Leading from inside an ‘othering’ culture
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It doesn’t take long to see ‘us’ and ‘them’ cultures in organisations. It shows up in militaries, emergency services, break rooms and executive team meetings, and it operates whether it’s intended or not. I felt it soon after enlisting in the Army and again in my corporate jobs.
I started paying closer attention to it recently. As the worst of COVID passed and the teams I work with began rebuilding, I noticed how much harder belonging had become to manufacture, and how quickly tired people reach for an enemy to explain the exhaustion.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s how soldiers talk about officers and how paramedics talk about ‘management’. Bus drivers talk this way about ‘the depot’ and nurses talk this way about doctors.
The words carry an almost affectionate contempt, a kind of shorthand that bonds the people saying it as much as it diminishes the people being described.
This is the act of ‘othering’ and it’s one of the most reliable social behaviours humans produce.
And it’s easy to treat othering as a failure of character but I don’t think it is.
I think it’s a feature of how groups work. And once you see it as a feature rather than a bug, you can lead differently because leadership here is a choice anyone can make from wherever they sit.
The trick to leading when othering exists is to do it without exiling yourself from your own people, and that might be easier than it sounds.
The othering origin story
The instinct to sort the world into "us" and "them" is nearly ancient, and it was only in the late 1970s that we found language to make sense of it. It was Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s work in Social Identity Theory that produced one of the more unsettling findings in social psychology.
They took people, divided them into groups based on nothing that mattered, and watched them immediately begin to favour their own group and penalise the other. There was no history, competition or resources at stake. Just a line drawn, and the human mind rushing to make that line meaningful.
The core of this theory is simple: A portion of who we feel ourselves to be is borrowed from the groups we belong to, and we protect that identity by inflating our own group and deflating others.
And it’s very efficient. When we join a group, that category lets us predict behaviour, allocate trust and act quickly without assessing every individual from scratch.
When you think about our world inside and outside of work, speed and cohesion are survival traits and that means that sorting people into known and unknown is not a defect. It is a shortcut that worked often enough to be passed down.
This makes sense and becomes turbo-charged when you add our human appetite for narrative.
Very few people think of their work as a flat set of tasks. We experience it as a story, and stories need an antagonist.
The paramedic crouched over a patient at three in the morning is the protagonist of something. Someone must be the obstacle, and the people who set the roster, deny the overtime, and email about compliance are conveniently placed to fill the role. They are perceived as the distant ones. They hold power, and they rarely have to defend themselves at the scene. That distance is the soil that ‘othering’ grows in.
The same instinct in different clothes
Once you start looking, you see it everywhere, and it always clusters around the same fault lines.
There are the frontline-versus-authority versions: nurses and allied health versus doctors, call centre staff versus management, teachers versus the department, retail floor versus head office, enlisted versus officers, police on the beat versus command.
There are the status-and-credential versions: paralegals and lawyers, registrars and consultants, sessional staff and tenured faculty, support staff and money makers. And there are the broader cultural versions that run on the same engine: public sector versus private, city versus country, locals versus newcomers, one generation versus the next.
Underneath nearly all of them sits a single pattern.
Othering thrives wherever there is a gap in power, in visibility or in the daily reality between two groups who depend on each other but rarely share the same room.
The frontline ones are about power and visibility. The professional-hierarchy ones are about status. The cultural ones are about belonging and territory.
Three different costumes, one instinct.
Why it feels so natural to pick a side
A few forces compound to make camp-choosing almost automatic.
The first is proximity.
We trust the people we sweat alongside. Shared difficulty is a powerful bonding agent, and the people who share your difficulty become ‘us’ by default. Everyone else is provisionally ‘them’ until proven otherwise, and most people never get the chance to prove otherwise because they are never in the room.
The second is the asymmetry of visibility.
You see your own group's effort up close and in full detail. You see the other group only through its outcomes. The paramedic sees every minute of their own shift and only the decision that lands as a directive. Management, equally, sees a screen full of incidents rather than the human moment behind each line. Each side judges itself by its intentions and the other by its effects, and that gap is almost impossible to close from a distance.
The third is that othering pays a real dividend because it feels good.
Belonging is one of the deepest human needs and a shared adversary is the cheapest, fastest way to manufacture it. The military version, done with good humour, is partly a recognition of this. The ribbing about other units or senior officers is a ritual that says we are together, and the laughter takes some of the sting out of the division even as it reinforces it.
The danger is when the humour starts to evaporate, or when the group with less power starts to believe the story so completely that ‘them’ becomes incapable of good faith.
What organisations can do
Organisations tend to respond to othering with structure, and structure has its place, but most of it misses the point.
In building companies and working with CEOs and their teams, I’ve seen three strategies stand the test of time.
The first and single most useful thing an organisation can do is reduce the distance that lets othering flourish.
I met John Mulcahy, then CEO of Suncorp, at a call centre. It was my first job after leaving the Army, and I spent my days with a headset on, answering hundreds of calls. One morning he sat down at the computer next to mine, put on a headset, and started taking calls alongside me. He was the CEO of a major financial services company, in the seat, listening to the same customers I was, getting closer to the people who did the work.
Consider Bunnings, the leading home improvement, hardware and outdoor living retailer in Australia and New Zealand. When its Managing Director, Michael Schneider, was asked about how often he gets in store, his answer was weekly.
Visibility runs both ways, and it is the antidote to the asymmetry above.
The second is to be deeply authentic about shared purpose. Values plastered on a wall don’t count for much.
But genuine, repeated clarity about what everyone is for, and where each group's work meets that purpose, gives people a larger ‘us’ to belong to. The aim is to nest the in-group loyalty inside a bigger identity, so the nurse and the doctor are both, recognisably, on the same side of something that matters.
I've watched a hospital executive open every leadership forum with a single patient story, the same way for two years. It’s served as a reminder of the one thing the surgeon, the cleaner, and the finance team are all there for.
The third is to watch the language. Organisations often harden the divide through the words they institutionalise. ‘The field’ versus ‘head office’ or ‘clinical’ versus ‘corporate’. These framings are not neutral. They tell people which camp they are in before they have done anything.
One CEO I work with banned 'the business' as a phrase, because it had quietly come to mean 'everyone who isn't us'. It sounds trivial but it changed how her team wrote every email.
Leaders who notice this language and quietly refuse to use it are driving culture in the right direction.
What individuals can do
Here is the part I care about most, because it’s the part anyone can act on without permission and where leadership becomes a choice.
Three acts sit within reach of anyone, and they build on each other. Refuse the easy story. Stay loyal while you redirect that loyalty. Then go and meet one person on the other side.
Othering is sustained one sentence at a time and dismantled one sentence at a time.
The person who declines to complete the easy joke, who says ‘I wonder what pressure they were under when they made that call’, is doing something quietly radical. They are holding open the possibility that the other group is made of people acting on incentives and information you cannot see.
And here is the reason so few people act. If you stop othering, do you stop being one of us? Does refusing the joke make you the island, the one who ‘went soft’, the one who started taking their side?
It’s a legitimate fear. And the answer to it is the whole point.
You don’t lead this by defecting. You lead it by staying loyal to your people and redirecting that loyalty toward something they would want.
This is why the work must come from the inside.
The person trusted enough to make the joke is the only person who can decline to make it without seeming like a sell-out and the belonging you’ve earned is the currency that buys you the right to lead that change.
An outsider preaching unity gets ignored. A respected insider asking, ‘what were they actually dealing with?’ changes the feeling in the room. Curiosity, coming from someone solid, reads as strength rather than weakness. When you spend a little of your reputation capital, the gap narrows by an inch, and you are still 'one of us' when it does.
If that step is the formwork for the foundation, this next step is laying the concrete. Find one person in ‘them’ and have a real conversation.
I did this once with a head of department at a university where my healthcare business had just relocated. He was sceptical of our thesis, and it was easy to label him a member of the establishment who didn’t believe a privately funded company could conduct high-quality scientific research. When we met, I asked him to aggressively question every aspect of our research and purpose. What I found was a professional researcher who had been let down by commercial partners throughout his career. I offered collaboration and transparency, and we delivered on that commitment in the years that followed. Our approach helped reshape his experience and made his category of ‘private companies’ harder to believe.
Othering survives on abstraction.
It also struggles to survive a name, a face, and the discovery that the person on the other side is tired, trying, and occasionally right. I’ve found that one genuine relationship across the divide does more than any policy because it converts a category back into a human being.
We get to do this
At the risk of extending the construction analogy too far, there is one action that individuals can lead without anyone's approval.
Listen to how people describe their environment. Listen for ‘I have to work in this place’ or ‘I have to deal with these people’. That is the grammar of obligation, of something done to you, with the other camp cast as the force imposing it.
Now hear the alternative. ‘We get to do this work’. Same building, same roster, same imperfect system, a completely different stance toward it.
This is not forced positivity, and it would collapse instantly if it were.
No system is perfect. Sometimes it works exceptionally well. Sometimes it works only a little, and sometimes it limps along. The honesty about that range is what makes the shift in mindset credible. ‘We get to’ doesn’t pretend the bad days are good. It just refuses to let the bad days define the whole, and it quietly puts you back on the same side as everyone else who shows up to do the work, including, eventually, the people you used to file under ‘them’.
A leader who lives that distinction, ‘we get to’ rather than ‘I have to’, changes the weather for the people around them. By saying it, meaning it, and letting it spread the way the joke used to, they let teams keep constructing the building that delivers on their purpose.
The choice
This brings me back to where I started. That post-COVID fatigue hasn't fully cleared, and tired people reach for an enemy. The CEOs getting ahead of it are the ones rebuilding belonging on purpose.
Othering is not a moral failing to be ashamed of. It is a deeply human response to the need for belonging, the speed of judgement, and the comfort of a story with a villain. We will never stop drawing lines between us and them. The question is whether we hold those lines loosely enough to step across them and back without losing our footing on either side.
The gap closes the same way it opens: through a thousand small choices about who we are willing to see as fully human. Organisations can shorten the distance. But it’s individuals, in the moment the joke is offered and not taken, who exercise curiosity and move others from ‘I have to’ to ‘we get to’, who are reframing your culture.
It’s a choice available to everyone. The question is, how will you reward it?
PS If this essay helped, Episode 208 (5 CEO Insights: Time to think, leadership leverage and the one that matters most) from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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