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Why
good kids go bad, peer pressure, and tribes….
You
have heard about “peer pressure”. Perhaps you watched “Survivor” and
noticed how important and “real” the rather arbitrarily assigned tribes
became to the participants. If you didn’t watch Survivor, perhaps you
have noticed how loyal kids can be to their school…similar phenomenon.
You have also heard about some child raised in a great family with “all
of the advantages” who “went bad”, rejecting the values that are so
important to the parents and embracing a lifestyle nobody expected. So,
what’s all of this have to do with your company? Everything.
We
belong – all of us – to something. It’s our nature, like it or not. We
live in a world of “us” and “them” – the funny thing is, each of us has
so many personal characteristics, but we choose some of them to
determine what defines “us” and “them”.
Some
folks break the world into male and female, others divide “us” and
“them” along racial, religious, nationalistic, wealth, age, or
educational lines. At the moment I am thinking of myself as “single” –
although I certainly have a race, religion, national loyalty, income
level, age, and education…. We may not have a choice regarding which
characteristics we have, but we do have a choice as to which one(s) we
choose to have define “us” and “them”.
Not
only do we choose to belong to one or more groups, we choose which group
gets priority when we have conflicting loyalties. For example, your
managers are part of the “management team” – but they are also part of
their department or business unit. If they had to demonstrate their
loyalty to one group or the other, which would it be?
“Because of the recent productivity improvements, I can get by with 10
fewer people, but I am pretty sure I can find a way to move them into
new positions such as “Productivity Coordinators”…. demonstrates that
your manager has a greater loyalty to his or her department than to the
corporate (and management) mission, in this case, cost reduction.
Ideally, we can capture the power of this natural group loyalty to
create a situation where the people working at your company can work in
a mutually supportive environment, where the “winners” in the group are
the people who are doing “a good job”.
Please
notice the words in the previous paragraph that are in italics. Wonder
why? The topic is explored more thoroughly in the “Context”
section of this site, but let’s take a quick look at what makes someone
a “winner”, and what defines “a good job”.
In
some work groups, the “winner” is someone who conforms to group
standards of low productivity. In other groups, people “win” by helping
the group set new, higher, production records. This is important. The
group, not a training program you paid for or some neat posters in the
break room, defines “winner”. As long as the people are members of a
group that values low production, every reality of peer pressure and the
desire to conform is working against the corporate mission.
Why do
good kids go bad? I won’t pretend to understand the entire process, but
perhaps it involves which group the kids chose to belong to, whose
definition of “winner” they bought into. The parents had a definition
of winner, and the kids were in that group a couple of waking hours each
day. The kids at school had a different definition of winner, and the
kid spent untold hours each day in that group. The parents say their
kid “lost”. The other kids say the kid “won”.
Do you
think something like this could happen at your company?
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