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Key points
- Promoting socialization among colleagues through after-hours events has more downsides than benefits.
- People are most likely to form authentic personal loyalties at work when challenged.
- Avoid enmeshment among coworkers by focusing on playing their individual roles in service of the mission.
For years, organizations have been experimenting with strategies to create a greater sense of belonging and teamwork among coworkers. The problem with these initiatives is that they often fail to bring colleagues closer together.
Many HR leaders have become wise to the fact that promoting socialization among colleagues through meals, happy hours, events, and parties excludes those who just want to get home after work, to the gym, or walk the dog. And often, those employees who appreciate the after-work partying the very most find themselves embarrassed in front of their colleagues—and potentially being asked to leave their job—following some major social misstep.
In an attempt to bring peer networking and bonding back to working hours, some employers have implemented self-managed teams. Their hope is that by operating as teammates who are mutually responsible for one another’s success, these teams will form stronger relationships and get better work done. The issue is that self-managed usually means an informal hierarchy: In a power vacuum, ringleaders inevitably emerge, and usually not those best suited to lead.
People are least likely to form significant lasting bonds with coworkers in workplaces with less challenging work, less structure, less supervision, and less interaction with authority figures. The key to creating those important authentic personal loyalties among employees is creating conditions in which they can do lots of challenging work together under the strong direction of a highly-engaged leader.
Learn from the military.
Consider the United States Military: When young soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors talk about employee loyalty, they first and foremost invoke their commitment to each other—to their peers and to their most immediate leaders. But those peer bonds are hardly forming organically. Soldiers are not self-managed but rather have a strict chain of command with clear leaders who are highly engaged. They don’t get to choose who is going to be on their team. They don’t get to choose their own peer leaders. They don’t get to choose their own mission. They don’t get to choose their own positions on the team. Not everybody gets to be the MVP. Not everybody gets a trophy.
Of course, the military has a rare combination of a profound patriotic mission, life-threatening gravity, and extraordinary resources. Those are hard conditions to approximate for most leaders in most workplaces. The lessons to draw are about building the conditions to support great teamwork: The strongest relationships among people in the workplace form in environments with a strong focus on the shared mission, the shared work, and the common ground.
Yes, it is important to value and leverage everybody’s different strengths on a team. But the key to supporting the spirit of teamwork is focusing on what everybody has in common: They are choosing to work in this job, for this organization, at this time. As long as they remain, they are in this together. They must depend upon each other to succeed.
Pull people from their silos.
Yes, some people pull more weight than others. Some people do more work better, faster, and with a better attitude. But being a great team player is necessary to succeed in today’s workplace. That means staying focused on the shared mission and how each person contributes to that shared mission.
Some leaders find their direct reports become more entangled by and critical of one another’s performance when empowered to work collaboratively. The way to avoid this enmeshment is to get everyone thinking critically about their own role and how to play that role effectively in support of the team and mission.
Have your direct reports complete the following exercise and discuss it at your next routine one-on-one:
1. Consider the first dimension of being a great team player: playing whatever role is needed to support the larger mission.
- How would you describe the larger mission of this organization?
- How would you describe your role in relation to the mission?
2. Drill down on your role. Make a list of all the different tasks, responsibilities, and projects that comprise your role. For each one:
- What do you actually do?
- How exactly does your work on that task, responsibility, or project contribute to the larger mission?
- Who relies upon you to do this work?
- What are the consequences if you don’t deliver?
- What is the value added when you deliver successfully?
- How are you doing on this particular contribution to the mission?
- How can you improve?
