In a conversation with a mentee of mine, we talked about the idea of respectful behavior in a team. For him, it didn’t seem necessary to talk about it. He assumed that it was built in and that one shouldn’t need to talk about it. However, he was also confronted with a situation in which he had to address it.
In a way he was right. The way people offer mutual esteem is embedded in the way the group will deal with one another. It is part of the social norms we’ll find in a group.
Norms correspond to the shared beliefs within a group allowing group members to know how they should behave in a given situation. They become norms when people start enforcing them by internal and external actions, those going against the norm know that they can expect to be shamed or somehow punished by the other group members.
Human beings have long been trained to observe such norms, to pay attention to their relative status compared to others, and to experience a feeling of obligation inviting them to follow these norms. What is at stake for people is the esteem of others. People look for it and need it, and they become anxious, that it can be withheld from them.
In this, norms are different from rules. People find it much less important to follow rules than norms, this is also true for rules that are defined within an organization. While there can be a wide overlap between rules and norms, it may help to look at it as follows: people choose to follow rules, whereas norms come with a sense of obligation to follow them. It thus isn’t astonishing that rules sometimes will only reflect the set of beliefs of the leader and his team.
To establish norms a team must therefore do more than establish a set of shared beliefs about how people should behave.
There needs to be enough mutual esteem in the group to make it feel like a loss should it be taken away. The harder part of establishing norms however is the developed willingness by members to openly call out a norm violation by peers and to withhold esteem from a peer who violated the norm. It puts accountability at the heart of sharing and receiving esteem.
An interesting aspect of norms is also the presence of defense routines. Once mutual esteem can be at stake, the group will develop ways to prevent the experience of embarrassment and threat. These behaviors may then serve as protection but they can also establish a bubble disconnecting people from reality as well as prevent them from learning. In this defense routines can be dysfunctional as much as serving people to do the work they need to do.
