Organizations have trouble talking to themselves

Ask any consultant and she will tell you that a good portion of her job is helping one part of their client organization talk to the other part. Odd, I know.  For those not working with Fortune 500-size companies, you may assume that big companies communicate effectively. Many times they don’t.

Business is increasingly complex and fast

Thomas Friedman made this abundantly clear in his 2005 masterpiece The World Is Flat; market forces and the digitization of information makes it a free-for-all of global, competitive. . . complexity. Any $10+ billion company has business units, regions, functions which all fight for the attention of their customers and internal sponsors. Each group sub-optimizes their own little piece of the pie well, which leads to the sum total of chaos.

“Growth creates complexity, complexity kills growth”

This is the premise behind Bain & Company’s Founder’s Mentality. Organizations start out young and scrappy, and as they become successful (read: bigger, fatter, lazier), they lose some of that insurgency mindset that made them awesome. 

Intra-company confusion

It is a surprisingly common for one part of the company to be unaware or completely misinformed on the activities of the other part. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. There are many potential reasons:

• Different data sets; lack of system integration of data
• Excessively changing leadership and directions
• Excessive layers of management creating lots of “mailmen” of information
• Lack of a trusting culture; over-reliance on reports, documentation, and approvals
• Large number of acquisitions with limited post-merger integration
• Recruiting of leadership from outside the company and competition

Cross-functional issues get resolved at the top

One of the goals of organizational design is to create “constructive tension.”  You would not want sales dictating all pricing decisions, just like you wouldn’t want finance to approve every small innovation investment. A diversity of educated voices help to make better decisions.  (We all studied the perils of “group think” right?)

The challenge is that the tension happens at the functional level, and sadly, it only get arbitrated at the top of the organization.  It takes a CMO (marketing) and CFO (financial) meeting to make a decision. Everything gets passed and legislated up to the metaphorical corporate supreme court. Basically, everything becomes a bureaucratic bottleneck.

Corporate marriage counseling

So, yes. Consultants help to different people at the client site understand each other. We “drive” alignment.  I joked with a consulting friend the other day that 1/3 of what we do is marriage counseling. That is probably not an exaggeration:

Counseling activities include:

• Surfacing internal best practices from different divisions
• Driving alignment on shared goals, outcomes, and expectations
• Getting cross-functional stakeholder buy-in
• Analyzing the value chain and synchronizing complementary processes
• Standardizing roles and responsibilities for job leveling
• Running post-merger integration across businesses
• Conducting strategic planning processes
• Developing governance and operating models
• Casting vision and mission statements
• Cascading performance metrics and creating dashboards

You get the idea. I could go on for another 4-5 pages, but all these activities have 1 thing in common – it involves bringing different parts of the business together and getting some agreement. Getting the two spouses to talk. Fred and Ethel.

I am not a licensed marriage counselor, but. . . 

Here are 12 things I have found useful in bringing different groups of clients together:

• Get the client talking and working through their own issues
• Listen first and understand; people assume consultants don’t listen well
• Be authentic; find a way for clients to relate to you personally
• Aim for your client’s success and tell them explicitly
• Document what you heard, structure the thinking, get feedback
• Pre-sell your thinking ahead-of-time, and separately with people
• Assume the best; have positive intent.  Consultants create change
• Find win-win for the clients; and ruthlessly promote them
• Don’t fall into the trap of talking bad about the “other team”.  Stupid.
• Don’t call pointless meetings.  Do the work, use deliverables to drive agreement.
• Use the power of awkward; use logic to make it obvious what the right thing is
• Call in the big guns; sparingly use your executive sponsor to reinforce behaviors
• Bring people back to the main vision, mission, purpose; root them in the WHY

What else works?

What other tools, methods, principles, tips, and chicanery do you use to get clients to better communicate with each other?   What works?  Do you agree with my analogy of corporate marriage counseling?

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