A few weeks ago, I turned on the radio and heard the announcer say that Vancouver Canucks hockey teammates Pettersson & Miller: “Don’t like each other.”
The announcer went on to say even though these two hockey players make millions of dollars every year:
“That’s just human nature. They don’t like each other. Money can’t buy you happiness.”
That immediately got my attention! Yes, money cannot buy happiness – happiness is an inside job. I find it takes conscious attention and mindfulness to keep myself connected to myself and others – in a “Hello World” frame of mind.
Regarding the hockey players behaviours being human nature, Lithuanian archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of “Old Europe” saw human nature differently.
Her idea of human nature was based on research she did on the peoples of Old Europe, who lived between 7000 B.C. and 3500 B.C. They lived in agricultural societies, worshipped female Goddesses and nature, shunned war, built comfortable settlements rather than forts and crafted superb ceramics rather than weapons. They also had a matrilineal social system.
Darwin had a similar outlook on human nature, even though he is known for his early hypothesis on the survival of the fittest. In his later years, according to Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The Empathic Civilization: “Darwin came to believe that survival of the fittest is as much about cooperation, symbiosis, and reciprocity as it is about individual competition.”
Whether not liking each other is our human nature is probably a moot point. What I do find helpful is to remind myself that we do have the capacity to be kind and I choose to believe that our human nature, or our authentic true selves, are fundamentally kind.
Which aspects of ourselves will we choose to feed?
What I know for sure is that if you don’t catch issues early enough, and put guidelines in place to have difficult conversations in a good way, breakdowns do happen and chaos ensues.
I don’t see that as human nature per se but as an inability to put what needs to be put in place to help bring out the best in ourselves and each other.
What I believe works is for our groupings: our teams and communities, to have a common understanding and agreement on how to do difficult conversations well. This is imperative if wise, informed decisions are to be made.
Otherwise, little pinches add up to the crunches that result in multiple types of losses in a downward spiral. For example, the feud between the two players on the Vancouver Canucks team created a “divided the locker room.”
That’s a fractal: the exact same thing happens in the workplace, our societies and amongst nations.
At a certain point, the little pinches add up to harming the relationship to the point that a loss of desire to stay connected sets in. As the Vancouver Canucks President of Hockey Operations Jim Rutherford described:
“As you know, sometimes emotions get deep and as much as people try sometimes you can’t get over it. It certainly appears that’s what’s going on here.” Mere days after that comment, it was announced that one of the two players in question, C.T. Miller, was traded to the New York Rangers. That relationship ended.
What do we do when teammates don’t get along? Well, in a way, it’s like asking: “What do we do when our teeth are so badly rotted that we need multiple interventions and triage to deal with the abscesses and infection.” In one way, it’s already too late. When you are at the point that there is great division on the team, it takes an incredible effort to turn things around. That’s when mediators get called in.
I’m much more interested, these days, in helping create collaborative cultures so that conflict can become innovation. I believe teammates not getting along is a symptom of a lack of team culture that allows differences to be surfaced in a good way and leveraged for the good of the all.
Harvard researcher Linda Hill calls this surfacing of differences “Creative Abrasion.” Hill studies innovation and tells us the capacity to bring out these differences, and to hold the tensions in a good way, allows for something new to be formed: innovation.
Having ongoing conversations in a good way matters. We need healthy team cultures. If we are going by society’s standards, that’s a very low bar. We have to create a higher vision.
The higher vision is not just coming together and talking at each other. We want curated and safe-enough conversational spaces – which allow for differences to come out early and constructively so we can all make wiser, more informed, decisions. So we can leverage the wisdom of the commons.
We may never achieve that vision and what’s important is that we try – with deliberate effort and good intentions.