unpacking the conspiratorial “they”
Leaders sometimes attribute an unhelpful circumstance, pattern, or policy to an ambiguous “they” or a big, immovable system. This could be as large as “capitalism” or “this administration”; it could be as small as a 5-person board of elites that regulates your organization’s work or the nearby franchise of a much larger company. This can erode the leader’s (and organization’s) power, ironically ceding MORE power to whatever institutions or systems appear to be obstacles.
Instead of conceding defeat and congratulating yourself on your ability to see the stubbornness of big bureaucracies, ask: Who is a local actor you can talk to, learn the first name of, find common cause with? Sometimes you’ll be surprised to find that this person, the closest thing you have to a face of / voice for / representative of The Big System, wants an outcome similar to the one you want. They may be in the game for similar reasons and share some core values with you. Your appearance in a friendly and collaborative posture helps and surprises them. Now there’s a chance to build something together instead of a) you lobbing anonymous complaints in one direction and b) them sending boilerplate in the other.
A leader often has a dual responsibility - to manage the performance and experience of their team doing the work right here at hand and to address external stuff - policies, competitors, vendors, partners out there beyond our walls. If you’ve been promoted because you were quite good at the first category of stuff - the work right here at hand - the external category can be an opaque, intimidating one you’d prefer to ignore or assume is immutable. This risk is especially high if you’re working across a partisan or political divide.
Shrinking the big system or immovable institution to a super small number of people you can meet and cultivate can make this intimidating part of the work tractable to start (there’s a thing you can do with the resources you have) and effective over time (the things you’re doing make a difference that’s worth the cost of doing them).
Shrink the big, amorphous “they” to “Terrance in District 7”. My hunch is that this tactic becomes more valuable, if more challenging, as organizations gradually wrap themselves in thicker layers of AI. Finding the human you can build a tie with will serve you even more than it did before.
-e
