Playing with the new team: the challenge of working across factions

The following is a blog post by Chris Green, Case Study writer for the Kansas Leadership Center

Exercising civic leadership across factions can seem incredibly difficult.  I learned about those difficulties long before I became immersed in leadership theory.

At 17, baseball was one of my all consuming passions. I desperately wanted to play in the most competitive level for my age group. But in the summer of 1995, I didn’t make Manhattan’s American Legion baseball team.  As a result, I ended up playing with my hometown’s biggest rival, Junction City.

I played with the enemy.

That meant for three months a year, I played with our rival. It was tricky. The social dynamics between Manhattan and Junction City went well beyond high school sports rivalries.  I sensed that some in Manhattan, a university town, tended to look down on Junction City, a more ethnically and socioeconomically diverse community.

Playing for Junction City forced me to refashion my loyalties and change my perceptions of the community and its players. I also had to be very conscious of how I presented myself to my new teammates, who had their own preconceptions about what someone from Manhattan would be like.

Playing baseball in Junction City worked out great for me.  I built trust with my Junction City teammates by demonstrating my loyalty to the cause we shared, winning as a team. We became good friends. I also managed to maintain relationships with my home team.

Not a walk in the Ball Park

In civic life however, it’s not quite as easy to cross factions by literally changing teams. But working across factions may require giving up some comfort by befriending those with different views or positions, we must learn to be conscious of the role we play in the system and we must be willing to give up some of our loyalties at home if we want to achieve our greater purpose.