Playing as One
Over the past few weeks, I have repeatedly encountered situations where an organisation’s greatest challenge is breaking down silos—the fragmentation of the organisation across different functions.
“It is not power, but relationships that help you achieve results.”
— Kim Scott
This tends to happen easily in growing organisations. The focus shifts towards improving efficiency, while people lose sight of why the organisation exists, where its value lies, and how—and through whom—that value is created (Obsess Over Customers, Bezos Letters).
A rationally minded leader may view an organisation as a machine in which functional specialisation can create significant economic benefits. Dependencies are built between departments and then managed centrally.
Unfortunately, this overlooks the fact that an organisation is not a machine. It consists of people with feelings, emotions and personal goals. Mutual dependency creates tension and is also one of the greatest sources of stress, reducing people’s motivation and performance.
At management meetings and on leadership dashboards, you can see attempts to improve collaboration between departments—as if the problem always lies with someone else.
Yet the large grey elephant is sitting right there in the leadership meeting. Everyone works hard to avoid noticing it. Change is welcome—as long as it does not affect what I do.
An organisation works together only as well as its leadership team works together.
In which role do leadership team members participate—as heads of their individual departments or as leaders of the company as a whole?
The leadership team is the organisation’s litmus test. Attend just one weekly planning meeting and you will quickly understand the organisation’s culture and how effectively it works as a whole.
Where is the leader’s daily focus? How successfully have they enabled their stars to play together as a dream team?
Organisational culture comes down to three simple rules of collaboration.
1. Are goals set in a way that inspires every team member and aligns with their values?
If people show only passive interest in the organisation’s results and development goals during team meetings, the team has not agreed on what game it is playing—and lacks the desire to win it.
If the goals do not inspire the leadership team, why should they inspire the rest of the organisation?
“The best people join organisations with a charismatic purpose.”
— Peter Drucker
2. What is each team member’s contribution—or role—in achieving the shared goal?
How has the leader aligned the organisation?
If topics repeatedly arise in meetings that do not appear to belong to anyone, the leadership team has failed to answer a fundamental question:
What game are we playing today, and which roles do we need in order to win it?
The world changes quickly. As a result, a leader must effectively re-recruit their team every 90 days.
This means defining the roles required to win the changing game, setting clear expectations for the outcomes of those roles, and placing the right people in them.
If this is neglected—or if standards are lowered—the goal remains a dream, while fertile ground is created for organisational politics (Focus on High Standards, Bezos Letters).
Just as individuals need clearly defined roles, meetings and other decision-making bodies must also have a clear purpose.
How does this meeting create value? Which outcomes is it responsible for?
Once these questions are answered, it becomes much clearer why people meet—and the conversations become far more focused.
3. How is the team’s daily work organised?
The best evidence can be found in the agenda of the team’s planning meeting. The topics usually fall into three categories.
Decision-making
If the leadership meeting spends its time solving an issue that belongs to one team member’s area of responsibility—or resolving a matter between two team members—it has stepped outside its own role and taken over theirs.
The usual cause is unclear roles or a lack of trust within the team. Everything has to be decided together.
People bring questions to the leadership meeting that they should be capable of resolving independently, allowing them to free themselves from responsibility.
This is how teams learn helplessness. People lose the willingness to decide and take responsibility, while the organisation loses its ability to respond quickly to new opportunities.
If recruitment has been rigorous (Focus on High Standards), the people selected should genuinely want what is best for the organisation and care about its development.
When responsibilities and roles are clear, people should have the authority to make all the decisions required to achieve their expected results.
Conflict resolution
When internal tensions remain unresolved, one team member will often explain their failure to achieve results by pointing to the actions of another.
The cause is usually unclear roles or a failure to live by the organisation’s values and shared rules.
Most organisations have written down their values, but only a few actually use them to guide everyday decisions and behaviour.
Clarity here gives the organisation agility—Nimble Leadership.
On the day Amazon went public—Day 1—Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to future shareholders explaining the core principles that would guide Amazon’s people and support the organisation’s rapid and sustainable growth.
Information sharing
Is information visible to everyone, or is it used as a tool for manipulation?
The more people understand where you want to go, how you intend to get there, what you are doing each day and how every team member is progressing, the fewer rumours and contradictions emerge within the organisation.
Overcommunication is better than a lack of information.
If an organisation is afraid to share information with its own people, read the previous point again. There are unresolved tensions and serious problems with the organisation’s values.
In a modern organisation, the only true creator of value is a competent and inspired person.
A company’s greatest asset is its ability to attract the best people and create synergy through their collaboration.
When a leader establishes purposeful collaboration within the leadership team, that positive experience spreads throughout the organisation like a virus.
Have you ever wondered why some organisations grow rapidly while others begin moving towards Day 2?
Give people autonomy and responsibility, and you may be surprised by how dramatically their creativity—and therefore their performance—can increase.