Why do corporate teams turn evil?
Remember school days? Remember competitions in school? Remember winning and losing? Remember being happy when you won and upset when you lost? Some of us would have turned a bit negative in failure. Some of us would have become negative towards self and rarely towards others too. If you were lucky enough to have had good teachers, the moment you turn negative towards others, they would have given you a whack and told you to get over it and try harder the next time. In corporations, this doesn’t happen.
When someone fails in a corporate, the penalty is high. This is fair enough. It makes competition thrive. Having said that, this culture of intense competition kills the smallest sapling of collaboration. How often have you heard a colleague praise another one? They do praise when the two are in entirely different strata (for example, an entry level employee and a leader). The appreciation for a peer is so hard to hear. Why? If one does that, it might enhance the chances of other person’s growth. Why are they against this growth? The reason is that as you move up, there is such less room for co-existence. The pyramid cannot be more pointed!
Now the absence of collaboration leads to the mindset of “That is not my job!” How often have you heard a manager telling a fresher who suggests an idea for the larger team, “You do your job! Don’t get involved in too many tasks. There are other teams to take care of those things! ”We can all talk about organizational goals. But as long as the high premium on success stays, people will try to achieve only their goals and advance their agendas. They wouldn’t care about the larger picture at all.
Most organizations save their costs in employing lesser staff than required. This shortfall keeps the employees so occupied that they are unable to do anything beyond their daily routine. When they don’t have time to finish off their daily tasks, how will they help others? If they don’t help each other, how will personal relationships flourish? In the absence of personal relationships, what collaboration do we expect to happen? Collaboration is essentially lending a helping hand to each other, isn’t it? If people don’t like each other, they will not help one another.
This is where large corporations can learn a lot from startups. Startups are small, nimble and are in a position to maneuver easily. Every large company is made up of small teams. If there is a will, they too are capable of behaving like startups. Now, do all startups embrace the above-mentioned characteristics? Absolutely not! There are startups with founders whose egos are more inflated than their firms’ valuation. This trickles down the organization and people are at each other’s throats. But there are some smaller organizations who spend their time and energy on making their teams better, in terms of inter/intra- team relationships and dynamics as much as they focus on business. It is this aspect that larger organizations should emulate.
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