A University of Connecticut survey of 2,435 employees in 400 organizations revealed that people think that being a team player is the most important factor in getting ahead in the workplace. Being a team player ranked higher than all factors, including merit and performance, leadership skills, intelligence, making money for the organization and long hours.

But most people think being a team player is all about the we, and never about the me and that’s simply not true. But how we channel that individual contribution and motive is what makes us a team player, or a team liability.

If progress is truly our primary motivation, we won’t let individual passion and commitment to a project or idea drift into a me-first, company-second view. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight fiercely for our individual team’s needs, but we should be guided by what’s best for the business, not just our own territory. Consider the email from a Fortune 100 general manager to his leadership team inviting a more “we, then me” focus:

From: (name withheld)
Sent: Wednesday, March 1, 2007 9:15 AM
To: Leadership team
Subject: Food for thought

 

As the planning process for [product name] unfolds, I’m seeing or hearing some behaviors that could be destructive to our long term goals. Essentially, everyone is feeling the pinch of our budget reality, but most are also lobbying for their group to get a bigger piece of the work that we need to accomplish. Sometimes that lobbying is in the form of emails, sometimes it’s in planning meetings, sometimes it’s accomplished through prototypes, etc. My only conclusion is that somehow I’ve created an environment where people believe that the way to get more resources is to sign up for unrealistic deliverables. 

 

Prototyping and dreaming are activities we need to encourage, so I don’t want anyone to interpret my statement as not being in favor of that activity. As leaders, I expect you to guide the team through the tradeoffs it takes to make the transition from prototype or dream to funded project. Sometimes more than one good idea will exist in the same area and we’ll be forced to choose. Sometimes even a great idea won’t rise above the threshold that has us reprioritize other work in order to fit it in. Often times, you will be asked to do more with less. In the end, we have to do what’s right for the business, even if the individual dreams of some of our best people can’t be accommodated.

 

I hope to hear statements from each of you like: “Doing X is more important than Y. Even though I’m responsible for Y, I think we should cut it and move the resources to focus on X.” Unfortunately today, I’m more likely to get “I understand Y better than anybody else…Y may not be the most important thing we could do, but it’s really cool and it will motivate my team, so I should fight for it.”

 

We all have work to do. Thanks.

What message is he trying to get across? ”We” comes first. But let’s say this manager’s company is on the ropes and “downsizing” on the horizon. Is his “business first” request unrealistic to people vying for a limited number of jobs? Should they ignore the email and take a “survival of the fittest” approach? Even though that’s a typical response, it would be exactly the wrong approach. In good times, a company needs contribution from people, and people want to keep their jobs. But do company or employee needs change in difficult times? The answer is no.

The needs for both increase when times are hard—companies need more contribution and people need job security. If “we, then me” is effective when times are good, it’s no less effective when times are bad. The irony of a survival of the fittest mentality is that as pressure for survival increases, so does the temptation to abandon humility and adopt a “me, then we” attitude—to be defensive about our ideas, treat colleagues as competitors, occupy time showcasing our “you can’t live without me” brilliance, and seek the acceptance of those who can send us to the unemployment line. As ego takes control, our performance decreases. By definition, that decline puts us one step closer to the exit. If ego minimizes our strengths, we won’t be judged on what we’re capable of contributing, but on what ego’s counterfeits allow us to contribute. The more we focus on self-survival, the less likely we are to survive. “We, then me” is the most direct strategy and incentive for survival—on both sides of the equation.

“Economists have long assumed that success boils down to personal incentives. We’ll cooperate if it’s in our self-interest, and we won’t if it’s not (sort of like lions),” said Jerry Useem of Fortune. “Then a team of researchers led by behavioral psychologist Linnda Caporael thought to ask: Would people cooperate without any incentives? The answer was–gasp!–yes, under the right conditions. Participants often cited ‘group welfare’ as motivation. To economists, shocking. To anyone who’s been part of a successful team, not shocking at all. “[The] boss who assumes that workers’ interests are purely mercenary will end up with a group of mercenaries.”

It’s important to remember that devotion to progress abides by an economic reality; since the company is investing for the return and living with the risk, its needs factor in heavier. For instance, if an employee makes a mistake that costs the company money, the company eats the cost—it doesn’t come out of the employee’s pocket directly. As a result, the business comes first. But even with that reality, it doesn’t make sense that a company would be interested only in its progress to the exclusion of the needs of its employees.

It’s equally ineffective for an employee to pursue individual progress to the detriment of the company. A company shouldn’t skew the balance to 90/10 in favor of its needs, and individual contributors should be clear the balance isn’t 50/50 either. When either side miscalculates the ratio, they misjudge the consequences to a culture. When people perceive unfair disparity, they hold back and devotion to progress evaporates in favor of “doing their job” and collecting a paycheck. Not all strikes from work are on picket lines with signs of grievances.

Devotion to progress doesn’t mean you can always meet everyone’s needs, but you can diligently consider them before you make a decision. Those considerations will be subjective, and only you can determine your motive behind them. The sequence of focus we’re suggesting doesn’t eliminate selfishness, or guarantee selflessness, on either side. It does, at least, provide the opportunity to strike the right balance between we and me.

When the Celtics won their 17th championship this week, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce both made comments about how unbelievably great it was to have the weight or burden of winning a championship for the Celtics off their shoulders. That made me wonder where that weight came from. Did it come from Larry Bird or Bill Russell? Bob Cousy or Kevin McHale? If they didn’t win a championship, would it devalue what players from the past accomplished, or diminish their legacy?

I’m not a big believer in the pressure that comes from “legacies” or traditions. I think legacies can be overblown. They can be just as much of a motive for continuing greatness as they can in keeping people stuck in status-quo by imaginary expectations. I’ve watched plenty of people keep re-cooking the same ideas in business and becoming less relevant in the name of “legacy” and tradition. 

People live in their own time and circumstances. Larry Bird and Bill Russell played at a different time, with different coaches, under different ownership against different competitors. Garnett and Pierce were playing for their own accomplishment in their own time and circumstance, and that’s enough. Who cares what reporters and analysts say about if they “had what it takes” or not? The question is, did they or not? Success is not about what others said you accomplished, but whether or not you hit your capacity, your ceiling, in what you accomplished.

Garnett is an all-time great player because of his intensity and devotion to “we” over “me.” Pierce overcame high and hard hurdles in his life to reach Tuesday’s pinnacle. The trophy didn’t validate their accomplishments, it was just a symbol of it. What if they didn’t win it, had a player get injured, got a bad call, etc.? Would they have accomplished less? And each of us won’t recognize some of those accomplishments if we’re waiting for the trophies in our life to validate it.

Rocco Mediate isn’t any less of a player or person because he lost to Tiger at the U.S. Open this week. He did his absolute best (and so did Tiger), and any other standard doesn’t matter nearly as much. They are different people with a different set of skills, ages, challenges, circumstances, etc. They both reached what they were capable of…period. Both won, but only one received the physical representation of that achievement in the form of a trophy.

At the end of the day, did you do your best? That’s what matters…that nothing was left “on the court.” So decide today that you’ll push yourself as hard as you can to accomplish what’s possible for you, and let the trophies come if they will. When you’ve accomplished what’s possible, you’ll find the trophy won’t really matter, no matter how much it appears to matter to everyone else.

If we want people to open their minds to the truth when it’s hard to hear, we need as much humility and courage to speak up as others need in hearing down. When speaking up, what we say, how we say it, and our intent plays a big part in where the conversation goes. While it’s true that some things are better left unsaid, too often silence stifles progress. Most of us have been in a meeting where silence prevails even though everyone knows the truth is being avoided. There are dozens of reasons we keep quiet: “silence is golden,” “better safe than sorry,” somebody else will speak up, they probably already know, it won’t make a difference anyway, they have seniority, you’re new, they’re new, fear of the unknown, and on and on. One of the main reasons we don’t speak up is fear.

We often don’t speak up for fear others will label us, i.e. bringing up a negative equals being a negative person, or if we say something brutally honest, then we’re not “nice.” Or it could be we think if we state the obvious or ask an obvious question we’ll seem uneducated or stupid. When we strain to manage perceptions others have of us, that effort kills truth in the process. The fear we feel that prevents us from speaking up was clearly illustrated to me while I was a freshman in college.

My Psychology 101 class was held in an auditorium that seated 1,000 students. The professor was on stage with a microphone and a slide show, cruising through the day’s lecture. Rarely did anyone ask questions; we just took notes and tests.

One day as the professor lectured, I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. I looked around the room to see if anyone else was in the same boat. But everyone, even my friends sitting next to me, looked like they were getting it. So I continued to stare blankly toward the stage below. Since no one seemed to be taking a lot of notes, I assumed this was either pretty straightforward or unimportant stuff. What’s more, I told myself I was probably the only one in the auditorium that didn’t get it.

A couple minutes later I still couldn’t follow the ideas. Finally, out of desperation, I raised my hand from the balcony, told him I didn’t understand, and asked a question about what he was saying. My question didn’t come without fear of looking “dumb” or that it would seem like I wasn’t listening. The professor thanked me, and began to re-explain the ideas in a different way. Not only did I start to understand, but I noticed nearly everyone else frantically taking notes. I wasn’t the only one in left field. When we’re feeling peer pressure, self-imposed or not, we don’t ask questions or say what’s on our mind for fear we’ll be labeled. Losing veracity is often the price we pay to maintain image—ours, or someone else’s.

Have you noticed there’s often a gap between what executives think is going on, and what front-line managers know is going on—and vice versa? What about the difference between what marketing thinks the market is ripe for, and what sales is convinced clients really want? What about the divide between you and a colleague on the same team, on the same project, in the same meeting—and yet you hardly see anything the same? What about the gap between someone’s individual competence or incompetence, and the difference between what they think it is, and what everyone else experiences?

What’s unsettling is what we don’t know, and what we don’t know is buried beneath fear of saying what’s unknown to someone else, or hearing what’s unknown to us (person to person, board to shareholders, company to market, etc). The only way to close those gaps is if both sides have the courage to say it, or listen and embrace it when said. Building “water-cooler honesty” into the way a team works bridges the gaps ego can create by spinning the truth, playing coy, beating around the bush,  being overly “politically correct,” etc. 

And a recent survey suggests we’re going to need a very big bridge.