Team: Six Secrets of Powerful Teams , A practical guide to the magic of motivating and influencing teams (Project management)(The Leadership Series) by Michael Nir

Author:Michael Nir [Nir, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sapir CS
Published: 2014-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

Secret #2: The Incredible impact of Me

Political correctness is vital in order to survive and flourish in and as a multicultural society. It enables effortless relationships, careful interactions and erring on the safe side. This tendency of politically correct is also one of the biggest adversaries of powerful teams. When teams are treating each other with too much political correctness, they are undermining the healthy interactions of powerful teams.

A cornerstone of political correctness is the usage of the: ‘WE’. ‘WE’ conveys a (mostly false) message of cohesiveness and comradeship, often covering and smoothing dissent and disagreement. In many teams the usage of ‘WE’ is the manipulative method of saying: “this is how things are done in this team and do not argue with it because this is what the majority is thinking and since the majority rules we’ll do it this way”.

One can witness how the usage of ‘WE’ interrupts the free-flowing interaction between team members as it imposes an implicit rule on a free exchange of ideas, decisions, and actions. Who has not heard 1001 times the proverbial: “this is how we do it here”, to which only a few brave risk takers can retort: “well, maybe we can change…”

‘WE’ is used too much in team interactions. When I question participants during workshops that I lead on the superfluous usage of ‘WE”, usually the answer is, It is politer to say ‘WE’ then ‘I’. I agree that for politeness sake it is nicer to say ‘WE’. It is more social to say: “WE would like to go to the cinema for the team building activity” rather than: “I want to go to the cinema for the team building activity”.

It does sound better, doesn’t it? However, what is the price that WE are paying?

The usage of ‘WE’ dampens the communication, it makes the message vaguer, it creates communication noise. With ‘WE’ the individual thoughts, preferences, feelings, positions are masked at the expense of the often false sense of unity. Let me refresh your memory regarding a discussion about the Tuchman – Jensen model: This tension between unity and individualism is the essence of what a team is about – the precise balance between these two elements is at the basis of a powerful team. This tension is about how much I give of myself to become part of the team and how much I retain of myself as a functioning individual.

Teams that have reached high performance are able to withstand the propensity of the individual team members; there is no need for false sense of ‘WE’. As mentioned above, team members will frequently use ‘WE’ in order to create a stipulation on the team’s behavior that will stop the free generation of individual thoughts, ideas, recommendations, proposals etc.

Other times, people will use ‘WE’ instead of I, as they do not want to take responsibility and commit to a certain action, or maybe they don’t want to blame anyone and prefer to hide behind the wide back of the team.

Let’s review the second case study and observe where the use of ‘WE’ interrupts communication.

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