Labeling coworkers by department signals a team that avoids thinking

There is an organizational risk I watch very closely when I work with a company as an advisor or consultant.

It’s whether people use phrases like “the XX people” to refer to members of a different department or a different office within the same company.

“The sales people.” “The development people.” “The people on the first floor.” “The people at the XX office.”

These phrasings are the typical starting point of labeling. Labeling is a very convenient tool for simplifying things through abstraction, but using it inside a company is a warning sign. In most cases it comes from an escapist psychology that avoids thinking.

There are situations where you have no choice but to talk about things macroscopically, or where doing so is actually appropriate. Marketing is the clearest example. Terms like “housewives in their 40s,” “affluent households,” or “elderly people living alone in the greater Tokyo area” cluster people together to some degree, and without that kind of labeling, conversation becomes unworkable. “Inside the company,” though, ought to be, if anything, the opposite kind of situation.

In any project, if proper management is functioning, things rarely reach a scale where “it’s not really clear who’s involved.” Before that happens, the project gets properly divided, resources get reviewed, and milestones get reset. So in a healthy project, it’s fair to say that everyone involved stays “within visible range.” I don’t mean physically visible. I mean that individual members are close enough that you can find out, if you wanted to, what role they have, what they’re thinking, and what they’re doing.

Labeling is a snap judgment. Especially when applied to a large group, everyone knows the label doesn’t really fit. “Japanese people are polite.” “People over 50 are set in their ways.” “People from sports-club backgrounds are strict about hierarchy.” And so on. There will always be objections along the lines of “maybe that’s true on average, but I’m different.”

At the same time, labeling has a psychological effect: it induces behavior. It works exactly like hearing a fortune-telling result and thinking, “maybe that’s true.” So the basic rule is to use it positively. “We can do this.” “We’re made up of a rare group of excellent people.” “You all always do such meticulous research, it’s wonderful.” These carry an implicit inducement, effectively an instruction: proceed believing you can do it, be excellent, do thorough research. It’s not magic, so you need to use it repeatedly, but this kind of labeling can work effectively for an organization.

Usages like “the development people make an unpleasant face whenever you ask them for something,” “sales is always out of the office and doesn’t understand what’s happening internally,” “the first-floor members have no motivation,” or “the people at the Osaka branch provide low-quality customer support” only invite backlash (“that’s not me”) and lead to no positive improvement whatsoever. Labeling is also an expression of a psychological attempt to keep distance. By abstracting, it lets you escape from thinking deeply about the other person, from listening to them. Whether the words that follow will be positive or negative is something you can tell without even having to think about it.

The contents of this post are an excerpt (original text) from the following book. If you’re interested, please consider purchasing the book.

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

The Shape of a Happy IoT Startup

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/10/1181/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.