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 …
In the landscape of today’s working world, organizations are the fundamental and defining structures within which we work, produce, and get things done. Very few people now work outside of an organization. The pervasiveness of organizations in our society is now so complete that we take them as a given and no longer question the rationale behind their existence. In …
What exactly is a job? A person could work a lifetime without ever explicitly considering such a question. But its importance should not be underestimated, for actions are guided and shaped (as well as constrained and limited) by below-the-line understandings of what one is actually doing day after day. In the most basic formulation, a job could be described simply …
To the extent that leaders consider workplace unity at all, they tend to think in terms of fixing what’s broken. Discord is overlooked in countless forms and action is taken only when conditions get truly out of hand, when people are shouting in hallways or departments are refusing to work with one another. But just as peace at its fullest …
Why do leaders accept the largely avoidable costs of disagreement, turf issues, silos, politics, competition, cliques, hostility, and other forms of organizational disunity? Below-the-line beliefs about human nature play a role. But equally influential are related beliefs about the role of contest and competition in society. Competition is almost universally seen (in Western societies, at least) as a powerful source …
Organizations succeed or fail as whole systems. They can no more thrive on the strength of most-favored aspects than a car can use a functioning drive shaft and carburetor to make up for a dead alternator and flat tires. Systems whose elements are mismatched, sub-optimized, disconnected, or otherwise disunited will, therefore, inevitably fail to reach their maximum potential. This is …
If it is in fact true that organizational performance rises with growing levels of agreement, collaboration, reciprocity and shared vision, why do leaders accept significant (and largely avoidable) costs of disunity? Much has to do with widespread below-the-line beliefs that disunity is just the way things are. “It’s human nature,” clients have again and again suggested in our consulting work, …