![]() They lacked what I refer to as organizational solidarity: creating strong ties to one another and to a shared purpose so people never question either. Recent research from McKinsey revealed that the strongest drivers of people quitting was not feeling valued (in other words, like they and their work mattered) and lacking a sense of belonging. Creating an affinity to a team with broader purpose immediately helped improve cohesion and collaboration across the organization. Teams focused on things like learning and education, innovation, community building, and hybrid work health and were composed of members from numerous functions and regions, all resourced and empowered to act. In one organization, to break down unhealthy tribalism, we established cross-functional teams to take responsibility for various aspects of the organization’s cultural health. ![]() In one experiment using brain imaging, a set of people whose amygdalas revealed a variety of implicit biases about certain types of people showed that those biases were dramatically reduced when participants were told those same types of people were now “on your new team.” The closer we affiliate with our “we” tribe, the more outsiders become “they.” The solution requires broadening the definition of we. Research from NYU’s Jay Van Bavel found that our brains quickly shift away from previously held biases when we work together in solidarity. Enabling people to establish new shared identities that bind them to one another more broadly helps reorient their brains to new relationships, seeing colleagues who were once “they” with fresh eyes. This type of we-they thinking will intensify if cross-functional connections aren’t strengthened. By default, those outside the group are “other” - and likely not to be trusted. We bind with and narrowly identify ourselves as one of our immediate group. Here are three approaches I’ve seen help leaders and their teams reestablish strong connections across organizational boundaries as they’ve shifted to hybrid work environments. For example, one executive said of his colleague, “She used to have the best sense of humor, but now quips I make that she would always laugh at get no reaction at all.” He’d failed to consider that she was emotionally exhausted because her family was hit especially hard by Covid-19. Otherwise, our natural biases that formed about who each of us were will kick in, creating unhelpful dissonance as we react to each other as we did prior to the pandemic. In short, we have to get reacquainted with who we’ve each become. For some, tolerance increased while for others, it decreased. Our senses of meaning and purpose have broadened. ![]() Working to rebuild bonds is especially important because most people won’t be returning to work as the same people they were before the pandemic the last 18 months have changed all of us in some way. Silos were certainly prevalent before the pandemic - hybrid work has simply created new requirements for effectively connecting teams that must work together to achieve shared outcomes. It results from a lack of intentional bridgebuilding to link discrete groups and regions. On top of all that, most of our remote work interactions have been with our immediate colleagues and focused largely on the tasks at hand - research from Microsoft suggests that cross-functional collaboration went down by 25% as interactions within groups increased during the pandemic.īut fragmentation isn’t a byproduct of remote work. The challenges of remote work, dramatic uncertainty, the clumsy process of figuring out what returning to the office could look like, and the mass exodus of workers fed up with cultures that make them feel devalued have all served to threaten a sense of community. Over the past 18 months, most organizations have experienced some degree of fracturing as social connections and cultural cohesion have been strained. ![]() As people slowly return to some form of hybrid workplace, bonds that tie them to one another must be rebuilt.
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