Every day, you and I walk around carrying a bag. Not a literal one, but a bag full of our experiences, abilities, skills, values, and principles, among other things. It’s no surprise these bags grow heavy. Valuable, but heavy.

What’s stood out to me over the last few years of working with teams is how rarely we look past the top layer of each other’s bags. We open them, peek inside, and notice what’s sitting right on top: the clear, evident stuff. It’s far less common to really examine someone’s bag. The material it’s made from, the contents deep inside, the artifacts and experiences sitting at the bottom in the dark, mostly forgotten.

You can see this in how teams form. “Norming” is the process of discovering what’s normal for a team as a collective. But setting norms can easily become an aspirational exercise, a list of who we wish we were, instead of something rooted in the here and now, in the collective bag the team actually carries.

It gets sharper when a team changes fast. If you’ve been in a large organization when swaths of new people arrive, full of brilliant ideas but not considering the bags of the people already there, you know the divide that forms: old guard vs. new guard. At best it’s a felt tension, and at worst it’s adversarial and destructive.

In simple terms, the new guard isn’t honoring the bag of the old guard, and vice versa. Neither side is valuing the experiences (sometimes painful ones) and perspectives of the other.

I’ve watched the swirl that follows. The old guard digs in, feeling disrespected. The new guard presses harder because, well, the old guard “doesn’t get it.” Eventually, people on both sides leave: deflated, tired of running the same cycles, or carrying a feeling I’ve described as “the hallways have changed, and I don’t know who’s in them.”

It’s a waste of talent, energy, and time, and it’s avoidable.

Whose bag have you only skimmed the top of?

Here’s a small experiment for this week. Pick one person you’ve quietly marked as “difficult” and try honoring their bag. Get curious about what’s deeper inside, the things maybe no one else has asked about. Ask about their experiences, what’s been hard lately, the last time they felt energized at work, and what was behind it.

Then just listen. Honoring someone’s bag doesn’t mean you have to approve of every item in it. It’s acknowledging that it’s real, and that they’ve carried it a long way.

If we all spent a little more time honoring someone else’s bag, I suspect we’d find fewer “difficult” people, and a lot more teammates we just hadn’t met yet.

Try it this week, and send me a note. I’d love to hear what you found near the bottom.

P.S. This is a big part of why Suzanne Weller and I built Outsight <> Insight the way we did: a small group of senior leaders, each bringing their own bag, taking turns letting the others look a little deeper. Applications for the 2027 cohort are open at oimastermind.com. Not ready to apply? Join our Ask Us Anything on November 9 and see what it’s all about.