Negative remarks about others have the same detrimental effects whether they are blatant or back-handed.
When I facilitated a meeting between two departments who weren’t getting results, it didn’t take me long to see what was happening.
People in one department were making negative remarks about people in the other – and vice versa. Sometimes, the jabs were direct, like “you didn’t do your job” or more subtle, such as “had this been handled correctly in the first place, we wouldn’t need to be here now.”
Most people weren’t being intentionally malicious. But they HAD fallen into the trap of “them and us”. They came from an organizational culture that had encouraged, one way or another, adversarial positions at a serious price for all.
The good news is that once we identified the problem, we began the process of getting rid of it.
Action – What would it be like in your organization if “them and us” was eliminated?
(originally posted February 16, 2010)