14/04/2025

“How Did They Become Them?” — A Two-Part Guide to Dismantling Workplace Divides

Part 1: “It’s Not You, It’s Them”: The Day the Team Split in Two

 

Scene-Setting: The Accidental Cult of ‘Us’

One minute you’re all laughing at the same Teams GIF, drinking the same lukewarm coffee from chipped mugs, and bonding over shared confusion about another new policy email. The next—someone mutters, “That’s just typical of Finance, isn’t it?” Maybe it’s said in a meeting, or typed into a side-channel chat. Maybe it’s a new WhatsApp group, created “just to get things done”.

It doesn’t happen with fireworks. There’s no dramatic walkout. No Slack announcement that the tribes are forming. But somewhere between the shared project and the slightly-too-long email chain, something subtle shifts. People stop saying we. They start saying they.

A thousand tiny moments—an eye-roll, a closed conversation, a missed invite—quietly draw the line. And just like that, Them and Us has arrived. Uninvited. Possibly with its own Outlook calendar.

Most people think of culture as a top-down thing—something written in values statements, sculpted by HR, or delivered via annual engagement surveys. But in truth, culture is built in micro-moments. In offhand remarks, exclusionary emails, and the stories we tell after the meeting ends.

And in today’s hybrid workplaces—where teams are stitched together by calendars and bandwidth more often than corridors and breakout rooms—the micro-moments can carry even more weight. A missed message isn’t just a glitch; it can be a signal. A clumsy comment in a Zoom call isn’t easily undone. There’s no coffee queue to smooth things over. No glance across the desk that says, “That’s not what I meant.”

Them and Us doesn’t begin with malice. It begins with misunderstanding. It’s not usually sparked by villains—but by decent people under pressure, trying to make sense of complexity, and in the absence of context or conversation, the human brain does what it’s wired to do: it fills in the blanks. It creates stories. And those stories often hinge on us being right and them being difficult.

In truth, Them and Us isn’t just a communication problem. It’s a psychological one. Our brains are wired to categorise—to create in-groups and out-groups as a shortcut to safety. Even in professional, well-meaning environments, the instinct to protect our team and cast scepticism on their motives is deeply rooted.

This dynamic isn’t just personal. It shows up structurally—between functions, roles, locations, or access to decision-making. And these days, it shows up digitally, too: in Teams chats where certain names never appear. In “quick calls” that become closed loops. In emails that read colder than intended, and in camera-off meetings where silence is more telling than words.

If you’re a leader, a team member, or someone who floats between groups, this is your invitation to pause. To notice what’s really going on beneath the surface. To listen, not just to what’s said, but to what’s missing.

Because when we ignore these early signs, we don’t just lose connection—we lose collaboration, trust, and eventually, the very culture we thought we were all building together.

 

How the Divide Happens

You don’t need a dramatic clash to split a team. You just need a few mild frustrations, a bit of unclear communication, and a story that spreads faster than a meeting invite gets declined.

The divide often starts with something innocuous. Someone feels left out of a decision. A project gets reshuffled without warning. Another team’s priorities feel out of sync. Nothing explosive. Nothing that couldn’t, in theory, be sorted over a quick chat and a custard cream. But instead—it simmers.

Here’s where human psychology kicks in. 

In the absence of clarity, we create categories. We form in-groups—the people we understand, trust, and relate to—and out-groups—those whose decisions feel baffling, whose emails feel blunt, whose agendas we second-guess. According to Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), this is an unconscious but powerful response , and it simplifies a messy world by sorting people into “us” and “them”.

This isn’t just theory—it’s visible in the ways we work. A different goal. A different chat group. A different time zone. And suddenly, they don’t get it, and we are cleaning up the mess. It’s not petty—it’s primal.

In a sense of competition, things escalate. When teams feel they’re fighting for scarce resources—budget, recognition, decision-making influence, or even just airtime—lines harden. Defensive behaviour increases and collaboration dips. Even in the most well-meaning organisations, the scarcity mindset takes hold: if they get visibility, we lose it. If they’re in the room, we’re being sidelined. And so on.

In hybrid work, the divide is rarely visible on the org chart—but it shows up in the silence. When one team dominates the meeting while others barely speak. When people forward screenshots of chats instead of speaking up. When someone preps a “just-in-case” slide for a conversation they were never actually invited to.

And once the narrative takes hold—they always do this, we’re never listened to, they just don’t understand—it stops being a story and starts becoming a culture.

That’s the real risk. Not the occasional conflict, but the slow erosion of trust. What could have been resolved in a five-minute chat becomes a pattern of avoidance, scepticism, and quiet resentment. And without intervention, those patterns start to define the way the organisation operates.

It sounds dramatic doesn’t it?  But as many of you reading this will know, it’s so much more common that you might think. Let’s dive deeper and take a look at the elements in more detail.

 

The Language We Use is Important

Language doesn’t just describe culture. It shapes it.

The words we use—especially about other teams—aren’t throwaway. They’re signals, about value, belonging, and who we think is “in” versus “out”.

Phrases like “the ivory tower”, “head office”, “the tech lot”, or “the business side” might sound like harmless shorthand. But they’re loaded. They reveal more than intent—they reveal assumptions. About whose work counts, whose perspective matters, and whose experience is considered “real”.

This isn’t just semantics. As researchers like Fairclough and Bourdieu have shown, language in organisations reflects power. It reinforces who gets heard and who doesn’t. And over time, the labels we use become part of the organisational script. We don’t question them—we just inherit them.

Take job titles and team names. A role described as “frontline” or “support” isn’t neutral. It creates hierarchy. Same goes for labels like “non-academic”, “admin”, or even “back office”. Each suggests a secondary status, even when the people doing those roles are central to how things actually function.

Then there’s the language of visibility. In hybrid teams, who gets mentioned in the debrief? Who’s included in the “thank you” slide? Who’s described as a strategic partner, and who’s framed as a blocker?

These things matter. Not because people are fragile—but because language sets tone. And tone shapes behaviour.

It’s also about identity. Many teams carry a deep sense of professional pride—shaped by training, tradition, or lived experience. Whether it’s “we’re the ones who get things over the line” or “we hold the creative vision”, these narratives create meaning. But they can also create division when they turn into absolutes: we care more, we work harder, they don’t understand.

When these labels go unchallenged, they quietly solidify the Them and Us culture. We stop seeing the individual behind the role. We stop assuming positive intent. We start interpreting every interaction through a filter of past frustrations and half-truths.

In a digital world—where tone is flattened, humour is harder to read, and misinterpretations travel quickly—language isn’t just important. It’s foundational. A single phrase can build trust, or undermine it. A word choice can include, or exclude.

That doesn’t mean we need to walk on eggshells. It just means we need to be intentional. Because the way we talk about each other shapes the way we treat each other. And that, in turn, shapes the culture we all move through every day.

 

The Tribal Brain at Work

It’s a bit uncomfortable to admit, but we’re all slightly tribal.

Psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner proved just how deeply this runs in their now-famous Social Identity Theory. In one experiment, they divided people into random groups by the flip of a coin—no context, no history, not even a reason. And still, the groups began to show favouritism toward their own and suspicion toward the other.

No uniforms. No backstory. Just we and they. That was all it took.

Now imagine what happens when the difference isn’t random. When one team’s work genuinely affects another’s timeline. When one group controls budget sign-off, and another feels under-resourced. When someone else gets praise for a cross-functional win you quietly made possible. You don’t need a coin toss—you’ve got context, memory, and mild resentment. The line between us and them draws itself.

This isn’t about malice—it’s about meaning-making. In complex systems, the human brain craves shortcuts. So we simplify: we’re the ones doing the real work. They’re slowing us down. We care about quality. They only care about delivery. It’s comforting. It makes the day feel a little more manageable. But it also narrows our field of view—and over time, it warps the lens entirely.

These instincts don’t vanish just because we work remotely. In some ways, the digital shift makes it worse. We lose the informal social cues that help challenge assumptions—those post-meeting smiles, the quick chat after a tough conversation, the shared moment by the coffee machine that reminds you they’re human too.

Instead, what we get is Slack messages that feel a bit cold. Meetings where someone speaks in bullet points and leaves before the questions start. Email threads with just enough ambiguity to feel loaded. And when there’s uncertainty, our tribal brain kicks in fast: we know what they’re like.

It’s not irrational. It’s a protective reflex. But left unchecked, it creates echo chambers within organisations. We speak mainly to people who see things our way. We gather stories that confirm our version of events. And before long, the “others” aren’t just different—they’re wrong.

This is how Them and Us stops being an occasional tension and starts becoming the default operating system. Quiet. Familiar. And surprisingly hard to dislodge.

 

Micro-Moments, Macro-Consequences

You’ll know Them and Us is creeping in when the jokes start to wear thin.

“You know what Ops are like.”
“Typical Sales—promise the world, leave us to deal with it.”
“Don’t even get me started on IT…”

We say these things with a half-laugh, a sideways glance, maybe even as bonding. But they land fully. Each comment—harmless on its own—threads into a wider narrative. A narrative that shapes how we think, how we speak, and eventually, how we act.

This is how culture shifts. Not with all-hands memos, but with murmurs in meeting chats. With a roll of the eyes. With who we cc in, and who we quietly leave out.

In a fast-paced, hybrid work world, these moments carry more weight. There’s less informal interaction to balance them out—no corridor clarification or “just checking” conversation on the way out. Instead, silence fills the gaps. And when there’s silence, we fill it with stories. Usually the ones we’ve told ourselves before.

Stress accelerates this. So does organisational change. Throw in a restructuring, a strategic pivot, or a couple of high-stakes projects with unclear ownership—and things can spiral quickly. People stop assuming good intent. They start hedging their bets. And once protective instincts kick in, collaboration gets replaced by caution.

What starts as banter becomes narrative. What begins as misunderstanding becomes assumption. What should have been a single awkward interaction becomes “typical behaviour” from that team.

And the consequences? They’re not just emotional. They’re operational. Mistrust slows down decisions. Cynicism clouds feedback. Teams get caught in loops of low-key resentment and start quietly avoiding each other—not out of pettiness, but self-preservation.

As Harvard Business Review points out, silos in organisations aren’t just structural. They’re psychological. We build them out of experience and reinforce them with every assumption we don’t challenge.

And the more often we say “we’ll just sort it ourselves”, the harder it becomes to reach back across the line.

 

The Red Flags

If Them and Us was a colleague, it wouldn’t storm into the Monday meeting with a manifesto, it would quietly forward an email with a snarky comment. Mark itself “Working Remotely” forever. Then, it might chip-in late on Teams with a message that ends in “🙂” but doesn’t feel remotely friendly.

This culture doesn’t usually announce itself. It emerges slowly—through hesitation, exclusion, and stories that travel sideways faster than they ever go up.

Most teams don’t spot it until the damage is well underway. Why? Because it often feels like normal stress. Or even bonding. Having our lot to vent with feels safe. But when that safety requires someone else to be the problem, the rot has already set in.

So what should you look out for?

Gossip Disguised as “Just Letting Off Steam”

“I’m not saying anything bad—it’s just true.”
When feedback flows more freely in backchannels than in proper conversations, you’re not venting. You’re avoiding. And avoidance feeds resentment far faster than it resolves tension.

 

 Meetings Get Weird

There’s an atmosphere. One team presents an idea, another team stiffens. Crossed arms. Awkward silences.
Phrases like “Well, from our side…” or “You would say that.” start appearing.

This isn’t alignment. It’s a turf war with PowerPoint transitions.

 

Cynicism Becomes Culture

Sarcastic asides about “those lot in Finance” or “how IT always drops the ball” become part of the team’s vernacular. And because no one challenges them, they become truth-adjacent folklore.

It’s not wit. It’s a quiet cultural slide into mistrust.

 

 Silence in the Places That Matter

People stop raising concerns. Not because they’ve given up caring, but because they’ve given up hoping.
If another team won’t listen, why risk it?

Silence is often misread as agreement. But as Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows, it usually signals protection—not peace.

 

Other signs include:

• One team always feels absent from key decisions—even when they’re technically in the room.
• People talk about decisions as “coming from above” rather than being made together.
• Scepticism towards a team is expressed in “off the record” comments, but felt across the floor.
• Changes are experienced as imposed, not co-created.
• The phrase “I’m not sure what they even do” crops up more often than it should.

 

A healthy culture encourages tension to surface—early, clearly, and kindly. A Them and Us culture suppresses it until it leaks sideways or calcifies into cynicism.

So if you’re seeing these signs, don’t panic. But don’t shrug either. Because when meetings start to feel performative, when sarcasm passes for safety, and when the real conversations are happening everywhere except the room—you’re not just losing clarity.

You’re losing connection.

 

Why It’s So Toxic

At first glance, a Them and Us culture might seem like just another workplace quirk—like passive-aggressive fridge notes or someone who insists on using “per my last email”.

But left unchecked, it becomes something else entirely: a fault line running straight through your organisation. Not loud. Not always visible. But quietly eroding the foundations of collaboration, trust, and performance.

It Undermines Collaboration

You can’t collaborate with someone you’ve already labelled as obstructive, clueless or out of touch. Them and Us thinking shrinks the space where good work happens.

Decisions slow down because no one wants to stick their neck out. Handovers turn into hand grenades. And “alignment” becomes just another word you write in a strategy deck while secretly bracing for pushback.

 

It Reinforces a Scarcity Mindset

When people don’t feel seen, valued or heard, they stop thinking in terms of shared success.
Every ask feels like a risk. Every recognition feels unfair. Teams hoard their knowledge, their contacts, their influence.

It’s not collaboration—it’s resource protection.

And in a world where innovation thrives on openness and trust, that mindset is culture poison.

 

It Quietly Lowers Morale

On the surface, things might still look fine. People turn up. They do the work. Cameras go on. Deadlines get met.

But underneath, something shifts. People stop believing things can improve. The spark’s gone. Enthusiasm gets replaced by eye-rolls and quiet exit strategies.

According to Gallup’s employee engagement research, that kind of low-grade disengagement is among the most corrosive and expensive dynamics in modern work.

 

It Creates a Vacuum of Accountability

If the problem is always them, then the solution never needs to involve us.
Responsibility gets slippery. Progress stalls. Feedback loops vanish.

The real risk? People stop asking “What could I do differently?” and start repeating “What have they messed up now?”

That’s how growth stops. Not with a bang, but with a shrug.

So yes—it may start as an occasional grumble. A joke in a meeting. A decision no one queries out loud.

But if it’s left to fester, Them and Us doesn’t just fray relationships. It dismantles the very conditions that teams need to thrive: shared purpose, mutual respect, and a basic belief that everyone’s pulling in the same direction.

The good news? If humans created it, humans can dismantle it.

And that’s exactly where we’re headed in the next article –  From Campfire to Conference Room: Ending the Them and Us Era.

Start a conversation with us about how we can help you change team dynamics in your organisation now: https://hello.leadhappy.co.uk/welcome