Case Study: When Good People Engage in Unhealthy Competition Because the System Tells Them To

The Challenge

An employee-owned professional services firm engaged Ascent after leadership noticed increasing tension among owners.

The organization's values emphasized collaboration, trust, shared ownership, and acting in good faith. Yet executives described increasing territorial behavior around client relationships, project opportunities, and business development.

From the outside, it appeared that collaboration had deteriorated.

The deeper question became:

Why were leaders who genuinely believed in the organization's values behaving in ways that seemed to contradict them?

What We Found

Our assessment revealed something surprising.

There wasn't necessarily a people problem.

There was a systems and accountability problem.

The organization had intentionally cultivated entrepreneurial thinking, encouraging owners to build relationships, pursue opportunities, and grow the revenue of the business. The owners felt personal responsibility to ensure adequate opportunities to keep staff busy and well compensated. Additionally, the internal reward structures, while well-intended, fueled a sense of internal competition for owners.

At the same time, however, accountability around opportunity ownership, project allocation, decision-making, and cross-office collaboration had not evolved alongside the company's growth.

Without clear governance, leaders naturally relied on their own judgment.

• Some aggressively pursued opportunities.

• Others prioritized fairness and transparency.

• Some protected long-standing client relationships.

• Others expected opportunities to be shared more broadly.

Every approach was understandable.

Unfortunately, they often produced conflicting expectations.

The Hidden System

Although collaboration was a stated value, the organizational environment unintentionally rewarded individual ownership.

Because there were few agreed-upon processes for allocating work or resolving competing interests, success often depended on who discovered an opportunity first, who held the strongest relationship, or who advocated most effectively.

No one deliberately intended to compete.

Yet the system quietly encouraged competition.

Over time, good-faith decisions made by individual leaders created organizational friction.

The result was not a failure of character—it was a mismatch between the organization's stated values and the structures supporting those values.

The Turning Point

Rather than asking leaders to "collaborate better," we invited the organization to begin examining the systems influencing behavior.

Leadership explored questions such as:

• What responsibilities accompany entrepreneurial freedom?

• How should opportunities be evaluated when multiple teams could contribute?

• What decision rights belong to individuals versus the collective?

• How can collaboration be reinforced rather than left to personal discretion?

The conversation shifted from personalities to organizational design.

Key Insight

Culture is not sustained by values alone.

It is sustained by the integrated systems that consistently reinforce those values.

Organizations can encourage entrepreneurial ownership while still creating clear accountability.

In fact, both are necessary.

Entrepreneurial freedom creates innovation.

Clear accountability creates trust.

Without accountability, entrepreneurship can unintentionally become internal competition.

Without entrepreneurial freedom, accountability can become bureaucracy.

Healthy organizations intentionally design systems that allow both to coexist.

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