Relationships Are the Deciding Factor

Across the different self-selection events we’ve been part of, it’s been fascinating to observe what people base their squad selection on. The most important factor we’ve seen has been their personal relationships—participants make decisions almost exclusively based on who they want to work with—and in some cases who they don’t want to work with. That said, it can be hard for people to admit up front or even after the fact that they based their decision on their relationships with others. They seem to feel that the correct answer is the type of work or the opportunity for learning. Perhaps that’s the kind of thing people have had drilled into them since early in their career.

In a survey we conducted after our largest self-selection event, most people told us they had based their decision exclusively on doing what was best for the company and/or the type of work they wanted to do. But that ran contrary to all our observations. During the events most of the conversations we overhear are about who wants to work with whom, and we noticed that many people were only available in groups (or mini-teams) of two or three. Often when one person moved, we saw other people move along with them or very soon after.

Those who had not been able to make it to the event through absence or sickness nominated proxies to make a selection on their behalf. The most frequent instruction to proxies was “Make sure I’m in your/their squad.”

It’s fair to say that sometimes employees don’t want to work with each other. And that’s okay. People know whether they’re going to gel in a squad with a particular person, and if not, it makes sense they would choose not to work with him or her. This process, unlike management selection, allows them to make that choice.

At our first self-selection event we observed two participants in particular who seemed to have taken a real dislike to each other. When one of them moved his photograph to a squad the other one was in, the second person immediately moved his photo to a different squad. This happened several times, and whenever those two ended up in the same squad, one of them would quickly move again. This wasn’t a problem at all; there wasn’t any drama, and those affected made a choice that was good for them and their squads. Had they been selected to work together, as they easily could have been by managers focusing only on compatible skills, both they and their squads would have suffered.