Uncomfortable, On Purpose: Thriving Through Organizational Tension

Since the first management consultants Uber-ed out of the primordial corporate soup, they’ve wrestled with business leaders on how to strike the delicate balance of comfort and tension needed to build and maintain a healthy corporate culture.

Ultimately, successful organizations must strive for equipoise, managing with agility and a ceaseless interplay of internal interests, drives, stakes and outcomes. Times change, cultures adjust, norms shift, nothing is static. Though, as companies seek to attract younger generations, I sometimes fustily wonder—is there a point at which the pendulum swings so far toward the warm fuzzies that organizational performance suffers?

I recently heard a story wherein a client of mine told one of her new straight-out-of-college hires that there were several errors in a presentation. She was calm but direct, and the new hire responded by saying, “I’m not comfortable.” Huh? Record scratch. Awesome, you should not be comfortable…that’s the point!

Organizational systems benefit from a healthy dose of tension; those that over-index on making people feel comfortable all the time simply don’t perform as well as those with a laser-focused drive to exceed objectives.

Is my position old fashioned? Perhaps. But maybe “old fashioned” is just another way of saying that an approach has stood the test of time. After decades of studying organizational behavior, it’s clear to me that human nature hasn’t changed much— not in the last 30 years nor in the last 30,000 years for that matter—I know, I was there! What drove people then still drives them today.

That’s not to say that all people are alike. Rather, the cohorts are. No matter what organization I’m working with, I see familiar patterns. Overachievers who can’t stop working, want to win more than anything and will do it at all costs. Self-described perfectionists who believe that is the sole path to righteousness (i.e., approval and acceptance.) Command and control types who crave power, the purely financially driven, the attention-driven, etc.

There are about a dozen different categories of internal motivators for people who are self- driven; they create their own tension to perform. And, of course, there are people who are just trying to get by, seeking to do the minimum required to collect a paycheck and stay out of trouble. This doesn’t mean they don’t have drive. It just means that if they do, it’s focused on things outside the organization’s objectives.

Getting all of these people moving toward the same goal requires understanding each individual’s motivations. It means creating the tension in the system required to activate the employees that are not driven to perform, as well as setting up the guardrails required to keep those that are driven working collaboratively where appropriate. Partially, this can—and should—be done through acts of positive consequences, such as bonuses, promotions, and recognition. However, people also need to understand that if they don’t perform there will be negative consequences. Sometimes it feels terrible. When I was running a business and missed my “number” one quarter, it wasn’t my bonus I was worried about…it was walking into that conference room with my CEO and his finance team and facing that fire.

While there are formal performance management systems in most organizations, they are frequently not robust enough to manage the ins and outs of balancing people’s desire to acquire rewards and their desire to avoid negative consequences. This is where it comes down to a leader’s direct relationship with employees.

If an employee is expected to deliver on something and they let it slip, they should be worried about walking into the boss’s office and saying they dropped the ball, not merely about the impact the mistake will have on their performance review six months later. Being worried about a boss’s reaction when one doesn’t perform is a healthy, rational response, not something organizations should seek to avoid.

Understanding that a boss may reprimand—or worse—someone in the moment can obviously influence how people behave. After all, if a manager tells an employee to accomplish five things and that person didn’t do them, and didn’t reach out for help, the manager has good reason to be ruffled.

Corporate culture in its simplest terms is the repeated patterns of behaviors present in an organization. If a leader wants their organization to be more creative, collaborative, or innovative, they must first set up a system that incentivizes and enables those behaviors, monitors them, and artfully inflects pressure points and applies consequences—both positive and negative. Those formal systems must be supported by informal systems, and one of those informal systems is the leaders’ application of approval and disapproval as each situation warrants. Friction produces energy, and energy is what drives outcomes and ultimately what separates good organizations from great ones.