If you’re reading these lines, you probably work in some kind of white-collar occupation, perhaps in a leadership role. You have business acquaintances and you serve clients. In all likelihood, you are someone’s work colleague.
The work “place” brings us into contact with others who can be our joy, our bane, or perhaps a bit of either depending on the day of the week and the colleagues in question. We can be quick to judge those we work with, but we are not very good judges of ourselves or of what others think of us, as countless 360-degree surveys will attest to.
I see it all the time. A “team” is struggling with actual teamwork. People are territorial, hold on to information, don’t respond to emails, don’t collaborate. Difficult conversations are avoided and issues get swept under the carpet. Trust is low, frustration is high, and people point fingers at each other for low employee morale and engagement and missed targets.
The temptation is to address the deficiencies through so-called incentives, which is just another way of wielding a hammer: When we say: “do A, B, and C to maximize your year-end bonus”, we’re really saying “you won’t be getting a bonus if you don’t do A, B, and C”. You may get compliance of the kind you get from drivers who fear a speed trap, but you certainly haven’t won over any hearts and minds. At best, you’ll get a culture of compliance, which has never underpinned any really high-performing teams.
Truly effective teamwork requires more than forced alignment. It is an exercise in practical reason, a form of social reasoning. It requires that we come together to deliberate on what we want to accomplish through our common project and what that will require of each of us (our team norms). It is also an exercise in mutual accountability. I mean by this that the various members of the team each have to make a conscious decision to be good colleagues to others and work at it continuously. Which pulls it into the realm of morals and ethics, of the obligations that we hold to ourselves and others.
Now, you may be surprised at how we’ve gone from teamwork and collaboration to morals and ethics, but this is not at all contentious.
Most of the moral problems we are faced with on a daily basis are quite ordinary. The moral and ethical questions you likely run into most often, as Owen Flanagan explains, “are not dilemmas and they are not emergencies. Most pertain to personal friendship, to civic friendship, to work for social justice, to being honest and reliable, to living up to one’s own standards, and to creating conditions in which the youth develop into persons, with the capabilities and sensitivities that will serve them well in the moral project.” (Flanagan, 2017, p. 257)
What it means to be a “good” anything – a good parent, a good teacher, a good colleague – brings up questions of choices and trade-offs, questions of values. To put it differently, you and your teammates can choose to be good colleagues or choose to ignore the demands of it and those choices say something about you.
You’ll object perhaps that this or that behaviour that would make you a great colleague is not in line with your temperament, your nature. That brings to mind the words 15th century Japanese philosopher Shiba Yoshimasha: “If the curved are made into wheels and the straight are made into axles, there will be no useless people.” (in Cleary, 2008, p. 21) I hold the less fatalistic view that we humans do in fact have the ability to grow beyond our first nature. I therefore prefer a different metaphor, one that has found favour with philosophers from Xunzi to Kant: “We are each a difference instance of crooked wood with great potential to be transformed into something better.” (Flanagan, 2016, p. 274).
If you have the potential to grow beyond your first nature, if you have agency, it makes your behaviour on a team your choice, and therefore your accountability. Or to put a finer point on it, how good or bad a colleague you are becomes a matter of character, as shaped by yourself and the human ecology that you are part of.
I am reminded here of something from 17th century Confucian scholar Nakae Toju: “The difference between government by character and government by law should be well understood. Government by character means first correcting your own mind and then correcting the minds of others. This is like the plumb line and square of the carpenter, which when in proper condition correct warping.” (in Cleary, 2008, p. 42)
One point is that how we decide to live together and behave towards each other is a matter of individual and collective character. Another point is that it starts with leaders as role models and mirrors for all who fall within their sphere of influence. All workplaces have policies and procedures, but almost everything that happens is shaped by the fuzzy concepts of norms, values and beliefs, under the even fuzzier umbrella of culture. And it starts at the top.
The workplace is a moral space, one in which, to paraphrase Damon Young, we get to create and recreate ourselves, and help one another do the same (Young, 2014, p. 217). It is, in other words, both a “me” and “we” effort. “This creation is not lawmaking or whimsy, but education, understood as the cultivation of habits which lead to the right words and deeds at the right time and place.” (Id.)
Like any common project that pulls together a variety of human beings with all of their uniqueness and foibles, teamwork is very hard work because it is about who we are and aspire to be.
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References
Cleary, Tomas (Ed.). Training The Samurai Mind: A Bushido Sourcebook. Shambala, Boston & London, 2008, 277 pages.
Flanagan, Owen. The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility. Oxford University Press, 2017, 362 pages.
Young, Damon (Ed.). Philosophy and The Martial Arts: Engagement. Routledge, New York, 250 pages.
