It took me a while to recognize that this was happening. At first, I experienced a series of seemingly unrelated frustrations: rooms that didn't get set up, requests that went unanswered, programs that other departments didn't want to support.
But eventually I realized these weren't isolated problems.
They were all symptoms of the same organizational culture.
“That's Not Our Problem”
One incident surrounding a Passover Seder crystallized the problem for me.
I was the director of pastoral care at a senior living facility, and we were expecting a substantial crowd for the 2022 Seder. I had heard from the maintenance staff that a microphone could be made available.
It wasn't an unreasonable request. The equipment apparently existed somewhere in the building, and there were maintenance members who could find and set it up. But they told me directly that doing so wasn't a priority.
What frustrated me wasn't simply the possibility of conducting a large Seder without amplification. It was the underlying message:
That's your problem, not ours.
Eventually, the building administrator learned about the situation - I don't remember whether I raised it directly or someone else did - and instructed the appropriate staff to take care of it.
Suddenly, the problem was solved. The issue wasn't that the staff couldn't help me. Once the administrator told them to do it, they did.
The problem was that, absent an instruction from someone above them, they saw little reason to make my problem their problem.
And this was hardly an isolated incident.
The Systems That Never Came Back
To understand how we got there requires going back to when I started the job.
I arrived at the facility in May 2020, at perhaps the strangest possible moment to begin working in senior living. The pandemic had disrupted virtually everything, and senior living facilities were experiencing that disruption more acutely than most places.
Programming had entirely stopped. Residents were isolated. Departments that ordinarily worked together had entirely different priorities. My predecessor nevertheless explained to me how things normally worked.
For example, we had a large programming room with several standard configurations. If you were holding a particular kind of event, you could request Layout A or Layout B, and the appropriate staff would arrange the tables and chairs.
There was also the Resident Life team. They ran their own programming, but they also helped residents participate in programs throughout the building, including by bringing residents to events and providing other kinds of logistical support.
None of that mattered very much when I arrived because we weren't holding large programs anyway.
I assumed, though, that when normal programming eventually returned, those systems would return with it. They didn't.
As we began holding programs again, I was told that the staff who had previously handled room setups were too short-staffed to continue doing so. If I wanted a particular configuration for a program, I would need to arrange the room myself.
And so I did.
Throughout 2021, there were plenty of occasions when I moved chairs and tables and prepared rooms myself. Resident Life staff sometimes helped bring residents to programs when they could, and I appreciated their assistance.
At the time, it was easy to chalk all of this up to the pandemic.
Everyone was short-staffed. Everyone was improvising. Outbreaks throughout 2021 and the following winter continued to disrupt whatever sense of normalcy we were beginning to establish.
But the temporary systems never really became temporary.
The old infrastructure of cooperation simply disappeared.
Then, in April 2022, the facility was acquired by another company, and the fragmentation became even more pronounced.
Resident Life was reorganized, with staff assigned to particular parts of the building. The old room-setup system never returned. Increasingly, if I needed something done for one of my programs, I had to figure out how to do it myself.
Working for the Same Company, But Not on the Same Team
What bothered me most wasn't actually moving chairs. I was perfectly capable of moving chairs.
The larger problem was the growing sense that different departments no longer understood themselves as mutually responsible for what happened in the building.
This became especially noticeable around Jewish life.
On multiple occasions, when I requested assistance from Resident Life, they told me point blank that there were no longer very many Jewish residents in the building and that, consequently, supporting Jewish programming was something they would not prioritize.
That put me in a peculiar position.
Supporting the religious and spiritual lives of those residents was precisely what the organization had hired me to do. Historically, other departments had helped make that work possible.
Now the organization was simultaneously employing me to perform that function while allowing other departments whose cooperation was necessary for that function to decide that it wasn't particularly important.
That contradiction extended beyond Jewish programming.
There were maintenance needs surrounding religious activities, including making sure the Sukkah was constructed. There were room setups. There was the microphone for the Seder. There was assistance getting residents to programs.
Each individual request could seem relatively minor.
And, of course, sometimes another department genuinely didn't have the capacity to help. Staffing shortages were real. Everyone had competing demands.
But over time, a pattern became clear: we worked for the same company, we served the same residents, yet increasingly, it didn't feel as though we were on the same team.
Instead, every department seemed responsible primarily for protecting itself.
When Helping Makes You the Schlemiel
Eventually, I realized there was a certain logic to the behavior I was seeing.
Suppose someone from another department asked you for help: If you said yes, what happened? You got more work. You gave up some of your staff capacity. You spent some of your time. You added another responsibility to your day. What did you get in return? Usually, nothing. The other department might appreciate your assistance, but organizationally, there wasn't necessarily any benefit to helping them.
Now consider what happened if you said no: usually, nothing. You kept your time. You preserved your staff capacity. You remained focused on the things for which your own department would be held accountable. From a narrowly departmental perspective, helping someone else could make you the schlemiel. You were the one doing extra work.
And once I understood that, I began to see the problem differently.
I had initially experienced these situations as conflicts with particular people or departments: Why won't they help? Why don't they care about this program? Why can't someone take care of this relatively simple request?
But perhaps those were the wrong questions. The more important question was:
Why had the organization created a system in which refusing to help was often the rational choice?
You don't need selfish employees to create a selfish organization.
You simply need to make cooperation costly and noncooperation free.
The Problem With “Work It Out Among Yourselves”
This is where leadership enters the picture.
The building administrator was not managing relationships between departments at all, and he absolutely demonstrated no leadership whatsoever. The standard way that he operated was that he let the departments argue and fight for help from other departments. He entirely took himself out of the equation.
But the microphone incident demonstrated the limitation of that approach. When the administrator finally intervened, the microphone got set up. The obstacle hadn't been technical. It hadn't been a lack of equipment. It hadn't even been an absolute lack of staff capacity. What had been missing was an organizational expectation.
This happened occasionally. Perhaps two or three times a year, the administrator would step in and make clear that something needed to happen. But those interventions were exceptions. Most of the time, departments were left to argue their own cases for why another department should help them.
And often the other department simply said no. “Work it out among yourselves” sounds like a neutral management philosophy, but it isn't necessarily neutral.
When departments have limited resources and different priorities, telling them to work things out without establishing expectations for cooperation can create a predictable result: every department learns to protect itself.
The department most willing to say no frequently comes out ahead. And people notice. Managers learn that preserving their own resources is safer than contributing those resources toward another department's success. Employees learn that volunteering to help can mean acquiring responsibilities that less-cooperative colleagues successfully avoided. And the people who naturally want to collaborate eventually discover that collaboration has a cost. Over time, even collaborative people can learn to stop volunteering.
That is why leaders cannot simply tell employees that they're all on the same team. Leadership has to make behaving like a team rational.
That doesn't mean every request from another department must be granted. Sometimes, the answer genuinely has to be no. People have limited time. Departments have limited staff. Organizations have limited resources.
But leaders can establish a very different default:
If another department is trying to accomplish something that advances our shared mission, helping them accomplish it is part of our work, too.
That expectation can be reinforced in all sorts of ways.
Managers can be evaluated partly on how well they collaborate across departments. Employees who make other people's work possible can be recognized. Leaders can distinguish between legitimate capacity limitations and simple territorialism. They can intervene when departments repeatedly protect themselves at the expense of the larger organization.
Most importantly, they can make clear that there is a fundamental difference between saying:
We genuinely don't have the capacity to help with this.
and saying:
That's not our problem.
Those statements can produce the same immediate answer, but they reflect entirely different organizational cultures.
Who Moves the Chairs?
Looking back, so many of the things that frustrated me seem almost comically mundane.
Who moves the chairs?
Who sets up the microphone?
Who helps residents get to a program?
Who makes sure the Sukkah gets built?
None of these questions belongs in an organization's strategic plan.
But organizational culture often reveals itself precisely through these small moments.
A mission statement can tell employees that they share a common purpose. Leadership can talk about teamwork. An organization can declare collaboration to be one of its core values.
But the employee being asked to move twenty chairs learns far more about the organization's actual culture from what happens next.
Does that employee think:
Of course I'll help. We're trying to make this program successful.
Or:
Why should I get stuck doing someone else's job?
If the first response is the norm, you probably have an organization in which people understand that someone else's success can also be their success.
If the second response becomes rational, you have something very different.
You have departments protecting their own resources, pursuing their own priorities, and negotiating with one another as though they were separate organizations.
Eventually, you don't really have one organization at all.
You have a collection of departments occupying the same building.
And that's why, looking back, I don't think my frustration was ever really about the chairs.
I could move the chairs.
The more important question was why the organization had created a culture in which helping me move them could make someone else feel like a schlemiel.
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