End “Us and Them”

There is no “them”; there is only ‘us’ (the team) and ‘we’ (the context).

Help your leaders step into their responsibility and authority, balancing nurture (safety) and challenge (performance).

Empower their teams to take responsibility for their own experience of the organisation and their working lives.

What

Division, distrust and frustration based on a sense of exclusion (humiliation, fear) and lack of control. This drives intense anxiety which drives behaviours such as making excuses (“no-one told me”, “not my responsibility”), withdrawal of cooperation and even sabotage or revenge.

These feelings inevitably arise whenever people come together, and are amplified by the unavoidable complexity of contemporary organisations, where people are divided by rank or title, work group or function, and geography.

Why

Eliminating the noise of division frees your people to focus on performing instead of trying to keep themselves safe from imagined threats. 

Teams where everyone feels safe if they deliver, take personal responsibility and are empowered to speak up are more robust, more creative, and more successful.

How

Mediated contact is key - your people need to be brought together in a structured environment in which they have the opportunity to experience for themselves that rather than being competitors or adversaries, their colleagues are in fact ‘good people’, ‘like me’ with similar values, objectives and challenges, and good ideas to solve them.

Recent Engagement

Ending competition and nurturing collaboration in a national construction equipment hire company

Distrust and a lack of a sense of ‘being in it together’ led colleagues across locations and across management levels to treat each other with suspicion

The CEO of a national equipment hire business noticed his regional managers were competing rather than collaborating. They said they liked each other and enjoyed having a beer together at the end of the day, yet behaved in ways that indicated there was very low trust between them. These people collectively had responsibility for 100% of the revenue and profits of the business but had no sense of themselves as being leaders in a collective sense, “in it together”, with shared challenges and shared responsibilities and objectives.

We conducted a process of making explicit erroneous beliefs and assumptions that had previously been implicit: about feeling the need to ‘protect’ their teams and P&L’s from their peers and from head office staff, replacing these with more realistic beliefs about facing shared challenges and together being empowered to exploit shared opportunities. We helped them understand and step into their personal responsibilities to each other, and their collective responsibilities to lead the business and lead their people - responsibilities it had never been made explicit before extended beyond their own local operation.

Team mates were left feeling empowered, aligned, mutually supported, and a little less on their own. Competitive behaviours ameliorated, and cross sell improved significantly.