My entire career has been spent adjusting to shifting roles or new team members. I graduated from college and started my career in 2006, a time of enormous economic upheaval. My first job was as a contractor with a major medical device company. About 3 months in they laid off 10% of their workforce, which amounted to thousands and thousands of people. I survived the layoffs because I wasn’t getting paid anything and my cube was in a weird hallway underneath a staircase. Most people didn’t even know I was there.
I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, but watching my coworkers behavior leading up to and in the days following the layoffs was fascinating. Some panicked and did everything they could to prove their worth and save their jobs. This included calling long, superfluous meetings with too many attendees so they could show everyone how smart they were, yelling at coworkers for seemingly minor mistakes or genuine differences of opinion, and deliberately sabotaging teammates (kind of like outrunning a bear. I don’t need to be faster than the bear, I just need to be faster than you).
Other coworkers gave up. They simply accepted the inevitability that they’d be let go and quit trying the minute the impending layoffs were announced. They missed deadlines, started coming in late and leaving early, and spent the limited time they were available gossiping and speculating.
Why were my coworkers being so irrational and unprofessional, when (in theory) the most rational, professional, high-achieving employees would provide the most value to the company and have the best chance of saving their jobs (or at least better prepare themselves to find new work after the layoffs)?
I’ve also worked for companies that have gone through massive reorganizations. These typically led to the creation of new positions, the formation of new teams, and the hiring of new employees. Again, fascinating to watch how people responded. Some of my coworkers withdrew, not happy with how the reorganization affected their position. Some quickly turned on the new people, assuming they didn’t know what they were doing, or weren’t needed, or were filled with nefarious intentions to assume control. And some of the new employees did, in fact, start making rash decisions and attempting to assume control where they perceived power vacuums.
Why are people so strange?
Humans and Change
As a species, we’re ill-suited to respond to changing conditions. Our entire history of forming communities, developing civilizations, industrializing production, and crafting policies has been a drawn out effort to establish control, create stability, and minimize change.
Our jobs, our roles at work, the teams we work with, and our place on those teams are safety blankets. We’ll be okay as long as we have a job that provides us with survival essentials and material comforts. And as long as we belong to a team and understand what’s expected of us to succeed on that team, we’ll be protected. We’re fairly animalistic in this sense (sort of like a pack of wolves).
When that changes, when we face the instability caused by organizational restructures or layoffs or the addition of new people, we become uncertain and insecure. Reactions to these emotions vary, but by and large they cause anxiety, and many of us panic when we’re forced to deal with too much anxiety.
New People...Maybe Not That bad?
In 2009, researchers Katie Liljenquist , Katherine Williams Phillips, and Margaret Neale published a study called “The pain is worth the gain: The advantages and liabilities of agreeing with socially distinct newcomers” exploring group performance with new team members.
For the study, they divided students from Northwestern University into groups of 4 and had them solve murder mysteries. There were 2 different types of groups — groups made of 4 friends, and groups made of 3 friends and 1 stranger. The groups were all given the same evidence, and then they were given 3 suspects. They had to figure out which suspect committed the crime.
So which type of group did better?
The groups of 4 friends got the right answer about 50% of the time. That’s not very good when you consider there were only 3 possible answers. The groups with the 3 friends and 1 stranger, meanwhile, got the right answer about 75% of the time.
The researchers felt that the groups with the stranger did so much better because having the stranger in the group forced the 3 friends to have more conversations, to be more thoughtful, and to consider different perspectives.
It’s also interesting to note that the researchers interviewed the students after the study. The groups of 4 friends thought they did a great job and had a lot of fun. The groups with the stranger were full of doubt. It was awkward and messy. They didn’t think they got the right answer very often.
We think that teams of friends are better because it feels better. But time and again we’re presented with stories of teams that are more innovative, more creative, and more productive when things are a little messy, a little awkward, and we’re forced to adapt to change.
The 1995-96 Chicago Bulls were one of the best teams in NBA history. They went 72-10, until recently the best record ever, and won the NBA championship. Before the season started, Michael Jordan got into a fistfight with his new teammate Steve Kerr at practice. Kerr left practice with a black eye. This wasn’t a team of friends. They struggled to get along. It was awkward. They had Dennis Rodman, one of the strangest humans on earth, as their starting power forward. And they were one of the best teams ever.
New people make us better at our jobs. Even though we don’t like it.
Embrace the Awkwardness
I’m sure everyone reading this has been a new team member at one point or another. I’m sure everyone has gained a new team member at one point or another. Maybe you punched the new team member.
I’m guessing you didn’t, but what you did have to do was decide how to respond to the awkwardness of working with a new person. And there are good ways and bad ways to go about it.
A lot of times we resort to complaining. Or we isolate the new person. Or we isolate ourselves. All of these responses lead to negativity, frustration, and lost creativity.
There’s another way we can choose to respond. We can embrace the awkwardness and the mess of working with new people. If we can do that, we might find (as both research and anecdotal evidence suggest) that new people can help us be more creative, more innovative, and more productive.