Reduce Friction And Increase Trust And Coordination Between Functional Leaders

In corporate speak people talk about feeling like there are “silos” in their business where functions, levels or groups of people don’t work in teamwork. My observation is that siloed behaviour is often the opposite of teamwork, people actually try to make it harder for the other function or team to achieve their goals because there is no perceived mutual interest.
As well as being just generally frustrating and annoying, this culture of teamwork can:

• lead to people not working upstream or downstream to really understand what value is to your customer, clients, partners
• impact engagement and motivation of your leaders and staff
• cost you lots of money as people make fulfilment errors
• reduce your top line revenue as you miss cross sell opportunities from other departments
• impact profitability because of all the reasons above

What can you do about it?

Reduce Friction And Increase Trust And Coordination Between Functional Leaders Build Relationships and Capability at the same time!

The big result we are aiming for is to create an organisation that is a team of teams. So rather than having individual teams that are linked at the highest level by a leader we want all teams to have multiple touch points with each other.

Otherwise we tend to get siloed behaviour because if there is only one point of connection between functions, personality conflicts at the leadership level may prevent the relationship blossoming at other levels.

You need to think differently about structuring your team and business and how your functions are encouraged to interact with each other.

This is explained in the “lynch – pin” vs “flocking”  analogy. I originally heard about this analogy on a podcast with a team coaching guru by the name of David Clutterbuck.

With a traditional lynch-pyn structure the different departments are only connected (and share resources, information and intelligence) at the highest level  highlighted in blue in the diagram below:

Rather than linking, what we’re moving to is the idea of Flocking. Instead of just a link to one person, this idea is that the whole organisation is like a flock of birds. Picture watching birds en masse pivot and change direction.

And what we want them to do is to flock or pivot as one.
To achieve a flocking teamwork culture we want multiple people from your function to be responsible for collecting the information that creates the flocking effect.

What we’re doing is giving each of one your team members responsibility for a collective activity from the below and rotating that role over time:

1. Collective Vision – assign responsibly for understanding the chain of purpose across the organisation. What is the shared purpose of our team and how does it fit into the overall purpose of the team of teams?
2. Collective Intelligence – assign responsibility for collecting and communicating data from the external environment of one team that is relevant to other teams.
3. Collectively Plan Resources – look for opportunities and plan to give and receive resources from other teams during peak and slow periods.
4. Innovation Diffusion – what innovation from your team could you share with other teams so that all could benefit and vice versa.

Leave me a comment or Get in Touch

Hope that’s been useful for you. If you want to talk about your team. Send me a message or leave me a comment down below.

Talk to you soon.

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When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.

If you are a 50 person plus business, have budget to develop your organisation, and you have challenges with teamwork in your top 3 levels of leaders than we may be a good fit to work together. For more information, click below to watch a short video on my teamwork model and read testimonials from previous clients.

Let’s talk further about teamwork in your organisation…