Comfort vs. Team Members, Which would you choose?

I am an avid watcher of “Survivor.” Many see this show as simply a game. Some say that it is always the same (yet isn’t any sport). But for me it is life especially in organizations. I would almost be willing to bet that the behavior shown on the show would be how these individuals would face any challenge in business or life. We are “voting” people off our island all the time; we do it in our mind “I am never working with …… again.”

This season on Survivor has been interesting. Once again the creator and his staff have thrown new and different dilemmas at the participants. In this season one team has had many comforts (as one participant stated “We’ve had more food than many people in his neighborhood.”) while the other team has struggled to find any comforts. The “comfort team” has been winning all the challenges to date.

Then on March 1, 2007 there was a major twist which I found truly interesting and especially telling about the nature of people. As with every episode there is a competition in which immunity is won (the losing team goes to tribal council and votes off one of their team members). However with this challenge the winning team also received a note in a bottle. The note told the winning team they could either:

1. Keep all their comforts and the prize for the winning the challenge (which was a huge amount of food) BUT the would not keep the immunity and would have to vote off one of their members at tribal council OR
2. Keep immunity and avoid tribal council BUT they would have to switch camps with the other team and lose all their comforts and the prize for that challenge.

Which would you do? Do you choose comfort (things) over team members (people)? Well the team, after a rather short discussion, chose to keep the comforts and lose a team member. What an interesting decision to make.

As I thought about this episode I realized that this is a choice that is made all the time in organizations. Usually it is not made by the individuals that have to carry out the cutting of personnel. But what happens when we go for comfort over people?

I found that with this team some of the members felt that the decision should have been very easy. Cut the weakest member. How do you determine the weakest member? What is weakest? Is it physical strength? Is it lack of knowledge? Maybe it is lack of skill? How about the individual that can pull the team together to accomplish that tough task?

Then the human politics kick in. Who has a personal relationship with whom? Who do you like versus dislike? Who just drives you nutty? And what happens if the person who drives you nutty is “stronger” than the person that you really like?

Usually in organizations these decisions are left to managers or supervisors but the effect is still the same. With the Survivor team in a matter of a few hours you saw what appeared to be a fairly connected winning team start to implode. They started to finger point, nit pick and criticize each other. Just to be clear the team had some personality issues bubbling up but it was in check as long as they were winning and had comfort. Now that they had a tough decision to make the negative side started to show.

It will be interesting to see in the upcoming episodes how this team deals with lose of a member and the side affects that came along with their decision making process. What about your organization? How are you and your team dealing with the decisions made regarding your balance between comfort and people? Do you ignore the emotional issues that naturally occur with these types of decisions and go on, or do you actively consider them during the decision making process? Do you have a plan to minimize the emotional issues before they even happen? Do you have a communication process to assist in getting out the information people need to understand the pending changes or do you let the rumor mill run wild?

Comfort or people, major or minor impact, engaged or disengaged people, the decision is up to you.