You — Identity — Team

We all struggle with this question at some point in our lives. Who am I? What do I really want? What am I not? As an individual, we might feel the need to discover answers to these questions at multiple points in our lives. The realization may come as young as a teenager or as old as retirement. But the effect of those realizations shape who we are and also our relationships with those around us.

From wikipedia
In psychology, identity is the qualities, beliefs, personality, looks and/or expressions that make a person (self-identity) or group (particular social category or social group).

Today we will not discuss personal identity, as that in itself deserves a separate post. Today, we will talk about identity of a group of people. The idea of a group of people exhibiting characteristics of a single entity. Almost as if they were a single organism, reacting to situations around it.

I’ve been lucky to have been part of over a dozen cross-functional teams across 5 different organizations. Patterns begin to emerge after a point, where I started to see certain social behaviors of the individuals in teams. There are many ways to talk about group identity, but the lens of identity always intrigued me. Let me share two stark examples of how presence vs absence of perceived identity made a difference in the team’s throughput, morale, internal dynamics and communication.

The first example is that of a team at the forefront of “revolutionizing the IT industry” (a rather tacky line, but they truly follow it). I joined that team right out of college, with not much real understanding of where I was ending up, what impact it’ll have on me and the significance of what that team was doing at the time. My first day the CEO showed up and sat down with all of us new hires, and in the next 20 min he basically laid down what “team” and “group identity” meant to him and the team.

“attitude, aptitude and integrity”, he said, “are the three fundamental qualities that we collectively measure in each other. An Attitude that is grounded, Aptitude for what you are capable of doing and a strong sense of Integrity that keeps you rooted and inspires those around you.” He went on to describe other “principles” of this collective like Customer focus, Sustainable business practices, etc. but it was that first set of fundamental human qualities that stuck with me. Because since then for me, no other company or leader focussed on human qualities to build a team. And since then I’ve seen what happens when you ignore those qualities.

I remember an example of ‘integrity’ as a quality in action. At a client pitch when our team realized that the client’s requirements were not matching up to the software services we were offering at the time, the team lead decided to come clean and refer the client to a competing consultancy instead. This was unheard of. Most other consulting firms would take the client’s money, say yes to whatever is the requirement and figure out if we they can do it later. But not this leader. We did end up losing the client to the other firm that year. But next year that same client came back, this time with a need which we could help them with. I later learned that they even referred another potential client because they were impressed by our honesty and that leader’s integrity.

To be honest, at the time I did get totally enamored by those words, and didn’t really know what it meant to have those values. What I mean by that is, I didn’t know what it would be like to NOT have those values, so I couldn’t truly appreciate it.

Fast forward several years, and a different team and company. Something unique was happening in the Tech industry in terms of creation of teams. The importance of building cohesive teams was a known unknown at this point. People knew they needed to be like 37Signals or Atlassians of the world, but not everyone knew how to do it. No one wants to look like a stuck up corporation with literal and metaphorical cubicles. The words “Agile”, “flat structure”, “open layout”, “cross functional teams” are being used freely by every other company nowadays. Companies like 37Signals, Atlassian, Google showed the world that there was a different way (note I didn’t say necessarily better) for teams to come together and build products. Everyone wants to be a Google today.

So on the surface, this new team I was a part of had the same feelings as that first one. Seemingly cross functional teams, what looked like flat structure, etc. But something didn’t add up. After a few months I realized that the individuals on the ground didn’t know what the identity of this team was. Or at least they couldn’t all agree on what the basic attributes defined this company. Yes, there was a marketing page with all of the company’s “values” listed out, but none really related to them. Some people felt that the values were too generic, not enough to define a strong enough identity.

The effect could be seen during difficult decision making situations. Everyone would come at a problem with their specializations, experience and biases. But very rarely would we agree on why a decision was being made, what is at the root of it. Eventually the stronger personality or the higher ranking person in the room would make the decision, but the reasons were never clear. Were we going after improving our end customer’s experience? Was it client focussed? Or was it purely revenue focussed?

After being in enough of these meetings, I would hear the phrase, “This just feels wrong”, or “I don’t get it, why would we (company) do this to our client/customer?”. The doubt would grow wider and often transform into disconnect when the team members wouldn’t get a unified answer to the “why” question.

Good examples (that I’ve found) of companies with strong set of values and a group identity, that each of it’s employees strongly believes in are; Google, Atlassian, 37Signals, ThoughtWorks, Amazon and Netflix.

So next time when a leader or co-worker of your organization pushes for a decision that isn’t tied to your group’s identity, ask them the question, “How does this decision map to our group identity?”.

This is a personal blog. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are personal and belong solely to the blog owners and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the owners may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. Any views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual.