Monday, April 16, 2012

Public and Private Voices


One of the first lessons I learned as an Organizational Studies student, in fact not one of the first...THE first, was that the influence of organizations are all around us.  Our teacher, Jason Owen-Smith, put us into small groups and asked us to brainstorm all the organizations we interact with on a day to day basis.  After listing the basics - the University, the Government, our student-group affiliations, etc. the list became much longer - the FDA (did you take Tylenol this morning?), British Petroleum (oh yea, I guess I had to put gas in my car today), your house (I guess my roommates and I all function as an organization)...and so on.

The list of organizations that we are an active player and representative of is much smaller.  There are maybe a handful of these but we are swimming in them.  We are totally immersed in them, which makes it hard to separate the organization from our identity.

We also have voices for our identities.  We have our private voice - the voice we use that's in our day-to-day when we feel like we aren't being watched or monitored.  We also have our public voice - the voice we use when we feel like we're addressing people publicly or perceive ourselves to be monitored.

These "voices" also roll-up into the organizational world.  In some organizations (say our crew of best friends and family) we feel private - we aren't scrutinized for our words or actions because they're, well, private.  In some organiztions we feel public (say the company we work for) - an as a result we project an image ourselves that we want people to see.  There are also variations of these - e.g., in a social organization which is private but we feel like we have a public reputation to project within the confines of that organization or in a community forum where all actors are in a public sphere but form sub-committees where they have private voice.

What I think is interesting is that the organizations themselves dictate a lot - in addition to the people contained - of the norms of using public and private voices.  After all, organizations with similar types of people or objectives produce very different cultures.  And  organization types produce very different cultures and behaviors even though people may be the same too.

In addition to this, many things have suddenly become interesting hybrids of hyper-public and hyper-private, because of telecommunications technology.  There's a lot of ambiguity in how one projects themselves publicly or privately and when has to do one or the other.

Managing these public and private voices, I think, is very stressful.  We manage our identities more than we tell the truth. I would argue that this causes our organizations to do funny things and have lackluster outcomes.  We spend tons of time managing our voices rather than focusing on our work, purpose and intended outcomes.

I think the ideal is to be able to have one voice - an "authentic voice", if you will - instead of a public and private one.

I don't have time to elaborate on this now (I'm about to land) but I think a nice goal for groups of people and the organizations they make up is to produce an environment where people can speak in an "authentic voice".  I think the same goes for individuals, we should try to merge our public and private voices into one.  It'll yield more trust and probably much more happiness and much less internal conflict for ourselves.

Everyone is suffering enough, we should rid ourselves of suffering that is self-imposed.

Wednesday, April 04, 2012

What makes a good team member?

As many readers (not to imply that I have a readership, but please roll with me) probably know or could guess - I have a fairly romantic but peculiar obsession with the idea of teams.  In my experience, as is with most things, some people buy into teams and others don't really see them as teams but rather as a sum of individuals.  Some see the synergy and some see the parts which may create synergy.  Some see the forest and some see the trees.

I'm interested in what makes people see the forest - what makes people buy into the concept of teams and be successful in them.  Here's a frame: what makes some people trust things (and in some cases put almost blind faith) into things that are "larger than themselves"?  Here are some thoughts, not necessarily woven together:

Practice / Commitment
If you're around teams long enough, you see the magic that they create and it's inspiring...especially if you're on a good team.  Moreover, if you're on a team that sticks together for awhile you start to flow really well together, which is good because you get past the growing pains of being on a team and you get to the good stuff.

Confidence / Comfort
I feel like it would be very easy to be alienated in a team if you're constantly fearful of your own standing or of your material well-being.  So, it's probably important to be confident and feel affirmed.  Without being affirmed, you'd probably be too worried about self-preservation to care about the team.

Purpose
It's a big turn-off, at least for me, to be on a team which doesn't align with one's own purpose.  It's really taxing on your personal energy.  Adding to that, if it's not a noble purpose (of the person or the team) one of the two - the team or the person - will fall to selfish aims, and in turn destroy the team.  To have purpose you have to find something that matters gravely to you - so I suppose discovering your passion is an utterly necessary component of being a good team member.

Humility
To submit yourself to something larger than yourself, you have to acknowledge that something other than you can be greater than yourself.  That's jumbled, I know, but the point still stands - you can think anything is greater than you if you think nothing is greater than you.

Selflessness / Listening
Teams don't function when any one members' needs are consistently higher than others'.  So, once has to have some level of selflessness (so they don't monopolize mindshare) and ability to listen.  Without these, there's not a team because someone has elevated themselves above others.

Authenticity
People in teams have to be real with eachother, or, nobody trusts them.  No trust = no team.  'Nuff said.

All of these, though, raise a larger question of - Neil, you've listed all these virtuous qualities...how do you cultivate those?  Ya know, I'll have to think about that - my ideas aren't quite there yet.

-nt