The Concept of “We”

Over the years, I’ve attended countless courses, team bonding activities and company dinners where we will play all sorts of games.

The concept of the games usually goes like this; there will be a scoreboard and we will be divided into teams. Games will involve scoring points and in the end, the team with the highest score wins. Most of the time, we will let ourselves loose and get excited (it’s an after-work event anyway) and try our best to outsmart, outwit and outplay the opposition.

The key point I’m trying to make is not about the games. The fact is that in this short span of time, I felt that my teammates and I, “We”, belonged to “Team A” and “They”, and everybody else, became the enemy.

Us Versus Them

After one of these events, my team lead and I were discussing about how to motivate the guys to hit our sales targets for the month. I said,

“Remember the company event we had last week? We were just split into random teams to play games and everyone went into crazy competitive mode to try to win even without knowing the prize. The point is, we can try to re-create this spirit by creating a competition and finding a “common enemy”.”

I can’t recall how well did it worked out. But what we did was to stir some competition between the 2 teams to see who is the better team after that month’s sales performance.

As a leader, I think that everyone knows that the key to a successful project is that all members work together as a team. However, the above episode suggests that such common sense can be forgotten just by being casually divided into teams.

A project usually consist of members from different departments. If left unchecked, sub-teams will be formed within the project. This “Us versus Them” structure will then complicate the project. There will be conflicts between teams and members and this can be very frustrating.

In order to prevent this, leaders must give due consideration to create a system where communication is open and also encourages cooperation between all team members beyond their departments/organization/team.

Who is Included?

The word “We” may or may not include everyone.

At work, I’ve noticed the ways of how colleagues or people from other organizations used “we” or “them”. For example, someone would use “we” when referencing to their ex-company, or a project manager using “them” when referencing to the higher management. In other words, the word “We” has the effect of dividing the whole by separating you from the others.

I find this very interesting. But even if it’s not such a big issue, or it could just be a slip of the tongue, a casual statement like “you know, we used to do this back in xxx company” creates a wall between you and the team.

Then, what happens if we thoroughly enforce the phrase We = all projects?
In other words, the usage of the word We is limited to the meaning that does not separate “us” from “they” and “you” (= We including all).

Final Thoughts

As a leader, I think that it is important to always be consciously aware of how to use the word “We” because of how it unites or divides the people.

To me, it seems a little manipulative but he/she should know how to use the word “We” to achieve their goals.

A leader should also not be narrowly focused on a team’s performance but view from a larger perspective to foster team spirit in a higher level.