Commitment: Group Strength Through Group Struggle
Recently I went on a trip to a tropical island. On that trip, I went on a catamaran to do some snorkeling and rope swinging off the boat. The catamaran is quite large and carries about 50 people on it. On the way out to the location where we were to snorkel and swim, people who knew each other mingled a bit, but you could tell the group was only somewhat “into it”. Side note, this is the third time I’ve done this little expedition and it is the same every time. People hem and haw at the fact they have to get up early and meet at this one pier to get on this boat and the night before they’re always regretting having to go. The outcome though, is always the same.
Throughout the trip to the location where we drop anchor, music is playing and people do loosen up a bit. When we do get to the location, the skipper, first mate and crew show everyone how to use the snorkels and flippers, where the rope swing is, where to get on and off the boat, and to beware of the shifting current. As the day goes on, people are attempting different tricks off of the rope swing, diving deeper into the corals and really sharing in the experience. All for a good three hours.
As we sail back to the resort, something is different. Very different. People who don’t really know each other are conga lining around the catamaran, dancing and jumping around together to the music. It’s almost as if the group has been bonded together in some way.
This story displays what anyone who looks to bind a group of people together knows. That commitment to something as a group, will make you more bound to each other then before you engaged in that experience.
What Frat Boys, Sorority Girls and the Military Know
Have you ever wondered how frats and sororities get people to be so committed? Or how soldiers sometimes prefer to go back out to the front lines than go home when they recover from an injury? It’s all about commitment. Each of these humans have invested considerable time, and risk, to the acceptance, or survival, of the group.
Think of a frat boy or sorority girl. They’ve gone through weeks and weeks of pledging/hazing, doing physical challenges, some humiliating and some exhausting. Once this individual has completed their tasks, is sworn in, and felt this sense of accomplishment and acceptance into the group, it is quite hard for them to ever think about leaving in the future. What they say to themselves is, “after all I’ve been through, I can’t leave now!” Instead, they double down on their investment causing them to fight for their group’s cause and survival while further alienating anyone outside the group who hasn’t gone through the rigors of acceptance. This in turn further strengthens the glue within the group.
Why is The Experience So Binding?
Robert Cialdini explains this best from his book Influence:
My own view is that the answer appeared in 1959 in the results of a study little known outside of social psychology. A pair of young researchers, Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills, decided to test their observation that “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.” The real stroke of inspiration came in their choice of the initiation ceremony as the best place to examine this possibility. They found that college women who had to endure a severely embarrassing initiation ceremony in order to gain access to a sex discussion group convinced themselves that their new group and its discussions – extremely valuable, even though Aronson and Mills had previously rehearsed the other group members to be as “worthless and uninteresting” as possible. Different coeds, who went through a much milder initiation ceremony or went through no initiation at all, were decidedly less positive about the “worthless” new group they had joined. Additional research showed the same results when coeds were required to endure pain rather than embarrassment to get into a group. The more electric shock a woman received as part of the initiation ceremony, the more she later persuaded herself that her new group and its activities were interesting, intelligent, and desirable.”
Now the harassments, the exertions, even the beatings of initiation rituals begin to make sense. The Thonga tribesman watching, with tears in his eyes, his ten-year-old son tremble through a night on the cold ground of the “yard of mysteries,” the college sophomore punctuating his Hell Night paddling of his fraternity “little brother” with bursts of nervous laughter-these are not acts of sadism. They are acts of group survival. They function, oddly enough, to spur future society members to find the group more attractive and worthwhile. As long as it is the case that people like and believe in what they have struggled to get, these groups will continue to arrange effortful and troublesome initiation rites. The loyalty and dedication of those who emerge will increase to a great degree the chances of group cohesiveness and survival. Indeed, one study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies were those with the greatest group solidarity. Given Aronson and Mills’s demonstration that the severity of an initiation ceremony significantly heightens the newcomer’s commitment to the group, it is hardly surprising that groups will oppose all attempts to eliminate this crucial link to their future strength.
Military groups and organizations are by no means exempt from these same processes. The agonies of “boot camp” initiations to the armed services are legendary. The novelist William Styron, a former Marine, catalogs his own experiences in language we could easily apply to the Thongas (or, for that matter, to the Kappas or Betas or Alphas): “the remorseless close-order drill hour after hour in the burning sun, the mental and physical abuse, the humiliations, the frequent sadism at the hands of drill sergeants, all the claustrophobic and terrifying insults to the spirit which can make an outpost like Quantico or Parris Island one of the closest things in the free world to a concentration camp.” But, in his commentary, Styron does more than recount the misery of this “training nightmare” -he recognizes its intended outcome: “There is no ex-Marine of my acquaintance, regardless of what direction he may have taken spiritually or politically after those callow gung-ho days, who does not view the training as a crucible out of which he emerged in some way more resilient, simply braver and better for the wear.”
On the Team
You can even see this on display when someone new starts. While many people have every intention of being welcoming, there is this subconscious underlying thing happening. “This new person hasn’t been through what we’ve been through.” They aren’t fully accepted for some time due to this lack of “rite of passage”, and that “rite of passage” could just be experience. There are a number of things happening here as us humans tend to be somewhat predictable in our response to something we don’t fully understand. One of which I can tell you is the people who are in the group have been committed to the group success more than anyone new coming in.
Being in the fitness world I can tell you there was a 6-8 week curriculum that every trainer was required to go through. That and a time where you’re required to do prospecting hours on the floor assisting members as they worked out. You would need to do this until you obtained a certain number within your production and then you were released from the obligation. While we would not like to look at this as a hardship, it is difficult to shake and it does make someone think twice before leaving the job as a result of the prior work put in to be at the level you’re at.
What To Do As Leaders
We should use this idea of commitment to get our teams more bought in. This can come in a number of ways but the key here is to make the task something that makes them better. Not exactly condoning a “hell week” here but you can see how something like that does work. Maybe it is a curriculum that every team member has to undergo? Or a hardship that will develop a new skill they’re required to have for a successful tenure within the group? Again, nothing humiliating or too grueling but just enough to make them feel accepted into the group and a part of something others are not.
Conclusion
Think about what commitment can do for a group. You may even be a part of a group right now where you underwent a time period of “the most fun you’ll never want to have again” – this is something many fraternity and sorority members describe pledging as. Maybe you’re a police officer who went through the academy? A marine who went through boot camp? A Navy SEAL who went through BUDs? These times of commitment draw a line in the sand between one group of humans and another. How will you curate yours?
