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- #10 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Gangs at Work
#10 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Gangs at Work
"Accounts just messed with you? They just messed with all of us."
Shiao Yin Kuik
June 15, 2023
"Accounts just messed with you? They just messed with all of us."
THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR
“I had a great time working there until we fell out over something. Then all of a sudden, they just stopped hanging out with me. I feel kind of sad now when I see them leave for lunch or go out for drinks after work - why does this feel like school cliques all over again?”
“They are a good team - but only with each other. It’s hard to get them to hang out with others, or collaborate on work projects.”
…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of dealing with Gangs at work.
THINK // 3 insights from the field
😇 THE GOOD THING about having a gang at work is you get a strong sense of inclusion, belonging, protection and power out of it.
They will make sure you don’t ever lunch alone. They celebrate your birthday. They share the good stuff - especially the juiciest office gossip. They defend you from incoming nonsense and fight together with you against all your office arch-enemies.
Going to work feels good when it feels like you’re going in to hang out with a bunch of friends more than going to work with colleagues.
Life can be cool when you are hanging with the cool kids.
🤬 THE BAD THING about gangs at work is that they are not teams.
And workplaces need teams - more than gangs - to thrive.
Gangs =/= Teams
Peaky Blinders’ gang
GANGS (or cliques) are groups where an individual’s inclusion, position and belonging depends on how one or a few powerful or popular insiders relate to them.
A big clue that you are in a gang vs. a team is the presence of an Inner Circle of insiders surrounding a leader of the pack. The Inner Circle can feel overtly or covertly elitist, exclusive or secretive to outsiders.
It is easier to be personally or professionally excluded when an individual falls out of favour with the gang’s leader/Inner Circle
Gangs work very well on what the gang leaders want them to work to work on. But if the gang leader doesn’t want the gang to work on something, the gang may be compelled to rebel, stonewall or covertly work around the other people involved.
Gangs can be less aware of the need to relate and collaborate with outsiders. They are quicker to relate and collaborate with their fellow gang insiders. The most anti-social gangs may be dismissive, suspicious, disrespectful, even contemptous of gang outsiders.
Ted Lasso’s football team
TEAMS are groups where an individual’s inclusion, position and belonging hinges on whether they have a part to play in the work that needs to be done together. A team is built more around the continual process of learning how to relate and work more interdependently so that they can accomplish a common mission or specific objective together.
There may be some people in the group who have developed closer professional working relationships or personal friendships with each other or to the team leader but it will not feel like an impenetrable, elitist, exclusive or secretive Inner Circle.
In a team, you might still get excluded when there is personal or professional fall-out with each other. But healthy teams will make conscientious efforts to work through their disagreements and tensions independent of the social approval or direction of a leader or Inner Circle.
Teams work on what the team and their team leaders determine is necessary and/or desirable to work on. They will consider own personal, professional and organisational interests. If the team/team leader doesn’t want to work on something, they may contend and negotiate strongly with other people involved - but will not resort to anti-social behaviours like stone-walling, triangulating etc..
Teams actively practice relating and collaborating with fellow team-insiders. They are aware of the need to relate and collaborate with team-outsiders. They are generally open, curious, considerate and respectful of outsiders who wish to do so.
High Performing Gangs =/= High Performing Teams
Some organisations tolerate high-performing gangs because they are a strong group that knows how to work together to bring in the results. Gangs can create great results in the short run because they are very motivated to do what is good, welcome and desired by their group of gang members and leaders.
This works in your favour - as long as you are part of the gang, in support of the gang or aligned with the gang’s interests.
High-performing gangs inspire social anxiety from outsiders wanting to be included vs excluded from the “cool crowd”. People’s energy and focus can shift from working for social approval vs. working on better performance, mastery or achievement per se.
Over time, high-performing gangs led by high-performing gang leaders may build cultures of power-over and silo ways of work around them. This is especially so if the gang leader is a charismatic leader.
When the going gets tough, you may witness the gang run off to wherever the gang leader wants to go. They may even take your assets with them. This is where you see organisations lose entire “teams” in a mass migration of talent when a certain “team leader” quits for somewhere else. A lot of tension, anger and unpleasantness can follow in their wake with people taking things personally rather than professionally, feeling they must “pick a side” (A sure sign that you are part of a gang is feeling this covert or overt pressure to “pick a side”)
Ultimately, a gang’s strongest loyalties are personal more than professional or organisational. They care for their gang members and gang leaders. They may not care about you, the work or the organisation.
Similar to gangs, high-performing teams bring in great results because they are strongly motivated to do what is good, welcome and desired by their group of team members and team leaders.
The difference is teams know how to look outward not just inward. They aren’t just driven by Inner Circle dynamics. Good teams care for the good of other teams and the organisation they are embedded in as well. Good gangs care for the good of their gang.
High-performing teams can inspire healthy envy and ambition from outsiders who want to be included in the group. But the desire may be less about being part of an Inner Circle of cool kids and more because people want to experience the team’s camaderie, cooperative spirit and sense of achievement.
High-performing teams led by high-performing team leaders build cultures of power-with/for and collaborative ways of work around them.
When the going gets tough, you may still witness a strong team leave with a strong team leader especially if there is a case of deep disappointment or disenchantment with organisational direction. However, while a team cares about its team members and team leaders - it also cares about relationships beyond the team, the results, the work and the organisation. There may still be tension but it can be discussed professionally as people are not as compelled “to pick sides”. Strong team members may remain behind without fear of relational retribution from their former team members or team leaders.
Low Performing Gangs are the worst
Low-performing gangs led by low-performing gang leaders are just downright toxic without even bringing in results. They are the gossipers, the bottom-feeders, the ones who pull people and their ambitions down so nobody can stand out and they can live on, collecting their pay cheques and enjoying their gang time.
Why are you even putting up with them?
Build Teams, Bust Gangs
Build healthy teams around healthy team leaders who take care of 3 things simultaneously for themselves + others:
- personal well being
- professional well being
- organisational well being
Bust gangs who only take care of their interests.
Workplaces thrive through teams, not gangs. Workplaces break down when they are run by gang leaders and gang members rather than team leaders and team members.
😈 THE UGLY THING about gangs or cliques at work is that they appeal to our unhealthy hunger to become a member of an Inner Circle - or to lead an Inner Circle that gets to decide who is In and who is Out.
In 1944, writer/pilosopher C.S. Lewis wrote a famous essay “The Inner Ring” exploring how this phenomenon is happening around us because of our dark desire to socially exclude in order to feel a sense of superiority:
There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names….it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.”…From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything…
…perhaps you discovered that within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner…And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.
Lewis detailed why it would be soul-endangering for anyone to hunger for inclusion into an Inner Ring of a gang built around exclusion:
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside…
…Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. …As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want…Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring…
And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can’t in fact do it…But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
Lewis proposed that we free ourselves from the need to be included into excluding Gangs and instead learn to recognise what being included in healthy friendships and healthy teams feel like - freedom from the drama of ‘periodic scandals and crises’ that come with Inner Circle gang life:
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow….You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.
But the difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like.
This is friendship…It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.
FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone
READ CEO of Lean Academy Botswana Sharon Visser on checking whether you are running a team or a gang
READ Writer/pilosopher C.S. Lewis’ famous 1944 essay on our problematic desire to be accepted as part of someone’s Inner Ring
DO // 1 strategy to try this week
NOTICE if you are dealing with what you suspect might be a gang in your workplace
THEN, GET CURIOUS
Is this group a gang or a team?
Is there an Inner Circle of insiders and a leader of the pack? Does it feel overtly or covertly elitist, exclusive or secretive to outsiders?
When someone falls out of favour with the group, are they excluded personally and professionally without a real way back in?
Do they relate and collaborate well with outsiders or are they closed off, dismissive, suspicious, disrespectful or contemptous?
Are they interested in shared relationships and shared results with outsiders of their group within their organisation?
IF POSSIBLE, TRY TO
Challenge your organisation on how much they really need a high performing gang leader and how long they can tolerate the social costs of having him/her around. Remember the gang leader can always stage a walkout and take a lot of assets with him/her.
Break up the high performing gang occasionally to see if individuals in there can be re-socialised to care for others beyond the gang when they are in healthier team settings. Sometimes people just behave strangely in a clique under charismatic sway.
Is there anyone who can help me deal with a dicey situation involving gangs at work?
It's hard work to do alone. And I would love to have a chat with you about what's going on for you and how I could possibly help.
I help my organisational clients strategise how to change what's working/not working in their culture. I design interventions, train leaders & their people in necessary skills and facilitate necessary conversations on their behalf.
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