A Stranger Among You

The Attempt to Reclaim Personal Control in the Shadow of Team Distrust

The creation of a viable solution to the ongoing, complex problems of an organization is the primary aim of a service design project. Given the presence of diverse stakeholders within and outside the organization, the organization’s constantly shifting environment, and the various cultural, economic, and political dimensions surrounding it, among other factors, the path toward creating such a solution is fraught with ambiguity and challenge. This ambiguity is difficult not only for the client but, at times, for the members of the service design team as well, and it can lead individuals to experience various tensions—both personal and team-related—as a result. How individuals, and the team as a whole, confront these tensions, and what strategies they choose in doing so, is shaped by a range of different individual and team factors. This piece portrays one particular way of confronting ambiguity at the individual level.

It has been a week since I began studying a service design team working in Tehran—a field in which I myself was once present, both as a member of a service design team and later as a team lead, and now, in a team that includes some of my former friends and colleagues, I am in the position of an observer. At present, this team has no physical office where its members can gather, and the way people work is a combination of remote work and working on-site at clients’ project locations. Today I have come with one of the team members, Rana, whom I once managed and with whom I am now fairly close friends, to a shopping mall in northern Tehran where the team is currently carrying out a service design project. Rana is scheduled to hold meetings with one or two managers from various departments of the client’s organization, and during the meeting, to ask their opinion regarding one of the service plans for which she is responsible, so that she can make the necessary revisions before presenting the main deliverable.

We have settled on one of the floors of the mall where there is a café. We are sitting behind a table with three chairs, one side of which is a wall, and on this wall, a large advertising billboard hangs. Our table is in one of the mall’s corridors that does not see much foot traffic, and is a fairly cozy spot. It is both cooler and it seems unlikely that anyone would want to sit near us, which makes it a better place for talking. The managers with whom Rana has meetings come here to converse.

Rana is preparing for the meeting. She scrolls through things on her phone and writes. Then she sets her phone aside and takes her belongings out of her bag one by one, arranging them on the table in order—or rather, I should say she takes the bag apart, piece by piece, and places it on the table. The paper section goes on one side, the folding pencil-case section on another side, and so on. It is a bag specific to a designer, created as a handmade product resulting from a collaboration between her father’s idea and her sister’s artistry.

On the first day I began my observation, I had come to the mall to obtain the client’s permission for my presence in this project, during a meeting between the team manager, Mr. Fahimi, and the manager of the mall. Before that meeting began, Rana had shown me her bag at leisure, and it was there that I learned this bag was something special of her own. With a face full of smiles and an excited tone, Rana had explained to me that this way of arranging white paper and tracing paper had been designed by her father for his architecture students, and that her sister had then worked on this idea, and the result was this particular bag. She had also brought the bag with her to work in order to test it in practice and see how it turned out, with the thought that perhaps they would later produce more of these bags. Rana’s design notebook is full of writing, diagrams, and drawings. She has notes on white sheets of paper that become more complete and more visual when she layers tracing paper over them. She has created a kind of diagrammatic collage with this notebook. She explained to me how the notebook worked in such a way that I too became excited. I was excited more by what she herself had done with this notebook than by the notebook and bag themselves, and she, seeing my enthusiasm, grew even more enthusiastic herself, showing me more pages and giving me permission to take photos and video if I wished.

That day, the showing of the things she had done did not end with the notebook alone. I myself had earlier introduced Rana to this design team. She, too, spoke proudly of the work she had done during this time on this design team—and not only to me, but to those present around the table, even to the client’s secretary, who had grown curious while waiting for the meeting to begin. The secretary and I listened to what she said with surprise and admiration. Rana, too, clearly took pleasure in my approval and the secretary’s approval regarding her notebook, as well as the results of her work on this project, and even the other creative pursuits she engages in in her personal life. While it was not strange to me that Rana would want to tell me about her work—perhaps because she wanted to show me I need not worry about her introduction to the team—I was somewhat surprised by how quickly she showed me her various achievements on this project, and I had a feeling something like: Rana needs to be validated.

Now, as she is taking the different parts of the bag apart from one another and setting them aside, and separating her notebook from the bag and placing it on the table, my attention is drawn, and with raised eyebrows and an admiring tone I say, “Sara [her sister] really designed the bag modularly.” She smiles and says “Yeah,” and falls silent. Unlike that first day, she does not light up at my approval; she moves past it quickly. I attribute this quick passing-over to her needing to maintain her focus for the meeting.

The manager we had been waiting to meet finally arrived. A woman of about fifty, thin, of medium height, wearing casual attire, with very short hair and a delicate, olive-toned complexion. When she reached our table, she was anxious about whether it was visible on her face that she had had surgery on one side of her teeth and was still swollen. We shook hands and she sat down. Her expression was serious yet at the same time appeared good-natured—she was the mall’s HR manager. After greetings and pleasantries, and after Rana asked whether she needed ice for her surgically-treated tooth, the meeting began. The manager asked Rana to introduce herself first. Rana briefly introduced herself and the company, and after a short explanation of her own way of working on the project, she presented what had been done so far, using a notebook that she had again designed herself as an output of this project. A little later, she once again opened that same bag designed by her father and sister, and explained it to the manager as well, drawing her admiration too: “How nice… you must be an artist yourself, and you’ve made good use of it.” Rana explained from her notebook whom she had spoken with, showed their connections, and they talked a little about whether this initial plan she had drafted would be revised or not—but the manager, on the whole, approved of the work Rana had done so far: “In fact, in orientation manuals worldwide, they say graphically what is forbidden and what is permitted”—that is, exactly what Rana had done. Perhaps this was precisely what Rana needed: approval from a manager. As she heard the manager’s approval, I saw her face open up and a smile come to her lips. It occurred to me that her talk with me that day had, in fact, been under the pretext of my presence, but really directed at Fahimi, her manager, who had sat with us at the table that day—yet the approval she received that day was not from Fahimi but from me, which practically had no bearing on her work. Perhaps she had drawn it out in the hope that Fahimi would in fact approve of her, which he, too, did not do. Of course, the manager’s approval was not directed at Rana alone; at times her statements of approval were also meant to convey her own mastery over the subject of her work.

The meeting proceeded in a fully two-way manner. Rana curiously asked short questions, and the manager gave explanations that were neither too short nor too long. Rana sketched the manager’s answers into diagrams on her notebook pages before her own eyes, and the manager, too, would occasionally find a file or item on her phone and show it to Rana. Rana found a file on her own phone and showed it to the manager, and the manager took the phone in her hand and, attending carefully to the details, showed Rana the small corrections needed. The meeting proceeded in this manner, at a fairly quick pace, lasting close to forty minutes before it ended.

After the manager left, we remained in our seats to wait for the next manager, who would arrive ten minutes later for another conversation. As the meeting with the HR manager ended, I said to Rana, “That was a quick meeting,” and Rana said, “Yeah. I have the voice recording now; I’ll listen to it again. She wasn’t feeling well, so I said I’d finish sooner so she could leave sooner.” Then, without my having said anything else, she said, “I’m getting really good experience from sketching things out in front of them like that,” and again abruptly changed the subject, saying:

• The big problem I have with Mehrdad [meaning Mr. Fahimi] is that he’s not aware of what’s going on here. And when you do tell him, he doesn’t listen. It’s only close to the deadline that he tells me, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing—do you really need to be talking to all these people?’
• When is the deadline, anyway?
• We don’t have one. He himself says we should deliver output sooner. He wants to keep giving deliverables to the client frequently.

And immediately she raised another problem, one that seemed far more serious and painful:

• Another bad thing about this team is that we have no teamwork at all anymore, none whatsoever, and as a result we don’t get much feedback on our work. I do get some myself, but from the user [she gestures with her hand toward where the HR manager had gone]—not from the team, and I feel this constant sense of insecurity [and adds with frustration] no one says ‘you did it right,’ or even scolds me and says ‘damn it, you got it wrong!’.
• Isn’t the Saturday meeting for coordinating this project?”
• Those Saturday meetings are half an hour to an hour and a half, and there we just say what we’ve done and what the bolded points were. That’s all. We report results there.
• What’s missing, then?

• Companionship.
• What do you mean?”
• Someone else giving their opinion. Feeling like you have a colleague. I got into service design specifically because I love teamwork. [she adds, somewhat angrily and resentfully] What bothers me most is when he [meaning Fahimi] says things like ‘I don’t know what you’re doing.’ It’s as if he wants to shed responsibility from himself and say the whole burden falls on me. [then, as if speaking to herself, she lowers her head and says] I don’t know why. Is he afraid I’ll become too full of myself?
• [I say with surprise] Does he really have that kind of trait?
• He said it once. The other team was praising me, and he said, ‘Don’t tell Negin, she’ll get full of herself.’
• [Again, with surprise, born of my own knowledge of Fahimi, I say] Maybe he was joking.
• Rana [still resentful] says: That’s the impression one gets from something like that. And then she continues: Sima has more seniority than me here—she’s been in contact with this client for almost two years—but that time, she was the one asking me how the plans were going!

I only then realize that Sima is the most senior of everyone working with this client, and I show my surprise to Rana with a glance, but I no longer try to justify or defend Mehrdad, and I fall silent.

I had thought that Rana’s problem was working alone and not receiving feedback, or perhaps not being approved of—but by the time her complaints arrived at “I have no colleague,” it occurred to me: is the burden Rana feels on her own shoulders greater than one person can manage? Would Rana be satisfied simply by having a colleague who truly plays the role of a “colleague,” or is this colleague meant to lift part of the responsibility off her shoulders? What Rana says about Mehrdad placing the burden of responsibility on her shoulders could also be the reverse: because of the stress she feels in doing the work, she does not want to be held accountable alone if the outcome fails to satisfy the client, and so, beyond a colleague, she wants an accomplice. The issue is the acceptance of responsibility for the outcome, and perhaps because service design is creative work with no previously completed comparable version, so that the designer cannot be certain of achieving the right result, she wants someone beside her both to ease her mind that the work is proceeding correctly and, should a mistake happen, to avoid being accountable alone.

 This matter becomes especially more understandable when we know that Rana has never before been solely responsible for bringing a service design project to completion. That self-confidence which a service designer needs in order to accept responsibility for the outcome of the work is gradually built up in the course of doing the work; but its building is an anxiety-inducing process. I experienced this anxiety myself when I was about to become the contracting party with the client and the person accountable for the project’s results. Even though I had previously worked in service design teams, the awareness that I would be the person accountable for the outcome in this ambiguity-laden work was anxiety-inducing. It was something like a person wanting to swim for the first time in open waters, where anything might happen, while at the same time having promised—not only to themselves but to another, whether a teammate or a client—that they would reach their destination. Rana now finds herself in such circumstances, with the difference that she cannot even hope for help to arrive, or for guidance to be at her side. Whereas Shiva, at one point as a team member, had had the chance to experience receiving support from a manager or the other members, and began accepting this responsibility once she felt she could be her own support, Rana has been placed in this position without any assessment of whether she is now ready to accept this role. Even if Rana’s belief that she is not ready to accept the role of the accountable party is mistaken, in circumstances where the team members do not help her see her own standing and capability, there can be no hope in the short term of this belief changing—meaning that this anxiety-inducing process is set to grow longer for Rana, unless she herself thinks of some remedy for this situation.

Rana continues her complaints, saying that she intends to talk to Mehrdad about these matters, and is only waiting to finish the work at hand before speaking with him—” or at least get feedback from him on where I went wrong and where I should improve. I’m not saying he’s flawed—maybe this is just his style of teamwork”—and then, with some anger, or perhaps regret, she says, “It’s you people’s fault. At Lean Design we used to move forward so much as a team, and it was so dreamlike for me. It was the most dreamlike period of my career. Wherever I go, I keep comparing everything to those six dreamlike months.” Lean Design is the previous company of which I was a co-founder, and which we decided to shut down. I don’t know exactly how to describe what I feel in response to this remark. I had previously held the feeling, regarding Rana, that by shutting down Lean Design I had ruined her dreams of becoming a service designer. Especially because that closure had been largely my decision, I tried to make up for this damage to Rana. The previous year I had brought her into a company where I myself had for a time been design manager, and then, when that company too shut down, I introduced her to Mehrdad, hoping that within this remaining glimmer of service design in Iran she might reach what she wanted. But from what she is saying now, I understand that this, too, has not come to pass. These words now make me more sorrowful than anything, yet there is nothing more I can do to remedy or fix it. It is as though I have done everything that came to my mind, and I have no other idea for doing anything else. For a moment I thought about what I had experienced at Lean Design—that same working-as-a-team which Rana says was satisfying for her, and which, for me as the manager, was more painful; the pain that although Rana enjoys having a colleague, perhaps we, the founders, had also worked too much as a team, and it would have been better to have had more independence in the work and to have expected more responsibility-taking from the team, so that in the end, as team managers, we would not have carried on our own shoulders the heavy burden of others’ unfinished work, arising from less experience, more stress, and other causes. I say my thought to Rana: 

• Maybe that wasn’t right either.

• I don’t know. I have a feeling—I love that environment.
• [I fall silent for a moment and say, very deliberately and word by word] “I… think… that… Mehrdad… has a lot… on his mind.”
• [She closes her eyes in agreement and says with a smile] “Yeah;” [then adds with the same smile] “At first he said my management is weak. I said, ” That’s fine, we’ll move forward together.”

A silence falls between us. Then Rana shakes her head, meaning something like, who knows—”Well, I should call this guy [next manager she wants interviewing with].” Since not much time remains, we quickly down the drinks we had ordered at the café before the meeting with the manager, which had arrived in the middle of the meeting and were now completely cold.

Rana’s experience of what she herself calls “not having a colleague,” and my own former experience, as team manager, of carrying the burden of another’s responsibility, both count as forms of being abandoned by the team and having one’s needs go unseen within the core team of which we are or have been a member. But specifically with regard to Rana, there is also the matter of recognizing and making known her own place within the team. Rana seeks mirrors around herself—colleagues—who would reflect her back to herself, yet it seems that, for the time being, she is working in a team in which she does not register as visible at all. The behavior and speech of the team members, and especially of the team manager, do not reflect back Rana’s own presence, let alone her achievements—achievements through which she might have built herself a place within the team. But for now, in the absence of another, Rana not only lacks, in her own words, a “colleague,” but also, in my own formulation, lacks a “recognizable place” within the team, and is compelled to make use of opportunities to socialize with a researcher (myself) or a client-side manager (the manager) simply so that she might become visible to herself, at least, and see the effect of her work upon the team. Perhaps what Rana gained at Lean Design, and does not gain here, was simply that we saw her, for better or worse, along with her work, and spoke about her work, and she continually heard things about herself from our mouths. Although we too were cautious in giving feedback, and it rarely happened that we conveyed negative feedback to team members—something I know Fahimi does to some degree as well. The reason is that both our agency and this agency are small companies made up of staff not highly experienced in service design, in which employees’ relationship to the company is largely part-time and voluntary.

The business of these companies, given the current state of Iran’s economy, is so small that most staff collaborate with the companies out of interest in the field of service design and in order to learn this profession, with pay and benefits lower than what would meet their living needs. The managers of these companies, too, knowing that they are unable to provide sufficient benefits for staff, and knowing also the limited supply of highly experienced personnel in this line of work, tread carefully with staff, lest any feedback or negative feeling they induce in them cause these same few interested workers to abandon the work because of high workload and high expectations. In the course of this study, too, I have heard several times from Sima that Fahimi insists that, because team members are present voluntarily and part-time, care must even be taken not to assign work to them by compulsion, and that, as far as possible, individuals should volunteer for tasks themselves. I therefore find it quite plausible that Fahimi’s withholding of feedback from Rana, and his leaving of tasks to team members themselves, stems not from failing to see her work but perhaps from fear of losing her. On the other hand, the Rana I observe—who lights up completely upon hearing my approval or the manager’s approval—though she says she would even be willing to hear, “At least tell me, ‘damn it, you got it wrong,'” is not, in fact, seeking negative feedback.

Nevertheless, what stands out sharply in these conditions of team dispersion, minimal communication, and merely weekly online reporting, is a deficiency of the element of “trust” within the team. It is, in fact, mistrust that is conspicuous. If we take the mistrust to be a state in which the behavior and intentions of others are continually interpreted as unsupportive, as self-seeking, and as devious (Mirowsky and Ross, 1983: 229), then Rana is experiencing precisely such a mental space. She thinks that Fahimi wants to place responsibilities upon her shoulders—unsupportive; while he himself is not at all aware of what is happening here—Fahimi’s self-seeking on himself and his own work; and in the end he tells Rana that he does not know what she is doing and whether it is even necessary for her to be talking to all these people—from which Rana has taken away a sense of her own insincerity and of Fahimi’s suspicion that she is devious. The absence of dialogue about individuals’ needs within this team, and the absence of spaces for conversation and of the experience of team members sitting together, which would lead them to know one another’s character, have together resulted in the creation of an atmosphere of distrust. Rana has had no opportunity to share her concerns, nor have Fahimi and the other team members had such an opportunity. As a result, many of things done and undones of both sides of this relationship come to be interpreted as things that are probably far removed from their actual intent.

In the absence of a trust-building mechanism within the team, Rana is not certain whether the manager or the other team members trust her ability or not, and when, in the hope of gaining a little of this trust, she shares the output of her work stage by stage, she still receives no feedback. It is evident from what Rana says that her central concern is gaining the trust of the team manager, because although it is true that she speaks of the lack of collegiality within the team, when she wants to offer an instance of this lack of collegiality, her examples and instances are Fahimi’s reactions or lack of reactions to her work—not Sima’s or Melika’s reactions. In the absence of trust, Rana to some extent regards herself as a stranger within this group, at least in the eyes of this manager. The situation becomes more complex still when we look at Rana’s previous unsuccessful work experiences, in which, although she had tried to carve out her own path in service design and to build a good track record for herself in this work, the conditions of the work environments she had been part of before this team prevented her from achieving the accomplishments she expected. All of these work environments, before Rana could reach her desired accomplishment within them, either dissolved or halted their projects—and this has caused Rana, owing to her prolonged inability to achieve the desired result, to also feel powerless; and so that she might at least show herself that she is still capable and that her work has the impact it ought to have, she constantly seeks approval from people whom, in her mind, hold the authority to validate her work. 

This is why Rana, in gatherings where Fahimi is present, or the manager is present, or even I—her former manager—am present, recounts her achievements. She wants to once again experience that sense of personal control—the belief that one controls his/her own life, that outcomes depend on one’s own choices and actions, and that one is not at the mercy of powerful people, luck, fate, or chance. (Mirowsky and Ross, 2003: 83), and that it is she who holds control over events (Seeman, 1983: 173). Presence in this agency, after several previous unsuccessful work experiences, could have helped Rana to once again observe her own personal competence, and moreover, to build trust and to trust the group that is congenial and familiar, one to which she is bound through her desired profession, and to have a supportive group around her. But for now, she regards herself as a stranger within the team, one who strives hard, by soliciting fleeting support from those outside the team, to regain, at the very least, her own trust in her own ability.

Resources:

Seeman, Melvin, 1983. Alienation motifs in contemporary theorizing: the hidden continuity of classic themes. Social Psychology Quarterly 46, 171–184.

Mirowsky, John, Ross, Catherine E., 1983. Paranoia and the structure of powerlessness. American Sociological Review 48, 228–239.

Mirowsky, John, Ross, Catherine E., 2003. Social Causes of Psychological Distress, second ed. Aldine Transaction, N.J.