Tribalism
When someone leaves a job, they often say people are what they will miss the most. So why are internal politics also cited one of the top reasons people leave a job? Don’t these two things sound contradictory? The answer is tribalism. They won’t miss all people, they will miss their people.
In so many corporations today, teams and leaders are pitted against each other for resources and attention. We are competing to be the highest performer, adding more value to the company than our peers. Corporations believe the only way to increase their value is to prioritize the “highest performing“ work(ers) and cutting the lowest performing work(ers). [Note: there is a big difference between under-performance for the role and applying a bell curve to your workforce, which is a topic I will save for another thought post.] This all lands in a tribalistic mentality within the corporation that us versus them culture. It breeds corporate politicians who spend most of their days in meetings, trying to convince leadership why their idea or their teams work is the most important thing to prioritize.
You may find a few quiet people who ask “how do we work as a team instead of competing with each other?”. Instead of spending so much energy competing, we could be working together as one company to win against the market, to fight our external competition. This is the startup mentality so many CEOs try to rebuild as the grow larger, but they do not break down the system that fosters the internal competition. They want people to act as a startup while they are still fighting each other for resources and priority.
At the best performing companies I’ve been at, leaders bring people together by ensuring that everyone in the company knows how their work contribute to the greater court goals. The mechanism was top down OKRs. (If you are unfamiliar with OKRs, I recommend this article.) I have come to the conclusion that top down OKR is the best method because it allows the CEO and their leadership team to align on what the company will work on together, then cascading those goals down through teams to individual contributors. At each cascading step, people decide how they contribute to the overall goals and align with their manager before cascading to the next level. Leaders say they want to empower their people, and this is an excellent approach to empowerment while ensuring everyone is working toward same goals.