"Us vs Them" at Work

You're young, fresh of heart, recently graduated and out to conquer the world. It's your first job, and you're oh-so-excited because you get to Contribute! You get to Be Part Of Something Big! You're on your way!
And then BAM! you run into workplace politics 🤬, and there go your dreams, running smack-dab into the brutalist wall of reality. 

Mind you, this is the easy version, when you're fully aware of what's going on around you. It's even worse when you get caught up in it, and don't realize what you're doing 🤯.

We, as humans like being part of something larger than ourselves, something that gives us a sense of belonging, that can help us be rooted amongst all the chaos that is swelling all around us. And our workplace is one of the most natural places to find this.

Yeah, yeah, the obvious comes to mind - company songs (hello Japan), group activities (trust falls!), and oh so much more. But, in this case, I'm actually referring to something slightly more sinister, the scenario where you start identifying with your team, as in opposition to a different team 🙁.

• "We wouldn't be in this mess if it wasn't for those sales folks constantly mis-representing the product"
• "If the storage team could get their s**t together and build better drivers, we'd have fewer issues"
• and oh so much more, generally to the tune of "We're great, it's others who constantly screw up"

The worst part is, it is so easy to end up here. Again, it's a human thing. When we make a mistake, we instinctively look to shift the blame - it starts when we're kids - "I didn't eat the cookies!" - and we just continue from there. It's that much worse at work - after all, the number of dependencies for each product pretty much grows geometrically with the size of the team and the size of the product, and with all those interactions, there has to be something that's done poorly (and more importantly, something that you weren't involved in that's done poorly!).
In that kind of situation, you'd be a fool to not shift blame over there, right?

And that's how it begins. You start with a little blame-shifting, and pretty soon your team consists of the golden children, bravely soldering on and Delivering On Your Promises in the face of all the chaos that everybody else is generating. If it wasn't for your team, nothing would work, everything would break, and yet you get no appreciation for all this, see the world is stacked against your team, it's your team vs. the world, ....

See what happened there? You basically ended up working yourself up into a lather of cynicism, despair, vague loathing, and all-around dislike for The Others, all because you didn't want to own up to something early on.

Yes, it does sound somewhat far-fetched, except it isn't. This exists everywhere, and it's a pretty righteous buzz-kill when it comes to workplace culture.
And no, I'm not exaggerating - this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to an EnterpriseWorld-like culture, where you succeed by

1. Not f**king up

2. (Bonus) Making sure that others f**k up

The latter - making sure that others fail - is extremely common in these types of organizations, and no, it doesn't consist of actually sabotaging their code. Instead, and this gets us back to where we started, it's all about office-politics. This is the domain of 

• Negging: (In a meeting with the SVP) "Wow, that marketing campaign wasn't bad! If they'd timed the delivery windows better, they could actually have had some seriously positive sales impact!"
• Duplicity: Huge smile when interacting face-to-face, speaking ill of them when they're not around
• Whisper-Campaigns: Do I really need to explain these?
• Brutus-ing: "For Brutus is an honorable man" shortly before Brutus is put to death.

And so much more!

Look at yourself, and around you at your team. Is this happening? Does your team have an "us vs them" attitude towards any other team in the company? If so, is it intentional? Or still in the early growing phase, and correctable? Worst of all, is this something your boss does? (•)

If it's there, and you have agency, do something about it! If you don't, you'll end up neck-deep in office politics, and hey, is that what you want to spend 70% of your waking hours doing?

(•) If your boss is actually instigating any of this, you really need to do something about it (including, possibly, leave). If your boss displays this kind of behavior with others, what d'you think they're going to do when things are on the line and they can't shift blame to others. Of course they're going to look for a scapegoat, and you, my friend, are a sitting duck right there ☹️