need to all agree that we’re going to reject this idea that competition is the only way to succeed.

Stefanie: If you reject this idea of competition and and prioritize collaboration in an institution that is still fundamentally built around the principles of rewarding competition, how effective can you be? Or if you can be effective, how can you be?

Ruchika: I really want to start by saying that this is extremely challenging, especially for those of us who have experienced marginalization. So if you’re a woman, person of color, just any way of being underestimated in the workplace, it means that we walk in with much less power to be able to even get to a place where we can really make decisions and affect change. Versus if you come in and you see people like you in leadership and you know that what you say carries weight and gravitas.

So I think for me, one of the core themes of Uncompete is yes, I think that we can make a change. And when you practice the principles of Uncompete, whether you operate with generosity or whether you operate with the mindset of abundance (like there’s not just room for one person), I do think it fundamentally shifts as you model that. You do start to change the norms of people around you.

We’ve seen this in anti-bias work, all it takes is one person in a situation, in a meeting saying like, “Hey, I don’t think Ruchika was done talking. I’d really love to hear her finish. Or I’d love to hear what she’s saying.” And it starts to set the different cultural norms. And it can be very subtle, but it makes a difference.

And I truly believe that with Uncompete as well. It starts with us saying: I don’t believe in this. I don’t benefit from it. I’m hurting and I see how others are hurting, so I’m going to model a different way. But also, I think some part of Uncompete is also like: What do we want to do to live a different life? What does success mean to us?

One of the quotes I come back to is “Why be a star when you can make a constellation?” And I think that’s what this is about.

Stefanie: These ideals (competition, hustle, etc.) didn’t come out of nowhere. They might be being elevated in this moment through certain figureheaads, but I think the reason they’re allowed to be amplified is because there is still so much buy into those assumptions.

Ruchika: These ideas are very seductive and they exist because we live in a very competitive capitalist society and I think any of us critically trying to challenge them are going to face a lot of backlash.

If you’re trying to say something that’s recycled like you gotta show up, you gotta be a boss lady, you gotta be a trad wife, whatever it is — very recycled ideas, there’s a market for it because that’s the way that our media operates.

I certainly, as a former journalist, have seen how much those ideas get a lot more sway and a lot more buy-in than if you’re actually trying to challenge some of these systems and some of these outdated narratives that don’t fit into what’s good for an elite. So I do think that we’re in a really interesting time where we are definitely seeing that. What the silver lining for me is: I think more of us are finding each other being like, this is BS. Like this doesn’t resonate with me at all.

I will say the narrative that I’m interested in, and I would love your take on actually, is around caregiving and motherhood and the expectations on women having to be extremely nurturing and how that impacts our ambition. Especially now that it’s coming back into this sort of (not that it ever fully went away) very heated discussion about like: Should you be spending three hours with your kid on the weekend?

Stefanie: What I keep coming back to is that we’re still committing the same error of framing this as a personal problem instead of a systematic failure. And we still talk about “what do we do” as though it’s a self-optimization issue.

On the one hand you have: don’t spend any more time with your children than one hour (I’m being facetious). And then on the other side you have: Well spend all of your time with your children and have no interest other than that. And I actually think both of those frameworks are wrong because they both pretend that there’s something you as a woman can do — to schedule the right way or prioritize the right way to unlock a caregiving infrastructure — that literally doesn’t work[or exist] no matter how you do it.

I am constantly finding that we are framing these conversations as “Oh, it’s do it this way or do it this way.” But either way, it is still the same fundamental premise that you are the problem.

Ruchika: Hopefully what we will see is more of us questioning — even if you’re a man. This is a conversation I have regularly with my husband, he’s questioning a lot of those ideas as well because I think workplaces are changing very, very quickly with AI.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, we’re raising a nine-year-old boy together and it’s like what are the skills — both hard skills, but also like, who do you want to be as a human — that will help you navigate these times? So I think a lot of us are asking that question.

Stefanie: And I hope that that momentum continues to build. I hope that curiosity for ourselves, for the world, of what it means to be fully human and not cut off half of our capacities, whether it’s our ambition or whether it’s our collaboration and care. I want us all to be fully human across identity

Ruchika: And for me specifically, collaboration and care and ambition have actually been completely intertwined, even completely aligned, especially when I started doing the work that I did, once I got out of a more corporate track and started my own company.

I had big ambitions and I still do, but so much of that ambition came from: How can I build care? How can I build collaboration? How can I make sure that as I start this business, which I’ve been very lucky to see thrive, it is helping others also build businesses and do things that they love as well?

How much of this is just about me succeeding versus building that constellation?

For more from Ruchika, grab your copy of Uncompete: Rejecting Competition to Unlock Success and follow more of her work here.

And tune in later today (1pm EST) for my next LIVE with author Tracy Clark-Flory, author of the new memoir My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself In My Family’s Fractured Past, where she shares the story of her mother’s unplanned pregnancy, how she was sent to a home for unwed mothers and how she was forced to give her baby (Tracy’s sister) up for adoption — and the real cost of that kind of reproductive control.