Transcending loyalty is a condition for the survival of organisations and humanity

How do leaders create a shared sense of identity, given that most workplaces are highly diverse? It’s an important concern, because a staff complement that is divided along demographic lines presents almost limitless opportunities for conflict.

Members are not going to contribute to a shared loyalty if they feel that their ethnic, religious, political or any other identity prevents them from identifying with their diverse colleagues. Business leaders need to create a sense of belonging as “us” that is even more salient than the divisions imported from outside.

Leaders foster this shared identity through a mission that resonates with their followers, with symbols, traditions, stories and heroes that represent the soul of the organisation. They may also define “us” in terms of competencies and even processes that make us stand out from the competition. The greater the diversity in the organization, the more prominent the message needs to be.

Leaders need to be very careful to avoid language and events that might unintentionally seem to define the company in terms of one, usually dominant, set of members and exclude others. 

Group identity can be fostered at all levels. For example, it’s currently an opportunity facing the government of national unity in South Africa – can we all be persuaded that we belong together and should work together in overcoming the challenges we face as a nation?

I find the current Kenyan protests really interesting. The youth seem from the outside to have transcended identity politics in the form or ethnic rivalries that have plagued Kenya and so many other countries. If that is true, it’s a bottom-up rebuke to their national leaders.

Next door in Rwanda the recent election has illustrated a top-down approach to imposing a single national identity on a country that suffered their dreadful genocidal violence thirty years ago. 

It can be lost. National identity was once a strength of the USA, but that has fallen apart spectacularly in recent years to the extent that some commentators murmur about civil war.

Nations with multiple ethnic, linguistic and religious identities may have histories that include searing memories of fighting each other, and so cannot draw on much of what defines more homogenous peoples. We have to create shared symbols like the flag and anthem, shared heroes like Mandela and sports teams, and shared ceremonies or holidays. We create them to forge a national identity that would not otherwise exist.

Nelson Mandela provided an extraordinary example of how symbols can be harnessed. Until Mandela wrought his magic at the 1995 World Cup, celebrating the springboks would have been very alienating for large numbers of South Africans in Mandela’s core constituency. He courageously opened the door to transforming the springboks into a unifying team by donning the captain’s jersey and forcefully calling on the ANC youth to support the team. By itself that would not have been enough; it required wise leadership from captains and coaches over the years to take us through that open door and create what has become a unifying rather than divisive symbol, and part of our shared national identity.

Wise leaders recognize that we all need to belong to a community that we can identify with and that feeds our need for acceptance and significance. Leaders who can transcend their own limited, exclusionary loyalties and create a shared identity out of diversity create robust oganisations, communities and nations. 

How leaders help us to find each other in diverse organisations can be a proving ground for the wider challenge across the globe. As we rapidly develop the capacity to destroy ourselves in new ways, this skill of creating shared identity with a transcending loyalty will increasingly become a condition for our survival as a species.

Jonathan Cook, a counselling psychologist, chairs the African Management Institute. This is a coaching column for Business Day, published on 23rd July 2024 (https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/opinion/columnists/2024-07-23-jonathan-cook-creating-shared-identity-is-a-condition-for-survival/).

If you’d like to read previous columns in this series or ask Jonathan a question please visit
https://africanmanagers.com/jonathan-cook