The responsibility for addressing the imperative challenge of creating unity rests upon two different but overlapping groups.
First, it is essential that managers and supervisors, those people invested with formal organizational authority, commit themselves to forging the required unity, both between themselves and between the people that report to them.
The unity of management is a prerequisite to whole-system health and optimal performance. The disunity between people in management positions is where, traditionally, some of the greatest evidence of dysfunctional competition and conflict are consistently found. It is clearly destructive to overall performance and must be fearlessly addressed and corrected.
Second, it is important to recognize that creating unity is ultimately a human challenge facing everyone within an organization, regardless of title or position. We all bring into our organizations notions and skills shaped by a culture that encourage us to compete rather than to collaborate, contend rather than cooperate, win rather than support. We all bring with us societal stereotypes, prejudices, convictions, and habitual responses that are obstacles to creating a truly unified organization. With that being said, it becomes clear that he greater the number of people within an organization that can be enlisted to adopt unity as a personal goal, the greater the degree of success that can be achieved.”
The specific issues each of us face may vary, but none of us can safely say that we are untouched by the challenge of forging human unity in the workplace. Only as each of us raises the protection of human dignity within the organization to a point of principal, only when the creation of organizational unity becomes driven by convictions as well as economics, will we be equipped with the energy, and more importantly, the courage and will required to search for and root out those entrenched patterns of conflict and competition that too often define our organizational lives.
It is easy to spot the flaws in others. Only the combined forces of practicality and conviction will effectively animate the sincere effort required to address the most difficult challenge of all – to recognize and eliminate those prejudices and stereotypes that distort our own thinking. Upon us all, managers and non-managers alike, rests the responsibility to search out and correct the ways we ourselves contribute to the lack of unity that may. inadvertently, sap the organization of its energy, divert its attention, and diminish both its potential and it people.
Motivated by both pragmatic and economic concerns as well as by ethical and moral considerations, we must now accept, both individually and collectively, the imperative of developing organizational unity.