Most of human life is experienced in a group of some sort. This starts with our family and extends to friendships, sports teams, social clubs, committees and communities of every kind. Work is also dominated by groups – from your immediate team to your office location or your company or your group of companies. By nature, we seek out and join groups, and they can support a sense of identity, belonging and security, as well as helping us to achieve things we cannot do alone. It also makes us feel good when we are accepted and liked in a group, not least thanks to the release of serotonin.
So as well as earning a living, we go to work to be part of a group.
But belonging to a work group can also cause us personal and social difficulties, not least as we struggle to balance our need for an individual identity – to be ‘me’ – with our group identity – to be ‘one of us’. Our work group often asks us to sacrifice aspects of our individuality in favour of its culture, customs, processes or rules. This can be positive, particularly if it supports or relates to aspects of professional identity, credentials or status and we can gain a great deal – from pride to career opportunities – by identifying and being identified with our organisational group. However, it can also present challenges that take their toll on our experience of work, particularly when group dynamics go wrong.
Organisations of any kind and size are formed to achieve tangible outcomes. From helping young people get qualifications to manufacturing cars or collecting household waste. To do this, they have to hire, train and retain people with different skills and organise their activities. They might have to make money or work within a budget to survive. Which means different people getting together in teams, departments, locations and virtually to cooperate with each other across a range of skills and experience.
In ideal circumstances, this cooperation leads to organisational success – making money, growing, building reputation, delivering benefits to customers or stakeholders and creating a sense of meaning and purpose for employees.
However, sometimes this organisational success is compromised precisely because people are unable to cooperate in their groups. There can be many reasons for this, but they often boil down to three causes:
- The work itself is very painful or difficult
- There is a crisis or threat to survival
- We feel leaders have let us down
In these circumstances, in different ways, organisations and the individuals and teams within them can stop behaving rationally. Instead, they find themselves at the mercy of group dynamics, often without realising it. These group dynamics are complex but are fundamentally about how people manage their anxiety about the difficulties of the work they are doing and the group they are part of. They can vary between becoming very dependent on a leader, finding a common enemy, running away from the problem and imagining a perfect future – all of which feel comforting at the time, but are often nothing to do with the actual work of the organisation. In fact, they are the opposite of work.
The symptoms of this might be familiar to you.
Sitting in meetings wondering what the meeting is about, but knowing that you need to be there. Talking about the same problem over and over again without ever addressing it. Noticing that your processes seem complicated, confusing and actually get in the way of doing the work, but not being able to change them. Feeling that there is a particular individual who is causing all the problems in your team and wishing they would leave. Getting into a bitter row with a colleague on a point of principle that gets really personal and can only be solved by one of you leaving. Feeling everything would be OK if only that other department was more efficient or effective. Feeling that everything will be ‘sorted out’ once the reorganisation or big contract or new product is completed. Feeling totally isolated in your team, as if the problems of the work are yours alone.
Feeling completely deskilled or unsure of your ability on a project even if you have done something similar before. Talking in a special language unique to your organisation – particularly abbreviations or acronyms – which you have to learn to fit in. Finding yourself taking up a repeated role in teams – the one who complains, the one who fixes everything, the one who gets angry, the one who doesn’t speak up, or the one who withdraws – without knowing why. Desperately trying to keep an established team together despite there not being any work for them to do.
If any of these are familiar to you, the chances are part of your organisational life has been taken over by group dynamics that have a life of their own and are not anything to do with the job at hand.
In the end, this boils down to simple overlooked realities about how you feel in a group, how your group feels about other groups and how your group is affected by the work it is doing or the context it is in. As organisations get more complex, are subject to continual change, restructuring and external threats to survival, the chances that you will feel at the mercy of these group dynamics get higher.
And even when group dynamics are not taking over, some organisations make the price of membership the sacrifice of your personal identity, authority or sense of independence – to belong, you have to give up part of yourself, which can lead to real tension and difficulty, particularly when it’s in competition with other important roles like those in our family or social groups.
So why does this matter?
If one of the needs we meet through work is belonging to a group, then it’s important to understand how groups can make us feel and behave, particularly if our feelings are stronger than the situation seems to demand. Those feelings can be incredibly positive and useful – it’s great to belong to an organisation dedicated to doing work we feel is valuable. But they can also be negative and difficult to process – from feeling to blame for problems we didn’t cause to living with painful conflicts and anxieties that seem insoluble, but are the ‘price’ of doing our jobs.
The issue is that we can sometimes allow our compulsion to be part of a group (or not) to drive where we work – e.g. a large or a small organisation – how we work – e.g. in a team or across teams or on our own – and what we do – e.g. a specific profession, role or trade. On the face of it, these are often based on rational considerations like wanting to work for a well-known employer, job security, previous work experience, existing relationships or to do something that matters. Under the surface, we want to be part of groups, but struggle with the reality of the demands they make on us – demands which often go way beyond work itself.
This is the third in a series of articles about what work is for, focusing on meeting three needs that go beyond earning a living, and the problems it can cause. They are inspired by my education and training in systems psychodynamic consulting, leading and coaching and draw on the research and writing of thinkers in the Tavistock tradition as well as my own professional experience. The next article looks at the need to feel productive.
If you are interested in executive coaching that draws on this way of understanding our personal, role and organisational experience of work, please get in touch.
Tom Jukes-Adams - Executive Coach 