Our education system is similarly geared – a major focus is to give children a competitive edge for when they arrive in the job market. But if everybody is being pushed towards the same goal, being a straight-A student may not be enough to make you stand out.
Which is why in the opening salvo in the battle to find employment (the post-graduation CV), you will often find exceptionally florid descriptions of extra-curricular activities, designed to communicate that the candidate is an ambitious, cut and thrust go-getter, vitally different to every other applicant.
Later, having been lucky enough to land that first job, your average recruit will likely start work thinking of themselves primarily as a competitor, perhaps even a predator, stalking personal success, and not as a collaborator. Most new recruits, if asked if they are a team player, will make the intellectually right choice and answer in the affirmative. But their instincts might scream otherwise.
In an attempt to prove this, I undertook an anonymous survey of values using 211 people from three media businesses I’m involved with. Questions required participants to remember back to their first day in the job. When asked if they came into the role thinking of themselves as a team player, 77.5% claimed a very firm, ‘Yes, all of the time’. A further 20% said, ‘Yes, but only some of the time’ – a revealingly flexible approach to teamwork which may suggest that these people only play ball when it’s personally advantageous to do so (a behaviour definitely driven by evolutionary strategy).
Only 2.55% admitted an outright, ‘No, none of the time’.
Obviously this latter minority were honest, brutally so, but how about the majority?
When asked if, on that first day, they also imagined themselves getting promoted at some point in the near future, 79% of respondents (i.e., more than those who claimed to be team players) said ‘yes’. I thought the juxtaposition was interesting – getting promoted means you become elevated above your colleagues, which jars against the success of a team (a situation that demands everyone accept equal reward and recognition). Even more intriguing: 48% said they imagined themselves working their way up to the top – in other words, elevating themselves above everybody else in the building. Again, this grates if you claim to be team orientated.
It raises the question of whether or not it’s possible to be truly collaborative if you also seek personal glory.
It might be easy to pick a few holes in the survey – it may be that people in media are not as nice as those in, say, healthcare – but these answers are indicative of how hard you have to work in order to better channel this perpetual drive to compete. It’s harder still to point it in a direction that is beneficial to the entire business and not just a select few individuals.
For me, the failure to manage this drive is the first step towards a flawed – or worse, toxic – internal culture, riven with conflict.
How you can use evolutionary strategy to reduce conflict
Darwin’s finches point the way forward: these tiny birds found a way to live in harmony by diversifying. The net effect was that they avoided competing for the same food resources. In professional life, people compete against each other, too – not for food, but recognition and reward. The parallels between organisational life and the family dynamic are striking; the struggle for attention and the need for a person to find a niche to divert investment in their direction spring to mind. It’s evident that any organisation can be a Darwinian minefield, but one way of avoiding standing on any booby traps is to be more finch!
In practice, if you are a project manager tasked with building a team from scratch to deliver a particular project, you should think of your project as the Galapagos, and the people required to deliver it as the finches. You might then think about how to break down that project into individual layers or workstreams.
Consider what kind of temperament, qualities and expertise each goal requires and, subsequently, what type of finches you need.
Who are your cactus eaters and who are your leaf eaters?
I was prompted to think of Darwin’s finches and how their behaviour might help me while trying to put together a team to crack a tough client brief. After posting an internal request, I got a deluge of responses for one particular role, which happened to be the glamourous, high-profile role in my line of work: the creative lead. There were no responses for the others.
By being more finch, it may be possible to manage our innate propensity to compete with each other and ensure that our endeavour, whatever its goal, is not an extension of the evolutionary family dynamic or the education system.
How might you become more finchlike in practical terms?
How to build a collaborative team and reduce conflict through values outing
My answer to this begins with something I refer to as values outing, a process which is wrapped up in a common word in corporate life: culture!
Business gurus, experts and C-suite executives are so hot for organisational culture it’s almost unseemly. My definition of it doesn’t differ much from any other commentator’s: it’s the way in which the people within an enterprise collectively act to achieve a vision.
It follows that the way they act can be shaped by a set of values – these are the ingredients. Much has also been said about the first step to actively shape good culture: which is to take a values-first approach to your recruitment and onboarding policy; a signpost to all that there is a defined, identifiable culture and, by extension, behaviours that are less tolerated. Following on from recruitment, you’ll find equal amounts of expert opinion telling you that all decisions taken every day inside an organisation have to be genuinely guided by values.
I’ve followed all the advice to the extreme. As far as recruitment goes, I’ve relegated a candidate’s qualifications, past experience and abilities to a secondary position. And then I’ve gone further still: instead of recruiting people who would be a good fit with our published organisational values (which is where most advice points), I think there’s more value in getting candidates to reveal their own core values.
As we saw with my little values survey earlier, it’s difficult to pin people down on this. But if you can get people to truthfully out their real self, then you can make a better judgement call on their fit. This improves your chances of building a diverse team which features individuals with complementary beliefs and behaviours, as opposed to mere repeats of the values published on your website.
What’s interesting about this is that everyone instinctively feels at a gut level when something goes against their core values. A deep inner feeling tells you when a behaviour cuts against the grain. Yet if you were asked to clearly articulate your values, you might struggle. I’ve unfairly surprised many an interviewee by requesting them to share theirs, off-the-cuff and totally unprepared. Generally, people initially freeform over a range of superlatives, verbs and adjectives. Some of these will be completely aspirational (or totally untrue). Others will be words that the interviewee thinks you want to hear. Some will, of course, be absolute core beliefs – at least the ones that are socially acceptable.
In the values survey mentioned earlier, 96% of people answered ‘yes’ when asked if they possessed their own set of personal values. However, 78% of them had never committed them to writing, and just 4% could claim that they lived up to their values all of the time. Respondents were also asked to quickly, and without too much thought, list their top five values – an easy task for all who claimed they have their own personal framework. Later on, they were asked to repeat the exercise, but this time give their answer a lot more thought without recourse to their earlier inputs. Almost 50% changed one or more of the values the second time around.
I don’t mention this as a criticism, or to suggest everyone is dishonest. I offer it only to support the notion that, for a lot of people, personal values are seldom thought about and are not hard-and-fast rules. Further, if they are thought about at all, it’s mostly in aspirational terms. There simply aren’t that many people who