From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
In your Time Span workshop, you describe the friction between various departments, Ops-Sales-Customer Service-Accounting. You suggest this is a structural issue. In my company, we absolutely see this friction, but to me, it looks more like a personality conflict.

Response:
Most managerial issues look like a symptom, that’s why they are so difficult to resolve. The two most often cited problems (symptoms) are communication breakdowns and personality conflicts. You can have all the communication seminars you can afford, you can give everyone a personality test, the problems will remain.

The friction you describe between your departments is structural. Each department works from an internally focused agenda, with little consideration for other agendas in other departments. The exterior looks like a breakdown in communication. Not so.

Why is the agenda in each department internally focused? Simple. We, executive management, told them they had to be internally focused. We told each department they had to be efficient, profitable, no waste, no scrap, high utilization rates of internal resources, we told them they had to be internally focused.

In the heady days of growth, as these departments were emerging and developing, this internal focus was necessary, to gain those efficiencies, to make the output predictable. Absolutely normal. But now, that internal focus works against us. For the organization to move to the next level, those departments have to work together, support each other, cooperate, trade inside information, share planning, cross-train personnel.

You can spin your wheels with personality tests, but the fix is Integration. We have to integrate our systems and sub-systems together into a Whole System.