Naming Problems

“We are dysfunctional as a team.” A senior manager leading strategic partnerships on a marketing team stated this in the first five minutes of a strategy review session.

No one argued or pushed back. Then the confirmation stories started, one after another, and the room self-soothed with a round of agreement.

I wondered: Is that true? Always?

In the work I was doing for the team, I believed it for some time, until I started noticing contradictory examples. I began coaching people who, in private meetings, celebrated the highly functional parts of the team. Once I saw it as an incomplete story, I noticed the conclusion was baked into the label. “We’re dysfunctional” offers no space for fixability, let alone the whole truth.

Labels are short stories. A word or phrase that implies a fixed cause and an unchangeable outcome. They usually hold some truth, which is what makes them stick.

Signs mean one thing. See a stop sign, you stop, if you’re of the law-abiding type.

Symbols are alive and hold many meanings. Your nation’s flag means something different to each of us, and something different again to each generation that looks at it. A label enters a team’s story as if it were settled fact, and it becomes a sign. Believing that “we’re dysfunctional” as the whole truth, tells us to stop looking.

Stories are, and will always be, our more effective technology. They’ve started every war, won and lost every election, and made every successful brand. They install themselves in a sentence or meme, spread by word of mouth, and keep living rent-free in our minds until we question their trustworthiness.

Ellen Langer, a professor at Harvard, has spent her career studying how stories affect the body. In 1979, she took sixteen men in their seventies and eighties to a monastery in New Hampshire, made over to look like 1959. Eight lived there in the present tense, as if it really were 1959. Eight visited the same rooms and reminisced about 1959 from where they stood. Both groups came out with better hearing and memory. The men living inside 1959 improved more on some measures, and were judged to look younger in photographs taken before and after.

She has since studied a smaller story. With Peter Aungle, she reviewed 8,096 patient records at Tufts Medical Center: people whose blood test results landed a tenth of a percent apart, one just under the line for a prediabetes diagnosis, one just over. About 4 percent of those just over went on to develop diabetes, against about 3 percent just under. Before the “prediabetes” label existed, the same gap made no difference at all. A diagnosis gives a person something to act on. It also comes with a story attached.

It’s impossible to read the label from inside the jar.

An EVP I coached told me, “Everything we do in this company has some element of crazy.” So, I asked him for two examples from the previous week: one with crazy in it, one without. He was surprised he could find both so easily, which turned into a conversation about questioning what we see on the surface and what we believe about the stories we tell ourselves. This turned into our jumping-off point for our individual and team coaching.

One team I worked with had labeled itself as infighting. I called what I saw cultural drift, a slow slide away from the values-centered culture that had made them so good. After six weeks of interviews, focus groups, and their own survey data, I found the fighting had a source: the executive team had never said where they saw the company in five years. People were fighting over a future they couldn’t see. My label was a story too, and it only earned its keep once the work behind it proved it out.

What story about your job have you told so many times that it’s become a fact? What’s true about it?

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

Let’s Talk >