Who Is Your Common Enemy?

Have you ever noticed how having a common enemy brings people closer together?  I was daydreaming today (I learned the other day on the Daily Show that Einstein called this "Thought Experiments")and it occurred to me how, if global warming got really bad, that the whole world would have to work together just to save our sorry selves from planetary death, and there would be no more war.  Then I thought how sweet it was of Al Gore to get the country focused on a uniting global mission, as opposed to a divisive one.

Then I got back to my desk and thought about how the "common enemy" tactic is used to create political alliances within companies, and it occurred to me how harmful it can be.  At many companies, the common enemy of the employees is management.  That's pretty sad.    But it may not be as harmful to the company as two other popular common enemies.

What's sadder is that often, the common enemy is change, which means the end of innovation.  People with new ideas come in and get shot down because of their differences, until they learn to speak the party line and get subsumed by the groupthink.  How many times have you heard someone say, "We've been doing it like this for 20 years, we wouldn't think of changing it now!".  Curious, that more employees don't say, "Let's look critically at this process through this new employee's eyes.  Does it still work for us given how our competitive environment/customer base/workforce/marketplace reputation has changed?"

Even worse than that is when the common enemy is the customer.  I kid you not, this happens at some corporations.  You hear otherwise-smart employees say things like "Those stupid users, they have no idea how to use our software" or "Our customers are crazy if they expect us to offer refunds for defective merchandise, don't they know we have better things to worry about?" or "we're going to shut down the complaint line, we just can't handle all the complaints".

I typed "common enemy closer together" into Google and got this interesting commentary  from a personal coach:

"Whenever a new element is introduced to the complex relational system (say a new manager in the workplace) the system (rest of the company) will realign itself so as to accommodate the element with a minimum of disturbance (business as usual). The effects of this phenomenon may be beneficial or malignant. A benefit may be that it disarms a maverick manager. Conversely however, it may frustrate and subvert new management ideas and processes."

The coach, drawing on family relationship theory credited to Murray Bowen, recommends openly airing and discussing anxieties created by the new element as a way to counteract stasis in the workplace.  There's an even simpler maxim that addresses the second problem: "The customer is always right".

What if the common enemy were the product, and the common goal of managers, employees and customers were to improve it?  Just a thought experiment...