The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
August 14, 2017
From my own personal background, let me give several illustrations of the bee which has recently infiltrated my bonnet to produce this essay. That way you will better know from whence I come. In these paragraphs I want to try to make as clear as possible what I believe is a besetting organizational problem in America.
I have been an active member of the clergy for fifty-plus years. As such I have had many conversations with many clergy about many church matters.
Here are some typical ministerial phrases I have heard through the years which I find extremely off-putting. Pastors will refer to “my church, my associate minister, my pulpit, my staff, my church officers, my governing board,” and so on. I find such phrases offensive, irritating, and prideful.
How can any member of the clergy utter such foolish, self-centered words? It is legitimate for a pastor to speak of my office or my administrative assistant, because most ministers do have a room that is “theirs” for the time they are associated with that congregation. Often there also is someone from the church staff assigned by the organizational chart (of which there probably isn’t one) to work with the minister in an administrative role. However, it most certainly is not the minister’s church, associate minister, pulpit, staff, officers, or governing board. It is the congregaton’s church, associate, pulpit, staff, and so on.
No person in any position of leadership in any organization should ever refer to anybody or anything in the organization as “my” or “mine” with respect to the corporate body he or she serves. It demeans those working under their supervision, and it subconsciously erodes group morale, even if the group is not consciously aware of it.
When the coach of any team sport says “my team,” he is damaging the inherent integrity of the team by the usage of those two short words. If a coach says, “The players on my team are lousy,” it reflects badly on everyone, but especially on the coach for using such ill-considered terminology. It betrays a lack of leadership sensitivity to utter such a noxious declaration. “The players on my team are great” may really be the coach’s indirect way of saying, “My team is great because I am a great coach.” By my definition, no one is a great coach who ever refers to “my team.” Instead, a coach should say something like this: “Our team is great because we have great players.”
It is a huge mistake for any coach ever to speak about “my“ team.” It is our team, the Wisconsin Badgers or the Green Bay Packers or the Chicago Cubs or the Cleveland Cavaliers or the Mudville Marauders. Every participant is an integral component of every team --- the coach or coaches, the players, the trainers, the scorekeepers, the waterboys, the batgirls, the cheerleaders. A team must always be referenced by the pronouns “our, we, and us,” and never by “my, I, or me.”
I am nearly driven into a philological frenzy whenever a big-name athlete talks about MY team. It is OUR team, you boob! Who do you think you are? What do you think you are? You are nothing without the team, but the team is still a team without you!
A while back Tom Brady, the quarterback of the New England Patriots spoke of “my team.” Those two words speak volumes about Tom Brady.
On the other hand, last April, when the Cleveland Cavaliers were struggling, Lebron James projected his ever-present optimism. Referring to the seeding of the various championship teams of which he has been a member in his career, Lebron quietly stated, “I’ve felt very confident no matter if I was one or two seed or whatever seed I was. I’ve just felt confident that I can go into any building and win. I believe our team feels the same way this year.” That is a very wise separation between “I” and ‘we.”
Shortly after Lebron James said that, the Cavaliers caught fire and went on to win the Eastern Conference championship. (They did lose the NBA finals, 4-0, but hey, it happens like that sometimes. The best in the East were trounced by the best in the west. C’est la vie.) The point is, for Tom Brady the Patriots are my team and for Lebron James the Cavaliers are our team.
Furthermore, there is much more to any sports team than just the players and coaches and the rest of the athletic retinue. There are the fans. The hundreds or thousands or millions of fans of any team also legitimately speak of “our team.” It is their team. There would be no team without their support and devotion --- and ticket purchases.
The owners of many professional sports teams can properly speak of “my team,” because they own the team. But in a larger sense, “his” team is much more “their” team, the team members’ team and the fans’ team and the city’s or state’s team, than it is the owner’s team.
Business executives are some of the worst offenders in the misuse of organizational language. “I ordered my sales staff to get on the stick….I told my CFO to get the figures to me by Monday morning….I want a report from my senior v.p. for manufacturing ASAP that explains why THEY [not WE] are so far behind on their [not our] orders.”
Even those who are the sole-owners of any type of business should never refer to my company or my organization. It should always be our company. Why? Because “our” makes every employee feel as though he or she is an integral part of the organization, that they also have a certain type of ownership in the enterprise. In a vital sense they do have ownership, simply by being employed in that company.
Do you understand the issue being addressed here? Is it clear, or have I simply confused or befuddled you?
Whether it is a Cub Scout pack or a neighborhood pick-up softball team or a small charter school or a large university or the U.S. Navy or the U.S. government or the United Nations, it is imperative that everyone in each of those organizations sees it as OUR organization, not as MY organization. If the mentality in any organization allows or encourages anyone to think of the organization in individual terms rather than collective terms, that organization is in serious trouble. Every organization or group is an “OUR”; none of them is a “MY.”
Part of the reason the nation’s two political parties are in such disarray is that there is far too little “us” in party politics. Instead, there is far too much “me.” Individuals have splintered the parties into too many factions for their own selfish purposes. There is no cohesive collective identity to inspire the electorate.
Here are two hypothetical examples of the misuse of a personal pronoun. The Senate Minority leader might declare in a Senate debate, “I have lined up all my Senators to oppose the bill now before us!” He makes himself sound important, but he minimizes the position of the Senators in his party. They are not his Senators; they are the Senators of Illinois, California, and so on.
A Congressman thoughtlessly declares, “My people in my state support this bill!” They are not his people, and it is not his state. The proper way to convey the proper nuance and meaning of that statement is to say something like this: “Our people in our state support this bill.” (Actually, not all of the people in any state support any bill, but that kind of truth-fudging is another issue for another jeremiad.)
Here is an actual example of the burr that for the moment is firmly fixed under my saddle. A few weeks back, when a particular military matter was in the headlines, the President announced that he would have “my generals” fix the problem. It is philosophically unwise for any commander-in-chief who never spent a day in a United States military uniform ever to use the term “my generals.” Generals or admirals serving under Ulysses S. Grant or Dwight D. Eisenhower would even strongly object to that terminology, let alone the highest-ranking officers in our military hearing it from a man who pulled every string to avoid wearing any military uniform except the one he wore in the military academy to which he was summarily sent, hoping it would straighten him out. You may decide for yourself whether it succeeded.
People who use first-person personal pronouns when referring to organizations with which they are affiliated tend to have an unhealthy proprietary interest in those organizations. They delude themselves into believing that the organization could not get along without them, and that they are absolutely essential to the success of the organization.
There is an old song whose opening lyric proclaimed, “I got along without you before I met you/ Going to get along without you now.” Nobody is permanently essential to any institution or organization. If that were so, that organization would be doomed to failure before the Pivotal Person ever entered the scene, because every pivotal person shall inevitably leave every group by retirement, revulsion, ejection, or death.
Hiring committees for every institution should be very wary of any applicant for any position who refers to my-anything: my company, my church, my workers, my-whatever. My, my, my: that little word may indicate an enormous and potentially dangerous blind spot in the mind of the person who frequently uses it.
Prima donnas in any field of endeavor are more likely to say “I, me, or my” than any other variety of humanoid. And prima donnas are almost always inimical to the success of any organization. Caveat emptor.
John Miller is a writer, author, lecturer, and preacher-for-over-fifty-years who is pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC.