Published May 2004

Workplace is no place
to relive high school:
quash classification

We leave high school, but high school never leaves us.

The enduring popularity of the television series “Friends” is probably due in no small part to its extension of high school attitudes and concerns, which most of us never totally shake off, to the more independent life of working 20- and 30-year-olds.

“Friends” is a situation comedy, and it is important to remember that it is fiction. Still, the writers got a lot of things right about human behavior — right enough for us to draw some lessons that can be useful when we take up our management responsibilities.

In one episode, for example, Rachel (the Jennifer Aniston character) is still working at Bloomingdales, but since her entire department was eliminated, she has been reassigned as a “personal shopper.” She considers this a demotion and is about to quit when a customer — a young man Rachel is immediately attracted to — arrives and is in need of an entire wardrobe because his now ex-wife destroyed all of his clothing.

Rachel’s infatuation with this young man, Joshua, is so intense that she can barely contain herself. None of her schemes and stratagems to get him to notice her has worked, though. Desperate, she decides to ask him out, but is concerned that he will say no. And friend Joey suggests, “Invite the guy to a Knicks game, you’re guaranteed he’ll say yes!”

But it doesn’t work out so well. As Joshua is thanking her for her help with his clothing purchases, and saying goodbye, she blurts out, “I have two tickets to the Knicks game tonight if you’re interested, just as a thank-you for this week.”

“Wow! That would be great,” he replies.

“Really?”

“Yeah, that would be fantastic! My, my nephew is crazy about the Knicks.”

And off he goes, with two Knicks tickets and no Rachel — apparently clueless about her feelings or her intent.

Remember, it’s a sitcom and meant to be funny, not real. But Joshua, the character, had a problem recognizing the offer of the tickets as an invitation because of an imputed classification: he was the customer, Rachel was the employee. If something were being offered, it must be a part of the commercial transaction — customer relations — for there was no other relationship bridging the gap between the two classes.

There is something in us, it seems, that makes classifying things easy and reassuring, if not always accurate. And for most of us, classifications of people either begin in high school or there put down their strongest roots. The essentially tribal organization of high school students rewards quick classifications: friend, foe or freak; hot, not or eeeyeeach. We learn to make quick judgments and rarely revisit them.

Most of us continue to grow up after high school, but the instinct to classify things remains, just at a lesser intensity. And this can become a problem for management.

For efficiency reasons, most workplaces are divided up into areas of responsibility: production, sales, customer service, order fulfillment, finance and whatever else may be needed. And it is the most natural thing in the world for our high school instincts to classify our co-workers by their jobs and to assign characteristics to them that justify and simplify our affection, or loathing, for them. (“Those finance types are necktie-loving, numbers geeks whose favorite word is ‘no,’” for example.)

This instinctive process of classification may be natural, but it is the enemy of organizational effectiveness, and management cannot afford to ignore it. In the absence of positive action to get rid of it, efficiency will become such a distant memory that it will seem like a dream you once had.

And, unlike everything else in this world, where it always seems that always “education is the answer,” in the workplace, education isn’t enough — just as it wasn’t enough in high school.

It certainly helps to give each new worker some time to see and experience what workers in other departments do all day, but by itself, this won’t be sufficient to offset our instincts — any more than occasionally being a pedestrian makes us more polite to them when we are behind the wheel ourselves.

Managers have to work hard to build a team where everybody counts and everybody knows it. (If you have people who don’t count, you are a poor manager, indeed). Invite production and warehouse people to participate in screening interviews. Let customer service people sit in on sales meetings. And most important, let all members of the team know just how important they are and how well you know it.

Reliving high school is for television and movies. If you want a workplace that works, you have to encourage and help people to graduate.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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