Here are a few conversations I’ve had recently:
- A Growth Leader on the manufacturing team needs support from an oversubscribed support staff member for a major strategic initiative
- The leader of a new product line is preparing for a multi-week international road trip to launch the effort with local distribution teams
- An R&D leader who is leading an initiative with industry-changing implications needs to work with a product side leader to get a beta product on the production schedule for a key emerging client
What do all these needs have in common? On the surface, they are all relatively straightforward requests for support from adjacent team members. As an external shareholder, these are the kinda of discussions that you just assume (and are hoping) happen routinely and successfully.
Unseen Boundaries
However, I like to refer to these as “moat” conversations, because like water around a neighboring castle, they are the invisible interfaces in your firm where valuable cooperation loses momentum, stops and gets trapped – sometimes for months or even years. The truth is that these conversations are challenging to complete successfully for the best firms, and routinely go poorly in the average ones. These unseen moats are costly in career capital, organizational resources and ultimately, shareholder value.
The unseen origin of these “moats” has roots in the early stages of functional organizations. Each function tends to have a culture that attracts participants who have a preferred style of thinking, perspective, and communication style. For example, the financial team is precise, focused in the here and now, prefers specific written communication and has very high expectations for performance and deadlines. Marketing teams tend towards a future orientation, visual communication, and high-level conceptual targets. Please them in a high-stakes dialogue and friction will occur.
I was clued into this issue early in my career when I was called on to be the global P&L leader for a turnaround project. This work involved traveling to more than 20 countries and developing relationships with the local distribution teams and clients who were building leading-edge consumer communications devices during the “second wave” of digital cellular. I had a deep grasp on the technology application and assumed that would carry the day. It’s a very common error, (especially for North Americans) to assume that if they “show up” and be “genuine,” things will be fine.
The truth was that to be successful in this very competitive market, I needed to think and behave at a different level. There were cultural norms, customs, and platforms that I knew very little about, and after having a number of “those” trips (the ones where in your mind on the way home on the airplane, you just know you’ve got the business, only to find out that your visit resulted in “an interesting” dialogue, but no purchase) that I became a very serious student of the unseen.
I studied the literature and began to take a lot of notes regarding the customs, norms, and mores of the teams I was working with, spending phone time with them in region teams, asking questions and gaining insight. I became attuned enough to be able to see and point out the humor of how wrong my first instincts could be. Things began to go better, and my expectations became better calibrated and more realistic. I developed a deep empathy not only for the technical issues at hand, but the subtle cultural issues as well. I had subtly moved to playing chess on a new level.
These days, the tools are much stronger: you can go to this website and get a nice high-level view of the cross-cultural implications of how you will show up with a couple of clicks. By doing your homework, you are much less likely to enter a dialogue and completely miss the mark.
But There is More
As that chapter of my career closed, I joined a team that was accountable for taking R&D projects off the “technology shelf” and establishing profitable applications for the tech and homes for the resulting businesses in established product teams. Once again, the remit seemed straightforward: find the client, establish the need, align the product team, supply chain and distribution and Bob’s your uncle, you have a new business.
As anyone who works in the space will tell you, it’s anything but straightforward, and drums of ink have been spilled on developing just the “right” early-stage processes to carry this out. What I want to shine a bright spotlight on is: there is a second-order archetype that has a repeatable pattern and rules that once you see it, will greatly improve your success ratio in these endeavors.
Many times we layout the path to the results that we need to achieve without really thinking through the precise cultural boundaries that the project needs to pass through. By being explicit about this, we can do the homework of making sure that nothing is lost in “translation.”
What I realized after significant trial and error, is that there are also deep cultural norms that appear in functions in business that are every bit as strong as the regional cultures that I encountered in the work I did in international business development. By becoming a student of these patterns, much higher success ratios were possible, and seemingly insurmountable cross team conflicts could be solved.
I had an opportunity to start coaching my team in these areas, helping them prepare for discussions with sales teams, operations teams, product teams and so on. The more I shared these insights, the more I realized that this framework provided a foundational element that allowed their success rate to improve dramatically.
Specifically, I taught them to “brief” themselves before doing a cross-team “ask.” For example, one tool we used was the acronym TCA, standing for Time, Communication Style and Altitude. For time, are we future-oriented or now focused? For communications style, are we visual, fact-based or narrative…verbal or written? For altitude, are we big picture thinkers or deep in the details? By looking at these three items on each side of the boundary, you’ll be much better prepared and empathetic in your discussion.
The Complete Growth Leader
This laid the foundation for the Complete Growth Leader system that I use with clients today. We do an assessment on the four key capacities, and then help them see clearly their role as individuals and team members in their sphere of influence. We then choose carefully from the twelve underlying competencies and go to work on those specific areas that will most benefit the leader.
At a high level, the work centers on putting them in the shoes of their cross-functional team members and making them aware of the expectations that are unspoken and create barriers. Most misunderstandings pivot around the dimensions of time, communication style and altitude of viewpoint. When these are mismatched, conflict is inevitable, and value gets trapped.
With this awareness, we are able to approach their current intersections with other leaders in the firms – their peers and significant leaders in their own right, with not only the “ask” but with a strategic context that is relevant to their peer. By doing this work, information and insight flow, and along with it, the value that was locked up behind the hidden barriers is released.
If you are a leader in a firm, and you would like to explore what it might look like to release significant value in your team through working on these unseen barriers, I would be happy to explore them with you. You can either reach me on my direct line at (847-651-1014) or set up an appointment on the books by using this link .
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