Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 93: Me or Us?

February 22, 2022 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 93: Me or Us?
Show Notes Transcript

"Are people actually inquiring about other people's needs? Are they speaking about their own? And are they doing that in a way where it seems like they're not threatened by one or the other?"

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Paul:

Welcome to Employing differences, the conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen:

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Me or Us?"

Paul:

One of the things that Karen and I run into a fair bit, because we work a lot with groups we don't just work with individuals, we work with that space between is this tension that we feel between individual needs and the needs of the group. In the different ways that groups and individuals try to resolve those and try to think about them and try to work with them, we've noticed a couple of patterns. We want to talk about their relative effectiveness, and where we think it actually works, and what actually helps groups to navigate those tensions that are sort of necessary and always going to exist, of paying attention to both individual needs and group needs. And so, Karen has strong feelings about this. So I want to turn it over to her to start with.

Karen:

Yeah, I work a lot with consensus groups. And when people come into a consensus group, they're coming largely out of our broader pretty individualistic culture. So we're used to coming in to a meeting and sort of fighting for the thing I want. And when we say, "Okay, we're gonna do it by consensus," we don't want to do that anymore. We want to have this awareness of the whole group. And because we start with such a strong bias towards individual needs, there's a tendency to flip it the other way. And you get this mantra, almost, of, "The way to be a good community member is to set aside your individual wants, and instead support what's going to be best for the community." And that sounds good. But it turns out to be actually really a denial that individuals are part of the community. That the thing that's good for an individual is inherently good for the community, because the community is made up of individuals. And so this idea that the whole framing, that one competes with the other, when in fact they're the same thing. What's good for the individuals collectively is also what's good for the group. And I want to say one more thing about that mantra, which is what I see happen with it, is it becomes a version of majority rule, of majority vote. So we say we're doing consensus, but culturally, we put a thread over it that says, "If you're the only one who wants it, you should concede," and what's good for the group is interpreted to mean the same thing as what the majority wants. And I really want to point out that one of the fundamental philosophies of consensus for me is that there's a huge difference between what the majority wants particularly early on in the conversation and what actually is good for the group. One might like them to be reliably aligned, but in fact, they're not.

Paul:

Yes. So I also want to look at the other side of that, because I work a lot in organizations that do still really have a lot of that individual focus. And we're trying to help people work together as teams. They're coming together as groups. And one of the things that we often fail to do well is frame what is the common interest and the common goal and things like that. But then I think one of the things that organizations like that really struggle with is how to generate what is often called commitment. And what commitment really means in that situation is for each individual to consider the group's needs, the organization's needs, on par with at the same time as their individual needs. And it's almost the frame the other way of being able to say, "I need to recognize that I can't succeed without the group succeeding." And so it's, it's, it's that similar thing of we need to hold both. But kind of coming at it from the other angle. Often in those organizations, you see the fear that the individual need is going to trump the group's. And in your case, you're coming from the other side of the fear is because we've pendulum swung the other direction that the group concerns are going to completely outweigh the individual concerns. I think both of those they have different failure modes but both of those are pointing to the fact that when we are working together in groups, when we're living in a community, when we are trying to do something collectively, we have to be considering both the collective and all of the individual perspectives that make it up in order for things to work well.

Karen:

Yeah. And I think the skill that underlies that is the ability to see things from different perspectives. Because it's not that we don't consider individual needs, it's that we have to each of us has to be able to hold all of the individual needs. It doesn't mean we have to be able to meet them. But we have to have a capacity for hearing the person who needs more time to do a thing, the person who needs the thing done more efficiently, the person who needs quiet, the person who needs a loud interactive space to work. There's all these different needs that can show up in the space of a conversation. But if we show up in a competitive way, where we are pitting them against one another, our natural human instinct is to focus on just the one that meets our needs, and really beat down or drown out or ignore the one on the other side. And what we want to be able to do is hold all of them so that we point our energy to "Huh, we've got this puzzle. We need loud spaces, and we need quiet spaces." We need these things that seem like they can't happen at the same time. How do we solve that puzzle, collectively, with each of us holding all the pieces?

Paul:

Yeah, we have to hold the space and be curious enough to actually get all of those perspectives out, so we can figure out what is the true shape of the actual problem we're trying to solve. And that is anxiety-creating. We're having to explore and it's going to get worse before it gets better. We have to come to discover those things. And then we have to figure out how to solve that real challenge. The thing that actually is the inclusive solution and the sustainable solution, because that's the other thing. When you when you consistently fall on one side or the other, of individual needs or group needs, or some individuals' needs and not others, those solutions tend not to stick. They're not sustainable, they don't work because they aren't including all of the perspectives and all of the needs that are present. But having the willingness to sit with that for long enough to get it out there can be hard. That is challenging. And what I've tended to notice is that when we lose patience with doing that, when it just becomes too much for us to try to keep holding that, we will usually try to find a way out in one of two ways, which is either the,"Well, I'm just going to worry about meeting my needs" thing that you brought up. The competitive, "This is where I'm going to go, and I'm going to be rigid about my needs and where I'm at and what I want to do," or I will collapse, I will give in, I will be over accommodating. And so I will marginalize my own needs. Because either one of those either marginalizing somebody else's, or marginalizing my own makes the solution easier. Because it's whatever somebody came in with. And depending on our own personal makeup, we will tend to do one or the other. I know, for example, that when I'm overwhelmed with that kind of thing, I will accommodate. I will ignore my own needs, I'll just say, "Great, fine, we're just going to do the thing," because I want out of this situation. And that has drawbacks, just like trying to trying to steamroll people does.

Karen:

And I want to point out that those two things happen, and there's an awful lot of wolf in sheep's clothing about this sort of thing, too. So you'll hear people say, "But the right thing for the community is" and so you should give into the right thing for the community. And I had somebody say to somebody else, "Yeah, that thing that you say is the right thing for the community sounds an awful lot like what's right for you." So the language that we use to describe either how I'm advocating for my own thing, or how I'm just opting out of my own thing, and marginalizing myself and going with whatever, often sounds really community-minded, or really individualistic although I think more often community-minded and I think that the thing that we get caught in when we adopt this value of community first, potentially, is that it becomes unacceptable to speak of individual needs. And so what we do is we take our individual needs and we describe them as community needs. And then we don't have any way to figure out what the actual individual needs are. And if you're curious if this is happening in your group, see if anybody's ever said,"Well, I think some people need..." We want to avoid that. We can certainly say, "I'm guessing someone in here needs this." Do you? Is there someone? That's an invitational, but to say, "Well, we have to do this, because some people..." is very dangerous territory.

Paul:

I have been known in situations like that to say,"Who are those people? Are you one of those people? Is there anybody else here that is those people?" This is not the most skillful move, but yeah, when people start to be vague about that kind of thing is a clue that there is that sort of disguise thing that you're talking about going on there. The thing that ultimately, I think, we want to make space for, and the thing that helps us through this is creating a space where it is normal, acceptable, safe, to both speak, to be clear about what you think, feel and want and need. And also, to be curious about what other people think and feel and want and need. Because that's the ground conditions for being able to build these sustainable solutions: to be able to hold both the individual and the collective. We need both people to feel comfortable and safe saying what they need. And also to be curious about other people and what they need. And so that's kind of the the things that I will often I will look at whether or not those behaviors are happening. Are people actually inquiring about other people's needs? Are they speaking about their own? And are they doing that in a way where it seems like they're not threatened by one or the other?

Karen:

Yeah, and I want to go one other direction with this which sounds almost competing with what you just said. But there is also this sense that when we're together as a group, we have a reason to be together as a group. And so they's what we might call a mission. So if we are software developers, we're trying to build a piece of software. If we're living together, we're trying to build us into a community. We have some kind of mission, and some personal needs are consistent with that mission and some personal needs or not. And so I think there is a space to say,"I totally get, Paul, that you need a space of quiet, but we're here together to make music. We're a band. It's not gonna be quiet here." And so there is a space to say, "Okay, we're hearing and honoring and acknowledging the needs. You don't want to just be dismissing them with this. But, having acknowledged those needs, is it within the mission of the group or the purpose or the capacity for that matter of the group to try to meet those needs. And when it's not, then either that person needs to have other resources for getting those needs met, or maybe that person isn't a fit for the group. And so while we're all about employing differences here, and working with differences, in fact, there are times that the differences are too big. And there is a moment to say, "This group is trying to do a thing that's inconsistent with what I need, or what I'm excited about, or what I'm trying to do. And I should find a different group, or at least not be throwing my investments in here." And so the way to get to that is exactly the same thing we were just talking about, which is get all of the needs open and on the table, and then be able to have a frank conversation about, "You know, gosh, I had an understanding that the mission of our group was this thing, and I'm not seeing how group energy going toward that need, is going to fit with the thing that we're here for. Where are others with that?" So that you can have that really authentic and it again, being very careful not to dismiss the need, the need is very likely real. I'm going to assume that, but it may or may not fit with where we are or what we're trying to do. Because you can go too far the other way of trying to meet everybody's needs and at the expense of what you actually came together to do.

Paul:

And what you're really doing there is you're being sort of clean and clear about what's going on here. Because then each individual can make their own best decisions. And we're being transparent about what's going on, so we all have access to the same information. about it. I think when there is that sort of haze or smoke screen where we're not really talking about what's going on, what the mission of the group is, what the what the group is there to do, what individuals are hoping to get out of being part of this group, what they need, what they want. When we don't talk about those things, then we can't get to that point of making clear and sometimes hard decisions about what we're going to do. Instead, we make start making these weird, not quite decisions on the cover of language that is socially acceptable, but doesn't actually move us towards where we want to be. And so I do think that that that clarity is very important.

Karen:

Yeah, so I think just to sum it up, what we're saying is"me or us" is a false dichotomy. We don't want to live in the competition between the two. We want to hold both because each individual is part of the community or the group. And the needs of each individuals are therefore present and part of the group being successful. And so what we need is a space where those individual needs are spoken and heard and taken it into account, and where the mission of the group is spoken and heard and taken into account, and where we can work together to solve the challenge when those things seem inconsistent with one another. When it seems like we can't or we don't yet have it figured out how to make all of those pieces fit, that we have the space to work together on that puzzle, rather than trying to compete for one versus the other.

Paul:

Well, that's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

And I'm Karen Gimnig, and this has been Employing Differences.