Friday, November 26, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Learning to play with others
One day in the 7th grade, I lost all of my friends. We had no argument; there was no scene. I simply found myself one day shunned by the girls whom I had considered close friends. I found myself eating lunch alone, walking to class alone. No phone calls after school. No eye contact or recognition that I existed from this group of girls. My time alone probably lasted just a couple of months, but it felt like a lifetime. In the end, a girl who was previously my closest friend called and said she wanted to be friends with me, even if the other girls disapproved. I asked the question that had been my constant companion through the time of my blacklisting: Why? What had I done to deserve this? The answer astounded me: “One day you went to the front of the algebra class and wrote the answer on the board.” Apparently, the way I did this had angered one of the group, who then persuaded the rest of them to drop me.
I’ve known these facts about myself since I was 12: it’s not enough for me to get an A; I am driven to be at the top of the class. Another fact I learned: basing achievement on competition harms relationships. Differentiating yourself by achievement can provide the kind of distance that is hurtful. I have tried to remain mindful of this difficult lesson. It’s one I have a hard time learning once and for all.
These memories came back to me as I was thinking about a book by Mary Catherine Bateson called “Composing a Life.” Bateson explores the concept of complementarity in personal and working relationships. Complementarity recognizes that people are different in many ways, without placing those differences in the context of value -- higher/lower, better/worse, more/less. It also incorporates interdependence -- the necessity of the complement to complete the whole.
Complementarity is therefore the antithesis of the two most widely-held models of thought in American business or culture: competition and teamwork. In the American ethos, competition must be fair, which means no competitor can be naturally disadvantaged -- that is, the competitors must have symmetry, what we call a level playing ground. Teamwork similarly demands that everyone on the team is either equal or made equal within the context of the team. Any differences due to authority outside the team are artificially stripped whenever the team convenes.
These concepts fail to account for the fact that people are different, and different in many ways. Airbrushing out all of the differences to create fair competition or teamwork takes out of the picture the differences that could make a difference. Finding common ground is important to enable people to work together, but if they limit themselves to the common ground they limit their collective possibilities. Rather than benignly ignoring each other’s differences, why not recognize them and see if those differences could help collaboration?
We are restrained from embracing those differences when we place a higher value on our own attributes. Recognizing a difference in another person, and welcoming that difference because you lack it, would require that you accept that you don’t have it all. You’re not at the head of the class; if you perceive you are then perhaps you have defined the class too narrowly.
I’ve witnessed this struggle in many manager-employee relationships. The manager, whose position of authority frames this relationship, can feel compelled to be the expert, the guide and the monitor, enhancing the one-dimensional asymmetry of the relationship. Because a manager is expected to achieve through employees, any failure of an employee therefore reflects on the manager. When a failure does inevitably occur, the manager has to find some way to reconcile his/her rightness in the face of another’s failure. This is nearly always destructive, both to the manager’s ego and to the relationship between the employee and the manager.
What if instead we conceived of a manager achieving with employees rather than through them? The differences between the manager and employee -- not only position and authority, but also life experiences, perceptions, and skills -- could be included rather than excluded in their working relationship. If someone fails in a task, the focus could be on learning from the experience rather than (self-) recrimination. This could be freeing in some ways, but the manager would also have to accept that the position doesn’t make a person better, or more special. It just makes you different, in some ways, from some people.
Undoubtedly, my 12 year old nemesis was as stunted by her math insecurity as I was by my need to write the answer on the board. Had we the wisdom then that age confers, we might have seen in our differences a way for her to improve her grade and for me to learn humility.
I’ve known these facts about myself since I was 12: it’s not enough for me to get an A; I am driven to be at the top of the class. Another fact I learned: basing achievement on competition harms relationships. Differentiating yourself by achievement can provide the kind of distance that is hurtful. I have tried to remain mindful of this difficult lesson. It’s one I have a hard time learning once and for all.
These memories came back to me as I was thinking about a book by Mary Catherine Bateson called “Composing a Life.” Bateson explores the concept of complementarity in personal and working relationships. Complementarity recognizes that people are different in many ways, without placing those differences in the context of value -- higher/lower, better/worse, more/less. It also incorporates interdependence -- the necessity of the complement to complete the whole.
Complementarity is therefore the antithesis of the two most widely-held models of thought in American business or culture: competition and teamwork. In the American ethos, competition must be fair, which means no competitor can be naturally disadvantaged -- that is, the competitors must have symmetry, what we call a level playing ground. Teamwork similarly demands that everyone on the team is either equal or made equal within the context of the team. Any differences due to authority outside the team are artificially stripped whenever the team convenes.
These concepts fail to account for the fact that people are different, and different in many ways. Airbrushing out all of the differences to create fair competition or teamwork takes out of the picture the differences that could make a difference. Finding common ground is important to enable people to work together, but if they limit themselves to the common ground they limit their collective possibilities. Rather than benignly ignoring each other’s differences, why not recognize them and see if those differences could help collaboration?
We are restrained from embracing those differences when we place a higher value on our own attributes. Recognizing a difference in another person, and welcoming that difference because you lack it, would require that you accept that you don’t have it all. You’re not at the head of the class; if you perceive you are then perhaps you have defined the class too narrowly.
I’ve witnessed this struggle in many manager-employee relationships. The manager, whose position of authority frames this relationship, can feel compelled to be the expert, the guide and the monitor, enhancing the one-dimensional asymmetry of the relationship. Because a manager is expected to achieve through employees, any failure of an employee therefore reflects on the manager. When a failure does inevitably occur, the manager has to find some way to reconcile his/her rightness in the face of another’s failure. This is nearly always destructive, both to the manager’s ego and to the relationship between the employee and the manager.
What if instead we conceived of a manager achieving with employees rather than through them? The differences between the manager and employee -- not only position and authority, but also life experiences, perceptions, and skills -- could be included rather than excluded in their working relationship. If someone fails in a task, the focus could be on learning from the experience rather than (self-) recrimination. This could be freeing in some ways, but the manager would also have to accept that the position doesn’t make a person better, or more special. It just makes you different, in some ways, from some people.
Undoubtedly, my 12 year old nemesis was as stunted by her math insecurity as I was by my need to write the answer on the board. Had we the wisdom then that age confers, we might have seen in our differences a way for her to improve her grade and for me to learn humility.
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