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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Let’s see if we can pull this all together.

In recent weeks we’ve talked about teams and team dynamics. We’ve talked about the too-often perverse relationship between knowledge and certainty. We’ve talked about culture and how its self-reinforcing nature can result in appalling behavior just as it can help bring out the best in people.

Teams, as described here from time to time, are groups of people who trust each other, and are aligned to a common purpose.

Toss in some additional reflection and discussions with various correspondents over the past few weeks and it’s clear that while trust and alignment are important team-ness ingredients, they aren’t the whole recipe.

Another is interdependence. In the world of sports, members of baseball, football, and basketball teams depend on each other move-by-move to get the job done. Golfers competing in the Ryder Cup, in contrast, do root for each other, but don’t nudge the ball when nobody’s looking. Likewise tennis players in the Davis Cup who presumably don’t use mirrors to try to blind members of opposing teams from the stands.

The world of business can be even more extreme: Many companies pit members of the so-called “sales team” against each other in the quest to receive the sales incentives that only go to the top 10% of producers.

And some business leaders still buy into the old MBO (management by objectives) method of setting management goals, assuring that each manager will do whatever it takes to achieve his or her objectives whether or not it’s at the expense of other members of the “management team” trying to achieve their goals.

Does this mean the “sales team” and “management team” are only teams in scare quotes?

Not entirely, because of another ingredient of team-ness. That’s affinity – a shared sense of identity that’s independent of both trust and purpose. Independent, that is, except for a desire to beat other, competing groups.

Which gets us to culture. Shared identity can be and often is independent of trust and purpose. It’s never independent of culture.

Here in KJR-land our working definition of culture is how we do things around here. It’s the informal, unwritten rules the affinity group … the tribe … enforces far more strictly and ruthlessly than HR enforces any of what’s spelled out in the company’s policies and procedures.

Identity politics … tribalism, that is … isn’t limited to politics.

Because if it were, how would you explain soccer riots?

It’s time to connect all this theory to your work-a-day responsibilities as an IT manager.

As the golden rule of engineering is form follows function, start with what you want. I imagine that in most situations, most of the time, you want the men and women who work in your organization to accomplish important results.

Most of the time, they’ll accomplish important results more effectively as a result of teamwork than of working in isolation. So you need to encourage team-building in the trust-and-alignment sense.

But like it or not, achieving trust and alignment is hard work that requires constant, steady leadership. That’s in contrast to achieving an us vs them tribal sense of identity, complete with unwritten rules governing how we do things around here. You’ll get that in spite of your best efforts to prevent it.

What you can do, sometimes, if you’re lucky and the wind is blowing in the right direction, is to channel your employees’ natural tendency to form up into rival tribes, so tribal and team identities coincide, or at least overlap heavily.

It isn’t a perfect solution by any means. Yes, project teams that have a strong sense of tribal identity will work harder and collaborate better internally than employees assigned to a project whose sense of team identity is limited to trust and alignment to a common purpose.

But that same sense of tribal identity will make the team less likely to collaborate with other teams they think of as the them to their own us.

Is there anything you can do to limit the extent to which the tribes take over?

There is. You can keep projects short, so project-based tribes disband before their tribalism starts to dominate the cultural landscape. And, you can populate new project teams cross-functionally, redefining us and them frequently enough to break down tribal animosities faster than new ones can form.

Or, you can do what most managers seem to do: Hope for the best, complementing hope with an occasional lecture about how we’re all on the same team.

That’ll work well.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

This is probably a mistake.

But I wrote about male/female workplace issues quite recently (“A tale of two genders,” 8/14/2017). Now we have the decline and fall of Harvey Weinstein and others of his predatory brethren, with remarkably little root cause analysis.

Let’s start with this: Harvey Weinstein was a major financial contributor to the Democratic party and its candidates. Roger Ailes used his media outlet to promote the Republican party and its candidates.

Linking their sexual predation with their political affinities is … what’s the word I’m looking for? … ah yes, that’s it: reprehensible. Please don’t. The last thing we need these days is more tribalism.

We can each freely agree with someone about their political views without incurring an obligation to defend them on any other aspect of their lives. “Us” does not mean “good person” any more than “them” means bad person.

Well, actually, it usually does, but let’s not succumb to the temptation. Let’s do the opposite and forbid political affinitizing (I don’t care if it isn’t a real word) about this. It cheapens an issue that should, under no circumstances, be cheapened.

Next, let’s jettison the next-most-popular root cause analysis: “They’re horrible human beings.” Yes, they are, but how does that help? What’s useful is understanding how they became horrible human beings.

Which gets us to what’s missing as commentators vie to write the Most Condemnatory Commentary Yet. It’s culture, a subject I wrote about last month (“It’s always the culture,” 9/25/2017).

Whenever you see a pattern of behavior that’s common to a group of people who know and associate with each other, you can bet culture is a major causal factor.

Go back to the early days of the entertainment industry. The so-called casting couch was, if not ubiquitous, certainly prevalent. Those who had them figured their couch was one of the perks of their position. Reclining in one was, for many a budding starlet, a distasteful prerequisite for a shot at the big time. Some chose (or in some cases were forced) to acquiesce. The rest went home.

Those who ran the entertainment industry knew and socialized with each other. Anyone lacking a casting couch in their own suite of offices understood the key message: This sort of thing is okay. It’s how we do things around here. It’s embedded in our culture, “us” being the powerful and important people who run this industry.

Want to understand how Ailes, Weinstein, and so many others could get away with their offenses for so many decades?

I had the good fortune of having a business partner who was a student of anthropology. Culture, he explained, is the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment.

In our Cro-Magnon past, a lot of the environment was physical: Animals that could be hunted, vegetables that could be gathered, plant, animal, and mineral matter that could be turned into useful implements.

In an organization, in contrast, most of your environment is the behavior of the people around you. Culture becomes a self-reinforcing loop: it’s the learned behavior people exhibit in response to the learned behavior people exhibit in response to the learned behavior people exhibit.

Ailes and Weinstein, Hitchcock before them if Tippi Hedren is to be believed, and Fatty Arbuckle before him, all were embedded in a culture where the norm was, and apparently still is in some circles, “This is okay. It’s better than okay. It’s something you deserve.”

Look at just about every horrible act performed by any group of people who knew each other at any time in the historical record, and ask how it’s possible that human beings behaved in such extraordinarily repulsive ways. The nearly uniform answer: Their culture told them this is how they’re supposed to behave. It’s more than okay. It’s approved of.

Which has what to do with you?

If you have a leadership role in your organization, you’re responsible for the learned behavior people exhibit in response to their environment, because as a leader a disproportionately important part of their environment is you.

If you indicate, directly, or by modeling, or through implication, or even through omission that something is acceptable that shouldn’t be, you’re responsible for anything and everything that happens as a result of the culture you’ve helped foster.

Members of the KJR community understand these two critical points about culture: First, being a leader isn’t a matter of position. It’s a matter of choice.

And, second, if there’s something you don’t like about your organization’s culture, the most important tool at your disposal is a mirror.

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