Is your team blocking organizational success?
The energy in most organizations flows vertically. This occurs when colleagues prioritize impressing their boss or the achievement of functional objectives…rather than working effectively cross-functionally to delight customers.
If your team is blocking the flow of value across the organization, you’re a nuisance.
Delivering the right value at the right time at the right cost or price to customers requires that employees work seamlessly across the organization.
Resist the Temptation to Change Them
When cross-functional execution breaks down, most people blame others: If they weren’t such a pain, if theywould only collaborate, we’d succeed.
It doesn’t require a researcher to tell any of us: The method of accusing others for poor results is ineffective and destructive leadership.
Blaming others, of course, is the ego’s strategy to take the focus away from us—with hopes we will then not be held accountable for having to do the unthinkable: change.
5 Questions to Move from Nuisance to Seamless
If your team is willing to lead change, then consider asking:
- What steps can we take to be more trustworthy?
- What narratives or beliefs about “them” are we operating from…which are destructive to our shared objectives?
- How can we make the work others have to do easier for them to accomplish?
- When we think about other groups in the organization with whom we must work, do we feel like we “have to” work with them…or that we “get to” partner with them? (And what’s the difference?)
- Are we trying to “fix” those people or “build” stronger relationships with them?
No one is saying “those” colleagues in other functions shouldn’t also change. This is merely a reminder: The most effective collaborative leaders first change what they can control.