I’ve written about passive aggression and how much I dislike it. I dislike it because I don’t like that feeling of things unsaid which create ever building pressure — a pressure which dares me to relieve it.
Recently I was listening to Bruce Daisley’s excellent podcast “Eat, Work, Sleep, Repeat’ on the future of work. He was interviewing a psychologist who had done some research on teams for which one of his conclusions was the teams who feel secure tend to argue more. This was the headline to the podcast and it sounded a little too good to be true. What did secure mean ? How secure did you have to feel ?
Listening to the podcast what he actually meant was teams where individuals understand what they’re trying to achieve, know the part they will play in the team’s success and have every confidence in their own experience and abilities.
That sounds about right, only I can name around three teams in the last 30 years where I’ve felt anything remotely like that, and I would think I’m not alone. Teams are complex things. Rarely is the objective or the plan so ambiguous and consistent that everyone knows what it is. Far more frequently, different people have different ideas of the plan even if they’ve been in the same meeting when it was discussed and agreed.
People might understand what part they could play, but politics means people are rarely satisfied with the part they play and either wish they had someone else’s part or are keen to add someone else’s role to their own.
Even if the plan was clear and I was satisfied with my role, who wants to just stick to the stuff I know how to do ? Surely I will learn more when I’m on the very edge of my capabilities if not quite some way over ?
So it would seem to me that arguing is likely to be the natural state of any team. In fact, if there’s no arguing, either passive aggressive is dominant in the culture’s norms or people feel very insecure in the team and don’t want to rock the boat. Either way, the team’s chances of success don’t look good do they ?
