Scenario
Your organisation has a number of high quality teams, with good leadership. Each team functions well as a stand-alone unit. However two teams simply do not work well together – for example your Sales and Marketing teams do not quite seem to mesh together, or your finance team and your operations team seem to have trouble communicating.
Broadly speaking, when two teams do not work well together the underlying issues generally fall into one of two categories. We call one set of issues “hardware” issues and the other “software” issues.
Hardware issues, as the name implies, are those that are similar to the two teams using incompatible systems. So, for example, one team within an organisation might process packing and dispatch of customer orders by prioritising larger orders and those for good customers. Meanwhile, the team responsible for payments uses a different system that processes orders by strict time of receipt.
As a result, some orders for good customers are delayed because the payment has not yet been processed and other customers have money taken long before their goods are dispatched. This not only leads to inefficiency but also to complaints – and management becomes distracted by the need to deal with these complaints.
Hardware issues are relatively easy to solve. Processes just need to be re-engineered or aligned across the two teams.
Software issues tend to be more complex, and they are the main focus of this article. Software issues occur when systems are not out of alignment but people do not use them efficiently. Here is a four step process to deal with this.
Step 1: Investigate
First, investigate what is going on. Establish what the issues are and what unhelpful behaviour is undermining performance. This is akin to a doctor asking a patient about their symptoms.
The key questions to ask include:
- Does each team work well internally?
- What are the priorities of each team? Are they complementary?
- Where do the priorities followed by each team come from? Are they set by senior management? Are they set by the team leader? Are they determined by incentives or targets? Are they a reflection of the corporate culture of the organisation?
- Does either team have a “closed” attitude, where it focuses on itself and its own goals and is indifferent or even hostile to anything external to it?
- Do the members of each team have the right skills and attitudes to cooperate with others outside their own immediate team?
- Is the lack of coordination between the leaders of the two teams or is it between other members of each team?
Step 2: Diagnose
The second step, armed with this information, is to diagnose what the underlying problem might be – just as a doctor makes a provisional diagnosis based on the information he gathers from the client.
Broadly speaking, if two teams are not working well together then it is either because one or both teams is unwilling to coordinate well with the other team, or they are unable to do so.
People can be unable to coordinate with other teams either because they lack the skills or because something is preventing them from doing so – usually some sort of block within the organisation.
People can be unwilling to coordinate with others for a number of reasons.
- They may have no incentive to do so
- The culture of the organisation may encourage competition rather than cooperation between teams
- There may be historic reasons for enmity or friction between the two teams
- There may be barriers to cooperation without sufficient will to overcome them
- Team leaders may have their own reasons to prevent cooperation.
It is important to establish exactly what the nature of the issue is – and what the root cause is. If people decide to act in a particular way or have certain attitudes, there is usually a cause. Identifying the underlying cause is key to finding an effective solution.
Step 3: Verify
Once you have established what the issues are and have diagnosed what you think the root problem is, it is best to pause and to see whether you can verify that your assumptions are correct.
If you think that the issue lies, for example, with a poor attitude within one of the teams, can you find any other evidence of this? Can you triangulate by getting the views of others who see those individuals from a very different perspective? Does the team that you suspect of causing the issue have recognised “blind spots” that have been previously identified?
As well as looking for evidence to back up your theory you should also look for evidence that you are wrong. For example, perhaps you believe that Team A is slowing up your operations because they are poor at liaising with Team B and Team C. In that case you should also seek evidence that you might be wrong and that the problem actually lies with Team B or Team C.
Step 4: Take Action
Once you are as sure as you can be that you have identified the root cause of the problem it is time to take decisive action. That action must, of course, address the root cause of the issue and will depend on what that root cause is. The following is a general guide.
Objectives, targets and incentives are the fundamental tools that management teams use to get employees to focus on the right things and to perform well. They are designed to encourage certain behaviours. However, sometimes they can inadvertently encourage teams to work against each other rather than with each other. If this is the case, then management must clarify and adjust objectives and incentives. Issues might arise between two teams out of, for example,
- Inconsistent priorities given to each team by management that inadvertently lead to conflict
- Incentives such as bonuses or performance targets that inadvertently lead to conflict
- Priorities set by the team leaders that inadvertently lead to conflict.
On the face of it, this should be straightforward to deal with. However, companies often have conflicting objectives and it can be difficult to achieve a balance between them. For example, a ccompany may task one team with minimising the cost of customer acquisition and retention while another team is tasked with ensuring that the company provides excellent customer service (and need to spend money to do so).
There is clearly scope for conflict between these two objectives and the company is probably unwilling to drop either objective. The company wants to give good customer service, but also needs to control costs. A balance needs to be struck between these competing aims.
That could be achieved by a manager deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to back the cost reduction team or the customer service team each time the customer service team want to spend money to invest in a customer relationship. That is not very efficient or very motivating for the teams. It would be far better if the company refined its objectives and set some criteria for customer service spending that both teams could work with.
Sometimes inconsistencies will not come from senior management but from the team leaders themselves. This may be a mater of conflicting priorities or just of personal conflict. The resolution process in this case is similar. Senior management need to clarify and unify the objectives of both teams and clear the air of any personal conflicts.
Sometimes the underlying issue is just a lack of care or skill. Each team focuses on its own internal work and processes and does not think beyond its own borders. This can be exacerbated if the team is overworked or under pressure. The team’s output is just passed along without care for how easy it is for others to take and use its output appropriately.
For example, a team may be under pressure to complete a particular high priority piece of work. When they have finished they may simply leave other teams to complete their part of the process without briefing them about any special features or even informing other teams that this is a high priority case. A manufacturing team might work very hard to complete an urgent and highly customised order, but then not inform the shipping team that the order is urgent and needs special handling. The result is that the goods arrive with the customer both late and damaged.
In such cases training is an obvious first step – both to give people the necessary skills to liaise with others as appropriate and to help them to understand how and why this is important. This is a matter of getting people to see their work not just in the context of what their own team does but in the context of what the overall organisation is trying to achieve and how it is trying to do so.
In other instances, the lack of coordination across teams may be a cultural issue. Perhaps the culture has always set different teams in competition with each other; perhaps it has emphasised individual work over teamwork, with each individual expected to rely on themselves rather than others; perhaps the lack of coordination is just a matter of “how we have always done thing around here” that has become a deeply ingrained habit and has been absorbed into the culture.
Issues that are rooted in culture are harder to address. Not only is the solution likely to involve the entire organisation but these are difficult issues to fix. This brief article does not permit space to go into all the factors that may be involved in cultural issues and cultural change, but our article on how to achieve change may be helpful. This is to be found here: https://aletheian.co.uk/how-do-you-change-your-corporate-culture/
Anthony Saint is Co-Founder of Aletheian Advisors and writes regularly on corporate strategy and corporate culture.
