I originally posted the following story last year on the Win-Win Web blog. I ran across it as I was reorganizing the Win-Win Web Archives, and I decided to modify it a bit and post it again here for the benefit of the new Mind Unbound readership. Enjoy!
Human beings are a clannish bunch. Look around you. Our tribes are everywhere. They are the tables of the high school cafeteria, the fraternities of the college campus, the divisions of the corporate organizational chart. Honestly people, can't we all just get along?
Apparently not. Or at least, not without a lot of encouragement.
Many years ago, while I was volunteering for a certain non-profit organization, I was assigned the dull but critical task of summarizing all feedback received from the general public. This feedback was funneled through the marketing department, and every week it was my responsibility to generate a report regarding the nature of these comments.
During my first few weeks on the job, I discovered that sometimes letters from the organization's members came in through the public channel, so of course I offered to run them over to the development office. Instead, the marketing manager told me to throw them away.
"Excuse me?" I asked in disbelief.
"Yeah, throw them out. They aren't ours."
"But these letters came from our members."
"Right," he replied. "Members. Not the general public. Chuck 'em."
"OK," I agreed, and then took the letters to the development office.
The development team was ecstatic. It turned out that the feedback from an entire membership campaign had inadvertently been channeled through the wrong department. The development team had been about to write the campaign off as a complete failure. I never told anyone that I had been "ordered" to throw those letters away, and I never mentioned it to the marketing manager again. But week after week, I quietly handed them over.
Although corporate divisions rarely undermine each other's efforts quite so blatantly, the cooperative approach to business management tends to be the exception rather than the rule. Why? Because most organizations, whether consciously or not, are encouraging competition within their own ranks.
If you want your entire organization to function as a unit, you have to approach it as a unit. You can't set up hard divisional lines and then expect people to cross them. If different divisions are competing over any kind of incentives--whether budgets, bonuses, office spaces, corporate recognition, or anything else they might care about--then they aren't especially likely to play well with each other, no matter what other incentives you introduce.
Setting up cooperative incentives between competitive divisions is a bit like setting up a giant game of tether ball. Each team will want to win the cooperative incentives so they'll try to look like they're working together. But they'll also want to win the competitive incentives so they'll quietly try to undermine each other at every turn. The motivational ball will keep bouncing back and forth, making no real progress in either direction.
In short, don't try to drive progress through competition. Drive it through passion. (What? Passion in the workplace?) Yes, passion. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Give your employees something to believe in. Give them something to be excited about together. Rally behind your corporate vision. Does your corporate vision lack passion? Then change it! A collaborative workplace needs only two things: a supportive environment and a passionate vision. Provide them, and your employees will care about your business as much as you do.
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