Us and Us Starts With Me

The Economist's Bartleby column recently asked a question every leader should take seriously. In Are you committed to your company or your team?, the column explains how quickly people form loyalties, and how those loyalties stack up at work into what researchers call nested identities: company, department and team.

The research it cites is compelling. A meta-analysis by Michael Riketta and Rolf van Dick found that, on average, employees identify more strongly with their work group than with their organization. Work by Jeanine Pieternel Porck and her co-authors links strong group identification with a weaker understanding of company strategy. And in a memorable experiment, Manchester United fans were more willing to help an injured stranger in their own club's shirt than a rival's, until they were prompted to think of themselves as fans of football itself.

The column's advice is sensible: bring teams into contact, and explain how each team's work contributes to the whole. As it puts it, "us and them" comes naturally, while "us and us" takes a bit more thought.

I agree. And I would add the identity the column leaves out.

The Missing Identity

The column describes two levels of belonging, the team and the company. But inside both sits a third: the individual.

People do not only ask whether they belong to the team or the organization. They ask whether they can be themselves in either one. When the answer is no, no amount of cross-team mixing will create genuine commitment. People will attend the offsite, join the project and use the word "we," while quietly holding back the part of themselves that matters most.

I have asked people a simple question many times. Picture two doors at work, one marked US and one marked THEM. Which would you walk through? As I wrote in Us or Them: Which Door Would You Choose at Work?, most choose THEM, whether they are CEOs or entry-level employees. Most people see themselves as outsiders in their own workplace.

That is the deeper reason team loyalty often beats company loyalty. A team is close enough to know who you are. An organization usually is not.

Why Bigger Labels Are Not Enough

The football experiment is instructive, but it also shows the limit of the approach. Asking people to adopt a bigger label changed who they helped. It did not change how seen they felt.

In my work on Leadership in the Age of Personalization, the central argument is this: it is no longer about institutions defining the individual. It is about the individual defining the institution. People commit to something larger when they can see themselves in it, not when they are asked to set themselves aside for it.

The data suggests most organizations have work to do here. According to Gallup's employee engagement tracking, as of May 2026 only 31% of U.S. employees say their company's mission or purpose makes them feel their job is important. When people cannot connect their own work to the whole, the team becomes the only place where their contribution is visible.

As I explored in The Organization Is the Smallest Circle, people carry many identities, and the organization is only one ring among them. Leaders who understand that stop competing with those identities and start making room for them.

From Us and Them to Us and Us

Standardization still matters. A shared strategy, common values and consistent ways of working give people across teams a common language. Those are assets, and they are part of what makes "us and us" possible.

But commitment to the whole grows through contribution, not just contact. Two of the five indicator questions in my methodology point the way.

Who do you let in? Do people from other teams have a real voice in decisions that affect them, or only an invitation to the social event?

What do you let them do? Can people see how their individual contribution, not just their team's output, moves the organization forward?

When people answer yes to both, the company stops feeling like a distant label. It becomes a place where who they are is part of what the organization is.

Three Questions for Leaders

Which door would your people choose? Ask them. The answer will tell you more about commitment than any engagement survey.

Can every person explain how their work serves the whole? If only the leadership team can, the strategy belongs to the leadership team.

Where do people collaborate across teams on something real? Shared problems build more loyalty than shared events.

The Economist is right that "us and us" takes more thought. I would say it takes one more step. Before people can belong to the whole, they need to know they are allowed to be themselves inside it. Us and us starts with me.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.