When the budget cuts came, everyone in the department knew they were real.
The numbers had been circulated — a thirty percent reduction, effective in three months, with no clarity yet on where it would land. The ambiguity was, as these ambiguities tend to be, more corrosive than the eventual fact would have been. In the absence of information, people produced their own.
The director's approach to the situation was a model of a particular kind of crisis management: he communicated just enough to activate anxiety without communicating enough to resolve it. He scheduled individual meetings that seemed to carry different signals. He mentioned, in team meetings, that he was "assessing contributions across all roles." He allowed the uncertainty to run.
Within six weeks, a department that had functioned reasonably well as a unit had developed the quality of a waiting room before a verdict. People stopped sharing work-in-progress. Collaborative projects stalled as individuals focused on making their individual contributions visible. Two colleagues who had previously co-authored work submitted separate pieces instead. The crisis hadn't made this necessary. The director's management of it had.
What about you?
Have you ever seen a genuine scarcity be managed in a way that manufactured competition beyond what the scarcity itself required?
The budget cut was real. The scarcity was genuine. But the rivalry it produced had been manufactured by someone who had found the crisis convenient.
One of the team leads, a woman named Ruth, called an informal gathering of the team without the director. She named what she'd observed: that the ambiguity had been producing behaviour that would make all of them look worse, not better, and that the competition being generated was not a response to the actual problem.
She asked a simple question: *What would we do differently if we assumed we were all in this together rather than each for ourselves?* The conversation that followed was the first honest one the team had had in six weeks.
They couldn't change the director's approach. They could change how they responded to it. They agreed to continue sharing work, to keep the collaborative projects moving, to trust each other's intentions rather than reading competition into every independent action. The rivalry was still technically present in the environment. It stopped governing the relationships inside it.
What about you?
Have you ever maintained collaboration inside a system that was generating rivalry — found people around you who refused to be turned into competitors — and felt the difference it made?