Often, in an attempt to foster a team spirit among subordinates or to encourage people in a group to work together without external influence from a manager, a leader implements measures where the focus shifts from the individual performance of each employee to the overall result of the team. For example, if a group needs to make 1,000 pastries in a shift and there are five people in the group, ideally, each person should produce 200 pastries. However, the leader states that bonuses or even salaries will only be paid when the entire group reaches the goal of 1,000 pastries, and they are not concerned with the productivity of each individual. It’s a kind of collectivism that is seen as better than individualism.
There are calmer options, such as in a travel agency, where the activity of all travel agents creates a “common pot” from which the earned commissions are shared equally among everyone. It’s like, this way it’s fairer, since the flow of clients is random and we need to avoid mutual envy. It’s all about collectivism again.
However, surprise, surprise, collectivists don’t actually exist at all. It’s a myth from the Soviet era. It’s a convenient myth that supported the sweatshop system known as “brigade contracting.” The idea was that the brigade of “communist labor” would sort things out internally with the slackers and make them work harder. Meanwhile, the Motherland would still get what it wanted from a brigade made up of stars. How did this look in practice? My grandmother was a “shock worker” at the Transsignal factory, toiling there from bell to bell from the age of 12 to 60. A member of the brigade? Want a bonus? Then you better do the work not just for yourself, but also “for that guy.” In the Soviet Union, a person had nowhere to go, but now they do. And the worst way to motivate a “shock worker” is to punish them with extra work. In such a situation, it becomes very advantageous not to be a shock worker, but to be a slacker. Do less and get the same amount. People are inherently lazy and tend to optimize their efforts. The path to optimization is clear here.
All people are individualists. Each person works for themselves and their family, and they only consider the company and its values if that company, with its values, brings bread to their table. If they are willing to do something for the company, it’s only because they see the realization of their personal goals through the achievement of the company’s goals. This, in essence, is the role of a manager — to cultivate in employees that kind of vision for their goals and then help them achieve those goals.
A leader, often implementing a system of mutual accountability, draws analogies from sports. The team played well — they won a prize. They didn’t play well — they didn’t win. It doesn’t matter who played poorly and who played well. To win the prize, everyone must perform well, and therefore, everyone will want to play well, almost automatically. However, work is not the same as sports. Even those whose job is sports feed their families not with trophies, but with the money they earn from their contracts.
Similarly, the idea of shared goals is fueled by sports analogies. They say a team wins because they have a common goal—the trophy. Nonsense, as the English would say. They don’t have common goals at all. Each player has their own individual goal, and all those goals are different. They just manifest through the trophy in this game. Some want to shine and get scouted by an expensive club, some just want to earn more money, some are vain and need a medal, some want to hook up with more girls, and some are just ticking boxes. The trophy is not the goal; it’s a means to an end. If the trophy were the goal, then after the match, all the players would feel not euphoria but depression: “What do we do next, since we’ve achieved our goal?” The job of a football coach is not just to assign tasks, like how many times to hop on one leg, but to show each athlete why that trophy matters to them personally. It’s about finding the hidden notes in the athlete’s soul and playing them. The manager’s job is the same. You can’t replace this work with a crutch like mutual accountability.
What else is wrong with mutual protection?
- cultivating a climate of blame
- demotivation of “why bother trying if someone is going to mess it up anyway”
- punishing the most productive instead of rewarding them
- slipping into the strategy of “slow and steady wins the race”
Did I miss anything?