Opinion November 2005

Opinion
Professional or personal individualism doesn’t work

by Andrew Taylor
November 2005

Following recent Vivid articles about authority and governance as well as Oliver Perkins’ excellent article on team building, it is possible to see how the combination of the discourse of politics and team development theory may provide some insight into explaining why Romania is as it is.

Recent sociological studies have shown Romania to be among the most individualistic countries in the world. The combination of this individualism with the communist emphasis upon engineering and task skills has resulted in a nation with almost no sense of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck refers to as “the other”. People do not accord much consideration to their group needs when making decisions. Witness the selfishness of the political class, or the greed of the national business elite, both on the back of great poverty and exploitation. An expert commentator on leadership, John Adair, has convincingly shown the importance of achieving a balance between the individual, the group and the task. Furthermore, he argues that when they are heavily out of balance groups are likely to significantly under perform over the long-term. (I use the word group rather than team, since outside the rarefied world of the multinational teams and teamworking are not truly understood, either emotionally or intellectually, despite rhetoric to the contrary. There are exceptions, of course, but they are most certainly not the rule.)

People often throw around the Three Musketeers line of one for all and all for one. Yet the day-to-day reality is that very few people, outside of their immediate family, genuinely place others needs as of equal importance to their own. Rather than one for all, it is more akin to tossing a coin where heads I win, tails you lose!

Too frequently do Romanians show little concern for pride in their own work. This leads the task element of leadership being measured in quantitative rather then qualitative terms. In other words, people are more apt to ask themselves, “Did I get through all my paperwork,” rather than how much value did I add by doing so? Few could doubt that this was indeed the case before 1989. However, the problem is combined with an immaturity regarding the individual component of Adair’s leadership model, where people assume the credit and reward for individual action are resistant to assuming responsibility for their own failures and mistakes. Managers and journalists complain every day about their subjects (subordinates, or politicians) failure to take personal responsibility for their actions. Whilst such complaints can be heard the world over, the scale of the problem is more widespread, deep rooted and damaging here than elsewhere.

When things do go wrong there exists a strong tendency in Romania for people to view themselves as victims of circumstance, which leads to two subsequent effects. First, as eloquently described by Matei Paun recently in Vivid, they exhibit a passivity in the face of gross public abuses. Second, the tendency to seek out outsiders to blame, as the cause of the countries countless ills, as both Alex Ulmanu and Andrei Postelnicu have previously written. This trend was clearly seen during the Emma Nicholson scandal over children’s homes. Rather than face the issue, the country seemed to unite in outrage at how this foreign woman dare expose the things that we don’t speak about. The need to blame outsiders for societies ills underlines the internal weakness of the society that it feels unable to diagnose and treat its own weaknesses.

Parts of the problem have been seen elsewhere. Britain in the 1970s was characterised by a focus on quantity of task, rather than quality, for example. Whilst issues of personal responsibility have long been significant problems throughout the Mediterranean countries, the problem for Romania is that there exists a conflation of sociological barriers to development, which cuts right through society. Even worse, these barriers have been actively exploited by the ruling elite to maintain the status quo for the last 15 years. Whilst addressing these problems will doubtless keep myself, Oliver Perkins and others in the experiential learning business busy making small scale changes, real societal level change will only come when we stop being hostages to our past or present.

Andrew Taylor runs Connect-CEE, an outdoor management training company.