CHAPTER 2

Tribal Conflict in the Workplace

Peeking behind the Org Chart

Ryan wakes up screaming every night, tormented by flashbacks of his deployments to Saudi Arabia and Iraq. With excruciating clarity, he remembers the detonation of an improvised explosive device near his guard post. “When the actual blast went off, it was chaos everywhere,” he recalls. “I had to stop and put that part behind me. I needed to focus and ensure that the folks who had been injured or disoriented were taken care of.” For years, the aftereffects of that traumatic event have left him feeling angry and agitated.

Like Ryan, Jared, another combat veteran, found it hard to reenter civilian life. Jared grew up in a warm, supportive midwestern family, but he feels his military experience in Afghanistan transformed him from a “happy-go-lucky farm boy” into a “frightened soldier.” Though he earned a graduate business degree after he returned home, he decided to work as a self-employed plumber. “I couldn’t work in a beehive office,” he admits. “I just need to control my personal space.”

In researching difficult and often tragic transitions like these, combat reporter Sebastian Junger reached an unexpected conclusion. “As awkward as it is to say,” Junger observed, “part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up.” For all of the terror of armed conflict, soldiers develop a strong emotional connection with comrades and the battlefield experience, one they cannot easily duplicate in a conventional office. According to World War II veteran Win Stracke: “For the first time in our lives, we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear. I liked that feeling very much. It was the absence of competition and boundaries and all those phony standards that created the thing I loved about the Army.” The feeling Stracke describes is perfectly understandable, because, for most of human history, tribal collaboration has ruled the day.

Now take yourself back to 1945. You and Win Stracke have taken off your battered and soiled uniforms before strolling into the buttoned-down IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York. Everywhere you look you see employees isolated in cubicles and corner offices. That’s a far cry from eating and sleeping and fighting alongside your fellow soldiers in combat conditions. Can you forge similar bonds with these clean-cut “corporate citizens”? Can the company provide a life-or-death mission that totally engages you and your fellow workers? At first blush, that’s hard to imagine. Even when you go home at night, you might feel somewhat alienated from your family and friends. You still pine for the tight-knit wartime band of brothers that faced life-or-death situations every day and gave you that longed-for tribal feeling.

What does this longing tell us about the modern workplace, and what does it mean for you as a culture-builder?

Balancing the Cultural Instincts for Collaboration and Competition

Human beings are Jekyll-and-Hyde creatures. More than any other animal, we excel at collaboration. We make friends, we form teams, we launch start-up businesses, we found countries. Yet social life is also full of conflict with our fellow Homo sapiens. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we kill. What’s wrong with us?

Well, we’re only human. We constantly ride herd on two conflicting impulses: one pushing us toward collaboration within groups, the other pulling us toward competition between groups. This push-pull phenomenon can wreak havoc at work.

A look at our evolutionary history explains why this happens. Research by biological anthropologists reveals that our earliest primate ancestors bonded together in groups, not in pairs, because these small communities gave them the best chance of survival. Over time, the instinct to connect with and identify with groups has become hardwired into our DNA. Neuroscience research shows that social bonding is our default mode. The moment we stop doing any kind of independent activity, such as crunching numbers in a spreadsheet or reading a book, the socially oriented parts of our brain light up, ready for the next interaction with our companions. When we feel shunned and ostracized from others, it pierces our hearts like a sharp dagger. Vivek Murthy, U.S. surgeon general under Barack Obama, looked through the relevant literature to pinpoint the roots of loneliness. He found that “we evolved to have brains that are wired to seek connection, to focus our thoughts on other people, and to define ourselves by the people around us.”

What does all this tell us about culture? A relatively small group of people forms a tribe and develops a shared way of doing things to maximize the group’s chances of survival. Members of the group pass this legacy down to subsequent generations until a distinct culture emerges. As soon as it does, the Four Forces come into play—Vision, Interest, Habit, and Innovation—combining to shape how we meet our need to get things done together with others in a community.

Yet as the tribe grows bigger or comes into contact with other tribes, tensions erupt as another instinct appears. This instinct propels us to compete with others. In evolutionary terms, competition has figured into our survival because we have often needed to deal with intruders who threaten our safety or resources. Like the spirit of cooperation, competitiveness is hardwired into our DNA. Leading social psychologists Yarrow Dunham, Andrew Scott Baron, and Susan Carey conducted a series of revealing experiments to prove the point. They separated children into two groups: red shirts and blue shirts. With no information other than the color of their shirts, the children quickly engaged in tribal competition. The red shirts would help other red shirts (“the good guys”) and would ascribe any bad behavior to the blue shirts (“the bad guys”). In an organization, that tendency can bind a team together and encourage members to protect one another. It can also cause a lot of grief. In large organizations, small groups inhabit “silos” that protect them from those in other silos and enable them to engage in subtle and not-so-subtle competition for resources. Marketing competes with Accounting, Research and Development competes with both Marketing and Accounting, and managers struggle to keep everyone working together to achieve the organization’s overall goals. It’s much more than mere child’s play.

Just take a look at what happened to Procter & Gamble employees after the company’s merger with Gillette, a $57 billion deal that the “Oracle of Omaha” Warren Buffett predicted would “create the greatest consumer products company in the world.” However, it took a lot longer to reach that goal than investors like Buffett had hoped, with P&G’s stock price lagging behind its closest competitors and the new Gillette business proving a burdensome drag on the company’s top line.

Was it due to a clash of cultures? Yes. Was it a result of do-or-die decisions about major organizational and competitive issues? Maybe. But as in the experiment with the red and blue T-shirts, it also stemmed from some pretty small differences. For example, while P&G people had developed the habit of communicating via written memos, the Gillette people preferred PowerPoint presentations. A Wall Street Journal account reveals how this little difference in style caused some giant rifts between the merged teams. Gillette employees viewed their P&G counterparts as old-fashioned sticks-in-the-mud who adhered to a needlessly slow and bureaucratic decision-making process. The Gillette tribe also disliked the P&G tribe’s penchant for acronyms. To them, such expressions as CIB (consumer is boss) hampered rather than streamlined conversations.

Voila! Competition eroded cooperation to the point that the whole organization’s overall performance suffered. To put it another way, people clung to the values of their little tribes at the expense of the needs of the newly formed bigger tribe. In the overall organization, the natural preference for your own little tribe can undermine the need to work across group boundaries. Suppose Company ABC’s business development division needs to collaborate with the engineering division in order to fulfill the company’s mission to bring a shiny new coffee grinder to market faster than archrival XYZ, whose new grinder threatens ABC’s very existence. No problem. Ah, but wait. Those business development gurus and engineering wizards speak entirely different languages. Everything about them, from their clothes to their favorite leisure activities, is so different. It takes a lot of hard work to translate the two different languages, robbing time and energy from the urgent need to get that coffee grinder rolling out the door. As a result, the gurus and wizards just keep doing things the way they always have, hoping to make themselves look good on the next performance review. Of course, they run the risk of looking bad if they fail to set aside their competitive instincts and start collaborating (or at least appear to be collaborating) as if their lives depended on it.

Getting organizational tribes to work together and build a common culture requires a clear understanding of this fundamental tension between collaboration and competition. A strong culture tightly binds internal tribes together, supports an environment that encourages cross-functional teamwork, and motivates insiders to compete vigorously with outsiders who threaten the organization’s well-being and survival.

Cultural anthropologists made a striking discovery about the delicate balance between collaboration and competition while reviewing the vast amount of research into the moral codes that govern many of the world’s societies. These codes, while they differ in many respects from group to group, all aim to maintain cooperation between potentially competing individuals and subgroups. A typical code of conduct includes:

• Be helpful: Make sure the tribe takes care of everyone, from the beloved grandmother to the obnoxious cousin who ruins every holiday gathering.

• Be brave: Find the courage to take risks and challenge conventional wisdom when pursuing an important goal.

• Be respectful: Defer to the authority of leaders and welcome the wisdom of elders.

• Be fair: Return favors to others who have helped you, share resources with others, and respect their property.

Notice how these rules reflect our need to get along and get things done. No matter the nature of your tribe (your extended family, your work team in the office, or your community), you need the support of others, a way of instilling and rewarding the right behaviors, and a sense of purpose. Otherwise, collaboration collapses.

Every culture-builder faces this challenge: building a common culture to fight against the persistent tendency of people to create their own little tribes. Even a couple of people who meet daily on Zoom can form a tight-knit tribe of two. Members of a given tribe tend to view others in an organization as outsiders. When this gets out of hand, the sense of a shared culture begins to disappear. Groups can become so isolated from one another that they threaten the culture even more than an outside force. Given the fact that less than a third of executives feel they understand their own organization’s culture, the problem may seem insurmountable. Fortunately, our Four Forces model can help solve this piece of the culture puzzle.

Accepting the Reality of Tribal Conflict

All of the boxes and lines on an official organizational chart suggest a carefully crafted set of relationships among people and between functions. But the way people relate in that organization never fits snugly into a neatly arranged diagram. No chart can display the way a culture really operates. Little tribes develop outside a box’s boundaries, each following its own rules to maximize its chances of survival, often in ways that run counter to the overall organization’s stated rules.

A penetrating analysis of one global organization performed by social network expert Rob Cross provides a vivid illustration of the point. Leaders of the Fortune 500 company “Omnivore” staked its future on an initiative aimed at enabling people to share knowledge across technical divisions. But it was easier said than done. Even though Omnivore’s senior managers nodded their approval when they heard about the silo-busting philosophy, their actions told a different story. When Cross and his colleagues studied the lines of communication that actually took place among eight of Omnivore’s divisions, they discovered that most people remained ensconced in their own smaller tribes. Out of the eight numbered divisions in the research study, only Divisions 3 and 4 communicated fairly well with each other, while Divisions 7 and 8 pretty much gave each other the silent treatment, and the rest seemed to share information with others as little as possible. Far from working as a fluidly communicating collection of highly collaborative professionals, the divisions conducted business more like a region of small isolated villages. Trading occurred only when it became absolutely necessary to obtain vital resources.

Later research by Cross and his colleagues revealed that the disconnect between desired and actual collaborative behavior occurs almost universally in large organizations. For example, the leaders of the global consumer electronics company “Megavolt” wanted to accelerate product development while simultaneously improving quality. To accomplish this mission, they directed their mechanical and electrical engineers to collaborate on creating a lightweight notebook computer. The electrical engineers also needed to partner with software developers to produce multimedia hardware. Far from working harmoniously with one another, however, the three groups inhabited a Tower of Babel where cacophony disrupted decision-making and created such noisy pileups that the mission failed, and the company missed a chance to capitalize on a huge market opportunity. Information at Megavolt flowed up from the engineers to senior management but not across to other engineers. Senior management cried, “Tear down those silos,” but the engineers remained safely insulated within the old walls.

Was it a decision-making and workflow problem? No. It was a culture problem. No matter how desperately the company needed the big tribe to unite behind the common cause, the little tribes remained ensconced in their long-established comfort zones.

Megavolt’s leaders had come up through the ranks during a period of rapid growth and minimal competition. Now they faced a new and unprecedented challenge. Any further growth would depend on fending off emergent competition. While they realized that their engineers needed to work together to meet the challenge, they ended up putting such extreme pressure on the engineers to perform that no one took the time to tear down the walls of their silos and bond with other engineering groups. The engineering groups had developed their own ways of doing things and were not about to adopt unfamiliar behaviors and values. While one engineering tribe worried most about making the product user-friendly, others were deeply concerned about design and portability. Some of the engineers had worked on multiple projects and had thus gained a more expansive understanding of the company’s needs, but most project managers, who had worked solely on one project at a time, maintained a narrow view and felt harassed by the new demands.

All of this spelled trouble for Megavolt’s strategy. Communication snafus became the norm, meetings took place at breakneck speed, benchmark goals fell by the wayside, people grew cynical and suspicious, and the campaign to bring an innovative product to market fell through the cultural cracks. All the little tribes kept hunkered down, blaming their neighboring tribes for the lack of success, and sitting around waiting for someone else to fix the situation. It turned out that the new organizational chart with all its neat boxes and lines could not force the desired collaboration across boundaries.

If you become preoccupied with idealized statements of purpose and strategy, without taking into account the natural tribal conflict that occurs in the workplace, you may find your pretty ideas turning into pipedreams. You will learn the hard way that if you don’t manage the tension between collaboration and competition, it will manage you. It all begins with keeping in touch with all the smaller tribes.

Keeping in Touch

Ed Razek, the former chief marketing officer of Victoria’s Secret, dreamed up an otherworldly vision for the company’s models. Imagining them as “Angels,” he transformed the women into lithe colorful creatures with wings. Resplendent in all their finery, the women strutted down the runway at the annual fashion show, which the New York Times described as “a global cultural phenomenon.” According to L Brands, the conglomerate that owns Victoria’s Secret, the fashion company represents “an aspirational lifestyle” and helps “customers feel sexy, bold and powerful.” As the Times journalists observed, it “defined femininity for millions of women.”

“We woke up this morning and suddenly engineering can’t understand marketing and management can barely understand themselves.”

Not so for the actual models, it turns out. Beneath the surface of all that glitter and glamor they lived in a grimy and sordid world where they suffered from unwanted groping and sexual advances, inappropriate sexual remarks, and retribution. It was a tale of two cultures: one a glossy fantasy world, the other an “entrenched culture of misogyny.” Casey Crowe Taylor, a former public relations specialist at the company, commented, “What was most alarming to me, as someone who was always raised as an independent woman, was just how ingrained this behavior was. This abuse was just laughed off and accepted as normal. It was almost like brainwashing. And anyone who tried to do anything about it wasn’t just ignored. They were punished.”

The rise of the #MeToo movement exposed what many women have known all their lives: sexual harassment is “business as usual” in far too many organizations. Companies like L Brands and the Weinstein Company may seem wildly different from one another, but during the initial wave of #MeToo scandals, their cultures were exposed as sharing a toxic cultural trait, silently condoning offensive and humiliating treatment of women. As media mogul Harvey Weinstein allegedly told one of his victims, “This is how the industry works.” Chilling, but he may have been right. In February 2020 justice prevailed when a federal judge sentenced the 67-year-old Weinstein, once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault convictions.

To its credit, L Brands took steps in the right direction. L Brands spokeswoman Tammy Roberts Myers responded to questions from the New York Times by saying the company is “intensely focused (on) workplace and compliance practices.” Myers continued: “We regret any instance where we did not achieve this objective and are fully committed to continuous improvement and complete accountability.”

There’s an important cultural lesson in this sordid but all-too-common tale of misogyny. Those who view an organization from their perch at the top can easily lose touch with those who inhabit the lower landscape. Sometimes culture problems arise due to the behavior of a few toxic personalities like Ed Razek and Harvey Weinstein. But well-intentioned leaders can also contribute to culture problems when they fail to unite the tribes hidden beneath the official org chart. Even senior leaders with the best of intentions can let their “view from the top” blind them to malignant cultures growing beneath their gaze.

Applying Innovation to Solve the Right Problems

People love to innovate at work, but this strength, taken to extremes, can turn into a glaring fault. Take Wells Fargo, where creative problem-solving escalated into an epidemic of ethical misbehavior. The bank’s creative cross-selling strategy sounded innocent enough: pitch credit cards, auto loans, and other products to existing customers. After all, if the company offers great products, why not push them to everybody? Why not sell customers three or five or even eight products? John Stumpf, the former CEO, issued a rallying cry to his people, proclaiming “Eight is great,” soon shortened to “Gr-eight.” The company offered strong incentives to support this goal. This may seem like a perfectly sensible business practice, but the failure to consider how these initiatives would play out among the tribes further down in the organization propelled the company toward an ethically impaired culture.

Without even consulting customers, salespeople opened credit card accounts for them, modified their mortgages, set up new auto insurance policies, and engaged in many other unethical activities to boost revenue numbers. The scheme affected hundreds of thousands of customers. Eventually, in 2016, when the scandal came to light, Stumpf resigned, as did his successor three years later. Lawsuits erupted, leading to fines totaling over $1 billion. To prepare itself for future claims stemming from the company’s “fake accounts,” Wells Fargo set aside billions more. In the scandal’s aftermath, the company found it hard to attract new customers. It turned out that a toxic culture can leave its mark long after leaders take steps to correct it.

What went wrong at Wells Fargo? In retrospect, it all seems so clear, and sadly predictable. Wells Fargo salespeople felt relentless pressure to meet sales quotas, and in the absence of a clear imperative to pay attention to other equally important priorities—namely, ethics and respect for customers’ real needs—they did whatever it took to reach their sales goals and keep their jobs. They did what every group does: they created their own strategies for survival.

One former Wells Fargo employee described it as a “cutthroat” environment reminiscent of the “do anything to close the sale” culture portrayed in David Mamet’s film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Glengarry Glen Ross. You may recall the scene where the nightmarishly aggressive sales manager Blake (played by Alec Baldwin) barks at a roomful of cynical yet terrorized employees: “A-B-C. A: always, B: be, C: closing. Always be closing. Always be closing! . . . You close or you hit the bricks!” At Wells Fargo, where competition was tantamount to a religion, he would have shouted “Gr-eight! Gr-eight! Gr-eight!”

Sabrina Bertrand, who worked as a personal banker at Wells Fargo at the time but ultimately left the company to become a middle school teacher, remembers, “I had managers in my face yelling at me. The sales pressure from management was unbearable.” A 2015 lawsuit revealed that managers at Wells Fargo in a Los Angeles sales district reviewed sales numbers with each employee an astonishing “four times a day, at 11 am, 1 pm, 3 pm, and 5 pm.” What’s a poor sales rep going to do? Just about anything, it turns out, to hit her numbers. That’s not something any respectable sales manager would ever want her tribe to do. But disconnected from the everyday reality of the tribes of their organization, Wells Fargo leadership failed to see how their positive sales vision would translate into a sell-at-all-costs culture on the front line.

Avoiding Mismanagement by Abstraction

Discovering, understanding, and managing all the tribes in your organization should preoccupy you each and every day. It’s hard work. It takes a lot of effort to force yourself to slow down and see how people actually implement what, on the surface, seem like perfectly rational policies. Strategies are like mathematical equations. One plus one equals two. However, as the scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson suggested on Twitter in February 2016, “When human behavior enters the equation, things go nonlinear. That’s why physics is easy, and sociology is hard.” Math results remain constant; people results can go crazy. Every anthropologist knows that, in the real world of real people solving real problems, one plus one often equals less than zero.

An org chart represents a kind of arithmetic. It all adds up. As we pointed out earlier, however, an organization does not consist of a bunch of lines and boxes; it’s a big, messy, sometimes unpredictable collection of individuals and tribes who do not fit snugly into square boxes or follow perfectly straight lines. You must resist oversimplifying your view of the organization. Instead of thinking in terms of abstractions, look instead at the concrete reality that lies beneath the surface layer depicted on the org chart. That box containing Alice, the CFO? She’s not a number in an equation. She’s a quirky, self-interested, and utterly unique individual who speaks the language of her accounting tribe. The line that shows Alice reporting to the CEO? It’s not perfectly straight. It wobbles as she chats informally with the CHRO and the COO over lunch.

If you rely too heavily on the mathematically precise org chart, you’ll fall prey to what we call mismanagement by abstraction. It’s a form of malpractice that can end up killing the very patient you’re trying to save. The once-popular trend toward open-plan offices (one casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic) illustrates how managing by abstraction can yield unintended and unwanted cultural consequences. When you adopted an open office plan, you knocked down all the walls in an effort to get people mingling with one another so that they would engage more freely in idea sharing, innovation, and teamwork. What a great idea! But a quick look at articles about the phenomenon reveals an alarming downside. “How to Make Open-Plan Offices Suck Less” teases an article in the magazine CIO, while “Open Plan Offices Make the Workplace More Toxic” announces another piece in Inc.com. If open spaces were such a great idea, then why did they suck? How did they create a toxic environment? Answer: because the abstract idea made sense on the drawing board but did not work so well when you added people to the equation. People want to work together and get results, but it turns out that open spaces do not automatically fulfill those essential needs.

Picture this. Jose is sitting at his desk, concentrating on a report due to his boss at 3 p.m. His teammate Wanda, sitting a few feet away, is shouting on the phone at a supplier who has failed to deliver parts on time. Jose’s boss Vonda suddenly taps him on the shoulder and asks if she can have a word with him about a customer complaint. Jose’s brain begins to sizzle. The noise, the distractions, all the hubbub of people working their tails off to get results have given him a migraine. People suffering migraines find it hard to concentrate on getting results. At two Fortune 500 firms where leaders mandated the removal of cubicles to create vast open-office spaces, results fell rather than rose. Why? Paradoxically the anticipated increase in face-to-face interaction among employees actually declined by about 70 percent.

Two researchers who analyzed this phenomenon concluded that employees working in open spaces tended to create a kind of “fourth wall,” the imaginary barrier in a theater that separates the performers on the stage from the audience. This psychological wall creates “public solitude,” enabling a worker to concentrate on a task despite the presence of other people. Over time, the fourth wall becomes as concrete as a real wall in people’s minds. As the researchers observed, “If someone is working intently, people don’t interrupt her. If someone starts a conversation and a colleague shoots him a look of annoyance, he won’t do it again. Especially in open space, fourth-wall norms spread quickly.” In other words, in the absence of actual walls, people construct psychological walls in order to get their work done.

The rush by many organizations to knock down every wall in the office provides a case study in mismanagement by abstraction. While perhaps an admirable idea, the effort to bust up silos indicates that an organization’s leaders think of their people as interchangeable boxes on an org chart, rather than as many bands of living, breathing humans with distinctive quirks, habits, and aspirations. The open floor plan also assumes that if an idea works in another organization, it must work in your own. Practitioners of mismanagement by abstraction ignore the cultural differences among people, not to mention the forces that drive them. Initiatives that look good on paper will accomplish nothing if leaders forget that groups will always concoct their own strategies to produce results and create a distinctive culture that works in their particular microenvironment. Such common disconnects between leaders and employees will gradually create a toxic culture where people habitually resist and subtly sabotage visions that cascade from the top of the pyramid and bear scant resemblance to how work actually gets done.

Peeking behind the Org Chart

If you’re a leader under constant pressure to deliver the results an organization needs, you may spend a great deal of time and energy creating high-level plans that look brilliant on paper. “Here, Smith sits in this box,” you say to yourself. “Jones sits in this one, and Martinez sits in this other one. This straight line here shows the chain of command.” But if you’re thinking this way, you are not thinking carefully enough about the tension between tribal collaboration and competition. To grasp that natural tension, you need to peek behind the org chart.

As we have seen, people do not always reside comfortably in their assigned boxes or consistently follow strict lines of communication. The discomfort caused by constantly needing to figure out ways to get your job done despite management’s abstractions causes a lot of stress in the modern workplace. It can lead to a civilian form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Recall Ryan and Jared, the soldiers we met at the beginning of the chapter, who, after returning to civilian life, grew depressed because the conditions of deployment had made them feel more human than their lives back home. As one anthropologist who studies these veterans describes the PTSD experience, “[It’s] a crisis of connection and disruption, not an illness that you carry within you.”

While the struggles people experience at work hardly compare to the tragic effects of PTSD, the side effects of disconnection and disruption created by mismanagement by abstraction can be quite pernicious. It’s what Atlantic writer Joe Pinsker calls the “Sunday Scaries.” When Sunday evening rolls around, you may shudder at the thought of trudging back to work Monday morning. Alec Burks, a 30-year-old project manager at a Seattle construction company, knows the feeling. “[It’s like] the end of freedom. In 12 hours, I’m going to be back at my desk. You almost have to shrink who you are a little bit sometimes to fit in that mold of your job description.”

In its most extreme form, feeling trapped inside a box can lead to serious mental health problems. Angie Payden, a banker at Wells Fargo, described the effects of the crushing sales goals on her mental health: “I started to get these panic attacks, which I never had before. . . . After a couple times, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I looked at the hand sanitizer in the bathroom, and I thought, this has alcohol in it. This may work. And it did.”

For Payden, the side effects of mismanagement by abstraction extended to customers, who became impersonal boxes on a sales chart. “If somebody comes to the bank every day . . . here’s the problem: I don’t want to help that person. I can’t afford to have that person in my office for an hour, because I will not get anything off of them.”

If you do not fully respect the essential needs of human beings in the workplace and just keep trying to stick square pegs into round holes, the organization will never achieve its strategic goals. It will suffer from all the ailments that plague so many organizations: low engagement, poor morale, a lack of purpose and meaning, and weak results. But there’s one tried-and-true cure: you have to climb outside your own box and connect with others.

In almost every organization we have studied over the past 30 years, a cultural chasm separates senior management from the divisions, units, and teams below the top of the org chart. Whether large or small, these gaps invariably stem from the disparity between the cultural statements issued from C-suites and the words and phrases employees use to describe their day-to-day experiences at work. The difference can be as dramatic as the contrast between a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and a Stephen King horror story. That’s the bad news. The good news is that despite the fact that the innate tension between collaboration and competition will never disappear, you can take steps to ameliorate it.

First, you must set aside the abstractions that look good on paper, then connect to the reality of everyday work in the organization. Experts have written whole books on the art of managing by walking around, holding town meetings where people can voice their concerns and ask questions that reveal their dissatisfaction with policies and procedures, and other techniques for closing the gap between leaders and the people closest to the work. Whichever technique you choose, you need to remain honest, nonjudgmental, and humble in applying it.

Nick Basset knew how to do it. The executive director of population health at Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and health professionals that spans Utah, Idaho, and Nevada, Basset embodies the organization’s commitment to “helping people live the healthiest lives possible.” He and his colleagues take great care not to let abstract metrics get between them and the flesh-and-blood people who work for the company.

Take the treatment of lower back pain, for instance. Studies have shown that such pain frequently disappears without any active interventions, while medication and surgery can actually worsen the condition and drive up costs. In response, senior administrators at Intermountain set a broad goal of limiting unnecessary treatment and started tracking whether physicians waited for at least four weeks to pursue active treatment after a patient reports a problem. That’s a metric approach. And that’s fine. But it can become an end in itself, encouraging doctors to hold off all lower back pain interventions with little regard to a patient’s unique situation and needs. Like the Wells Fargo “eight is great,” it runs the risk of treating patients as numbers on a report and lends itself to abuse. To avoid this problem, Basset involved doctors in crafting more specific objectives and designing a set of incentives that promote the right behaviors. While the broad goal of limiting unnecessary treatment aligns with Intermountain’s high-level strategy of providing high-quality low-cost care, the strategy allows for deep discussions with the people actually doing the work. A doctor who took part in developing the strategy, Brett Muse, comments, “When I get in front of physicians and throw data at them, they get glass-eyed.” Instead, he continues, “[I say] here’s a problem involving quality of care. Let’s try to solve this problem. And, by the way, here’s some data we can look at to see how we’re doing.”

At Intermountain, doctors recommended a goal of waiting four weeks with 80 percent of lower-back-pain patients before pursuing active treatment. The percentage indicates that 20 percent of patients may require immediate intervention. By closing the gap between cultural traits leaders wanted their people to adopt and what actually happens at the point of contact between doctors and patients, Intermountain avoided the unintended and potentially damaging consequences of mismanagement by abstraction.

To put it another way, Basset and his colleagues at Intermountain looked beyond the boxes and lines on the org chart and acquainted themselves with the real people doing the real work that gets done day in and day out. In the next chapter, you will learn how many other leaders have connected with their people in ways that support strong, vibrant cultures.