"There's no 'I' in team" is one of my most despised business cliches. In this post, I'm going to look at two words also beginning with "i" to explain why it's such an awful saying; incentives and identity. If, like me, you've heard that phrase and felt oddly queasy, then this post might go so way to explaining why.
Typically, organisations tend to use "incentives" to mean job-related perks, like financial rewards for hitting targets or free access to gyms. These incentive schemes are all about giving the individual employee a reason to behave in a certain, narrow way. All are doomed to fail. Whilst these schemes might give a quick boost to some metrics, the way they distort business process makes them more expensive than the value they create.
Worse, incentive schemes like this are inherently anti-lean. I'm going to write more on lean process, and its benefits from a psychological perspective, in a future post, but for now suffice it to say I view lean process as A Good Thing. The reason incentive schemes are so problematic is because they make individuals, or small groups of individuals, aim for a specific target regardless of the externalities of that behaviour.
These externalities - the invisible elbow to Adam Smith's invisible hand - are, in an organisation, turned into process inefficiencies. Take, for example, a service desk with a target of resolving tickets first time. This sounds entirely positive; everyone wants a service desk which resolves tickets quickly and efficiently. The problem is, by setting the target those tickets will likely end up resolved in ways that don't really fix the issue, and more serious problems will be passed on to other staff when they should be investigated as they arrive.
Each of these schemes take a narrow view and set a single incentive, when instead they would do better to consider the whole picture. We all have a wide range of incentives which motivate us to certain behaviour at work. The problem is, they're complex and interconnected. Simple schemes with easily measurable targets only act to distort the careful balance of incentives that already exist.
Instead of these distortions, if the organisation makes it easy for staff to be the kind of people they want, they'll do that. Make it hard, and only the stubborn few will do so, for their own unrelated reasons. It's soul-destroying when you find yourself in a job where the systematic incentives don't line up with actual goals. If you have management responsibility, the more you can close the gap between what the organisation says it wants, and what it actually incentivises people to do, the happier your team will be.
There's another important alignment to consider here, too, which brings me to the second "i" mentioned earlier, identity. By identity, I mean the way you imagine yourself to be, and what you feel is important. Identity is built on really deep foundations and starts forming from a very young age. This is a really fundamental part of how we view ourselves, and it's what gives a lot of our actions meaning in the world.
We continually strive to maintain a cohesive identity. The things we believe about ourselves have to make sense and hang together. Most importantly of all, that story has to end with us being one of the good guys. This positive self-narrative is key to maintaining a healthy level of self-esteem, and can survive some surprisingly strong contradictory evidence. I'm going to go into personal narratives in a lot more detail in a future post, but for the time being the vital thing to note is that anything which challenges personal identity is likely to be resisted, often strongly and angrily.
This has some pretty strong implications for the workplace. The first one of these is that the goal of an organisation should be compatible with someone's own belief system and self-narrative. For example, if you believe that the generation of wealth is in and of itself an important social good, you're more likely to be happy working for, say, an investment bank, than someone who believes that inequality is a serious social ill, or that physical manufacturing is the only really meaningful work. It's worth taking some time to consider what it is that the organisation you work for really does, and how comfortably that fits with the way you see yourself. It's rare to get a perfect fit, but you should certainly think about some degree of change if the place you work for is doing work you either don't value, or you think is actively harmful.
Additionally, identity has a key role in teams. When we're in a social group, our behaviour changes to that which is more closely related to the identity of the group than us as an individual. It's not that the so much that the group changes us, but it makes certain behaviour more appropriate, and other behaviour less appropriate. The most obvious example of this is how we might behave differently at work to when we're in the pub with our friends. Both types of behaviour can be authentically us, but the emphasise different patterns and personal qualities.
Our immediate team is likely our most important social grouping at work. It's made up of the people we spend most time with, and with whom we likely share many skills and characteristics. When this system works well it can be hugely productive, bringing people together to do work that none of them alone would have been able to achieve. However, when it goes wrong it can make for a truly miserable workplace. With significant tension between the personal identities which make up the team, and the team itself, things can break down in all sorts of unpleasant ways.
Worse, as identities start to be regularly challenged, the personal incentives within the team are no longer towards collective success, but instead focus on the need for individuals to protect their identity. A bit of conflict is usually healthy, and constructively-resolved disagreements are part of a good working environment. However, when those agreements start to really shake peoples' view of themselves they can't be resolved without significant personal change, and the team is unlikely to work well or be a nice place to be.
So, it turns out there's a whole collection of different "I"s in every team, all working for their own reasons from their own viewpoint. If you forget that you run the risk of making people fundamentally miserable, and miserable people don't do good work. If you find yourself in a team run like this it might be time to consider moving elsewhere.
Typically, organisations tend to use "incentives" to mean job-related perks, like financial rewards for hitting targets or free access to gyms. These incentive schemes are all about giving the individual employee a reason to behave in a certain, narrow way. All are doomed to fail. Whilst these schemes might give a quick boost to some metrics, the way they distort business process makes them more expensive than the value they create.
Worse, incentive schemes like this are inherently anti-lean. I'm going to write more on lean process, and its benefits from a psychological perspective, in a future post, but for now suffice it to say I view lean process as A Good Thing. The reason incentive schemes are so problematic is because they make individuals, or small groups of individuals, aim for a specific target regardless of the externalities of that behaviour.
These externalities - the invisible elbow to Adam Smith's invisible hand - are, in an organisation, turned into process inefficiencies. Take, for example, a service desk with a target of resolving tickets first time. This sounds entirely positive; everyone wants a service desk which resolves tickets quickly and efficiently. The problem is, by setting the target those tickets will likely end up resolved in ways that don't really fix the issue, and more serious problems will be passed on to other staff when they should be investigated as they arrive.
Each of these schemes take a narrow view and set a single incentive, when instead they would do better to consider the whole picture. We all have a wide range of incentives which motivate us to certain behaviour at work. The problem is, they're complex and interconnected. Simple schemes with easily measurable targets only act to distort the careful balance of incentives that already exist.
Instead of these distortions, if the organisation makes it easy for staff to be the kind of people they want, they'll do that. Make it hard, and only the stubborn few will do so, for their own unrelated reasons. It's soul-destroying when you find yourself in a job where the systematic incentives don't line up with actual goals. If you have management responsibility, the more you can close the gap between what the organisation says it wants, and what it actually incentivises people to do, the happier your team will be.
There's another important alignment to consider here, too, which brings me to the second "i" mentioned earlier, identity. By identity, I mean the way you imagine yourself to be, and what you feel is important. Identity is built on really deep foundations and starts forming from a very young age. This is a really fundamental part of how we view ourselves, and it's what gives a lot of our actions meaning in the world.
We continually strive to maintain a cohesive identity. The things we believe about ourselves have to make sense and hang together. Most importantly of all, that story has to end with us being one of the good guys. This positive self-narrative is key to maintaining a healthy level of self-esteem, and can survive some surprisingly strong contradictory evidence. I'm going to go into personal narratives in a lot more detail in a future post, but for the time being the vital thing to note is that anything which challenges personal identity is likely to be resisted, often strongly and angrily.
This has some pretty strong implications for the workplace. The first one of these is that the goal of an organisation should be compatible with someone's own belief system and self-narrative. For example, if you believe that the generation of wealth is in and of itself an important social good, you're more likely to be happy working for, say, an investment bank, than someone who believes that inequality is a serious social ill, or that physical manufacturing is the only really meaningful work. It's worth taking some time to consider what it is that the organisation you work for really does, and how comfortably that fits with the way you see yourself. It's rare to get a perfect fit, but you should certainly think about some degree of change if the place you work for is doing work you either don't value, or you think is actively harmful.
Additionally, identity has a key role in teams. When we're in a social group, our behaviour changes to that which is more closely related to the identity of the group than us as an individual. It's not that the so much that the group changes us, but it makes certain behaviour more appropriate, and other behaviour less appropriate. The most obvious example of this is how we might behave differently at work to when we're in the pub with our friends. Both types of behaviour can be authentically us, but the emphasise different patterns and personal qualities.
Our immediate team is likely our most important social grouping at work. It's made up of the people we spend most time with, and with whom we likely share many skills and characteristics. When this system works well it can be hugely productive, bringing people together to do work that none of them alone would have been able to achieve. However, when it goes wrong it can make for a truly miserable workplace. With significant tension between the personal identities which make up the team, and the team itself, things can break down in all sorts of unpleasant ways.
Worse, as identities start to be regularly challenged, the personal incentives within the team are no longer towards collective success, but instead focus on the need for individuals to protect their identity. A bit of conflict is usually healthy, and constructively-resolved disagreements are part of a good working environment. However, when those agreements start to really shake peoples' view of themselves they can't be resolved without significant personal change, and the team is unlikely to work well or be a nice place to be.
So, it turns out there's a whole collection of different "I"s in every team, all working for their own reasons from their own viewpoint. If you forget that you run the risk of making people fundamentally miserable, and miserable people don't do good work. If you find yourself in a team run like this it might be time to consider moving elsewhere.
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