Hippie CEO Life #20 - We’re All on the Same Team, Aren’t We?
August 26, 2022
"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." – Michael Jordan
Last night, as i was thinking about the topic i wanted to write about today, i dropped a Tweet asking if anyone had any suggestions or requests for topics. i received a lot of really great ideas that i’ve captured and will be covering in future issues.
Today’s topic comes courtesy of Adam Bushman who suggested the topic of ‘Cross-departmental empathy’
As Adam has been thinking about the topic a lot, so have i. It’s a topic that has come up frequently among many of my friend, especially those working in larger corporations. Usually it comes up out of frustration, something like, “I can’t believe how difficult it is to get something done, every time our team starts on a new project, it feels like some other department makes it their mission to ensure the project doesn’t succeed. Aren’t we all supposed to be on the same team here?”
We see this often with the companies that we are working with as well, given that data touches so many different departments, often our job becomes less about the technical components of using data and more about fixing broken relationships between teams and departments.
So how did we get here?
There are lots of contributing factors to why departments don’t work well together within companies but from my experience, it comes down to 3 primary reasons:
Lack of Empathy
Lack of Executive Alignment
Lack of Safety
Lack of Empathy.
It’s just natural for us to view the world from our own lens, seeing it from the perspective of others does not come so naturally. This plays out in most organizations where teams take a very egotistical approach to the projects they are working on, instantly creating a disconnect between departments by putting up barriers between their team and the other teams within the company.
Companies that have solved this problem the best have challenged their teams to be deliberate in thinking outside themselves. What impact does our decision have on the other team? Will our project make it harder for the other team to be successful on their projects? How would I feel if the project manager from the other team came to me demanding something from me that I simply don’t have time to work on?
Lack of Executive Alignment.
While many organizations struggle to empathize across departments, this missing empathy becomes exaggerated when a lack of executive alignment further drives a wedge between departments.
A very common trap that many businesses fall into, and one that is especially dangerous for smaller companies that are seeing explosive growth, is for department specific measures of success to either be misaligned with or viewed as “more important” than the key measures of other departments and/or company goals.
Having clearly defined company level metric goals, aligned with a single North Star metric, will help reduce the likelihood of department specific measures driving behavior that could be harmful to the relationships between departments, the health of the business, and of course the health of the customer experience.
Lack of Safety.
We may not be comfortable admitting it but for the vast majority of employees, they simply want to do their work, so they can collect a paycheck, and then go home. These employees are often driven by fear, fear of losing their job, which leads to a fear of being unable to pay for their essentials, which then leads to larger existential fears.
So when Matt, from the operations team, seems to have a desire to destroy the project our department is working on, rather than going with our initial, emotional reaction to attack Matt for not being a team player, we need to step back, we need to assess the situation from a place of empathy, and ask a lot of questions about how our project could be seen by Matt as a threat to his job, his way of providing for his family.
Working together as one team, aligned with a common purpose, is an incredibly complex topic, one in which hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written about, but if this is a challenge in your organization, the very first place to start is with developing deeper empathy across teams and departments.
Slow your anger, slow your judgement, and instead work on developing a sense of empathy for those within other departments, by asking a lot of questions about how the decisions you are making, the projects your department is working on, could make others feel. i think you will be surprised to learn that most other departments, most other employees within your company, aren’t out to get you, they are just instinctively putting up defensive walls to protect their livelihood, it’s your job to use empathy to break down those walls in order to find healthy cooperation.
As always, thank you for reading, thank you for being a valued subscriber, if you have suggestions for future topics, drop me a note on twitter @usujason or drop a comment on this issue, i’d love to talk about the topics that matter the most to you.
