It is a question that few people in the trades-or in any modern office for that matter-want to answer out loud. To answer “yes” feels like an admission of a fundamental moral rot, a confession that you have traded your humanity for a fractional bonus.

To answer “no” feels like a lie, especially when the rent is due and the company has just pinned a colorful chart to the breakroom wall that ranks you against the people you usually share a beer with on Fridays. We like to think of ourselves as collaborative creatures, but incentives are a gravitational force that can warp even the sturdiest of characters.

The Neighbor and the Pickle Jar

I spent most of this morning failing to open a jar of pickles. It was an embarrassing display of manual inadequacy. I tried the hot water trick. I tried the rubber band trick. Eventually, I walked it over to my neighbor, who has forearms like a blacksmith, and he twisted it open in three seconds.

He didn’t ask for a cut of the pickles. He didn’t check to see if helping me would lower his “Jar Opening Efficiency” ranking in the street’s unofficial standings. He just helped, because a stuck lid is a problem, and he had the solution.

But imagine if the street had a leaderboard. Imagine if, every time a neighbor helped another, their own ranking dropped. Imagine if the “Winner” of the street got a 10% discount on their council rates.

My neighbor would have looked at my stuck pickle jar, looked at his own standing on the leaderboard, and suddenly, the mechanical leverage in his wrists would have felt much heavier. He might have suggested I buy a different brand of pickles. He might have simply walked away.

This is the quiet tragedy currently unfolding in service fleets and installation teams across the country. Management, in a desperate bid to “gamify” productivity, introduces a ranking system. They want to see who is the fastest, who has the fewest callbacks, who is the “A-player.” They assume that by shining a light on the top performers, they will inspire the bottom performers to climb.

A team is a collection of individuals working toward a common goal; however, when the goal is redefined as a competition between those individuals, the team ceases to exist in anything but name. Therefore, a ranking system is not a tool for measurement but a tool for transformation, which means it changes the very nature of the work it attempts to track.

Let us define “cooperation” as the voluntary sharing of surplus value-knowledge, time, or physical effort-with a peer. Now, consider the edge case: if sharing that surplus value directly reduces my own relative standing, cooperation is no longer a rational act; it is an act of professional self-sabotage.

The Currency of the Crew

In the old world of installation-the world that companies like iPlug Green Energy still try to protect by keeping their trades in-house-the “trick” was the currency of the crew. You’re out in a Melbourne suburb, maybe in an older double-brick home in Hawthorn or a tight apartment block in Southbank, and you hit a snag.

The drainage run for the unit is fighting you. The electrical path is blocked by a structural beam nobody saw on the plans. In the old world, you pick up the phone.

“Mate, I’m stuck on a run like this. How did you handle that one last week in Richmond?”

– Common Crew Call

The guy on the other end would tell you. He’d explain the exact shim he used, the way he angled the bracket, or the specific tool that makes the impossible bend possible. He shared it because he knew that next Tuesday, he might be the one staring at a wall in frustration. It was a communal pool of intelligence.

Then the leaderboard arrives.

Suddenly, that same call feels different. If I tell you the trick, you finish your job an hour faster. Your “efficiency” score goes up. You leapfrog me on the monthly rankings. At the end of the quarter, you get the “Installer of the Month” bonus, and I get a “performance review” about my declining speed.

So, when the phone rings and your name pops up on the screen, I let it go to voicemail. Or I answer and say, “Gee, that’s a tough one. No idea how to fix that. Good luck, though.”

Everyone gets a little worse, alone. The “top” person on the leaderboard looks like a hero, but the aggregate quality of the entire team begins to decay. The shared knowledge that took decades to accumulate is locked away in individual silos, guarded like trade secrets between rival nations.

The Stakhanovite Shadow

This is not a new phenomenon, though we often treat it as a modern management innovation. We can find its dark ancestor in the Soviet Union during the 1930s with the “Stakhanovite” movement. Alexey Stakhanov was a coal miner who reportedly mined 102 tons of coal in a single six-hour shift-14 times his quota.

The state turned him into a celebrity, a “Hero of Socialist Labor.” They used his record to set new, impossibly high quotas for everyone else. The problem was that Stakhanov didn’t actually mine the coal alone. He had a specialized team of timber-men to prop up the roof and haulers to move the coal, while he did nothing but use the jackhammer.

The state erased the contributions of the team to celebrate the “individual titan.” The result? Other miners began to sabotage the equipment. They resented the “heroes” because the heroes’ success made their own lives harder.

When we apply this to a modern context, such as a specialized trade service, the damage is even more insidious because it is harder to see. You can’t easily measure the “advice not given.” You can’t track the “shortcut not shared.”

A company that manages its own people-electricians, plumbers, and installers who are all on the same side of the ledger-operates on a different logic. When a customer books a split system air conditioning installation melbourne, they are essentially hiring a collective brain.

In an in-house model, the electrician isn’t competing with the plumber for a higher “rank” on a spreadsheet. They are both incentivized to ensure the system is commissioned correctly because if there’s a failure, it’s their shared reputation on the line. Accountability is a circle, not a ladder.

The Cost of Speed

In a competitive ranking system, the incentive is to be the “least bad” or the “most fast.” It encourages what economists call “externalities”-shifting the costs of your work onto someone else.

If I can finish my part of the aircon install ten minutes faster by leaving the electrical wiring in a way that’s slightly more difficult for the sparky, but it helps my “speed” metric, I’m going to do it. Under a ranking system, the electrician isn’t my teammate; he’s a hurdle I have to clear to stay on top.

This is why the Victorian Energy Upgrades (VEU) program is so sensitive to the “team” dynamic. The rebate process is a mountain of paperwork and compliance. If the installer doesn’t care about the back-end team because they are too busy chasing their own “output” numbers, the data for the rebate gets messy.

The customer loses out because the “Hero Installer” was too focused on his own leaderboard position to ensure the administrative hand-off was clean.

The irony of the leaderboard is that it often rewards the most selfish behavior while labeling it “excellence.” It rewards the person who takes the easiest jobs and leaves the complex, time-consuming ones for their “rivals.” It rewards the person who hoards tools and information.

It creates a “Stakhanovite” who looks great in a boardroom presentation but leaves a trail of exhausted, resentful, and less-capable colleagues in their wake.

If you want to know if a company is truly high-performing, don’t look at their top-ranked individual. Look at their average performer. Is the average performer getting better over time? If they are, it’s because the culture allows for the “pickle jar” moments-the casual, unmeasured sharing of tricks that lifts the floor, rather than just raising the ceiling for one person.

What True Efficiency Sounds Like

True efficiency is often quiet. It’s the sound of a phone call where a senior tech explains a wiring diagram to a junior tech without checking the clock. It’s the plumber waiting an extra five minutes to make sure the drainage pipe is perfectly aligned for the next person in the chain.

It’s the realization that the company’s success is a common pool we all drink from, not a limited pile of coins we have to fight over. Whenever I see a company bragging about their “internal competition” or their “aggressive performance metrics,” I think of my neighbor and my pickle jar.

I think of the silence on the radio. I think of the 102 tons of coal that broke the spirit of a thousand miners.

We have spent so much time trying to sharpen the individual that we have forgotten how to hone the group. We have optimized for the “A-player” and, in doing so, we have accidentally created a game where the only way to win is to make sure everyone else loses.

But in a home service, or in a heating and cooling installation, or in life, the “win” isn’t the number on the chart. The win is the airflow. The win is the system that works because the people who built it actually talked to each other.

If we want to build things that last-whether they are energy-efficient homes in Melbourne or durable cultures in business-we have to stop treating our colleagues like obstacles. We have to realize that the “trick” is only valuable when it is shared.

Otherwise, it’s just a secret, and secrets are the rust that eventually eats every machine from the inside out. One team, one accountability, and a complete lack of leaderboards: that might be the most “revolutionary” management hack of all. It’s certainly the only one that gets the pickles out of the jar.