Do you ever feel like your teams are not on the same page? That sometimes they work against each other? If that’s familiar, it might even feel like you’re playing the policeman or the arbiter between teams more often than not?

Businesses are like cities. Let’s take a big, well-developed place like Kansas City, for instance. There’s lots of traffic, residential, commercial and industrial as well as people, there’s lots going on all trying to get where they need to be, to meet deadlines as quickly as possible. At peak times, it takes you 36 minutes to get through the city. However, that same distance would normally take 30 minutes. So peak time increases the time spent traveling by only 6 minutes. Amazing! It’s not like that where I live!!

Now let’s look at Moscow, one of the most crowded cities in the world. It has the same pressures as Kansas however, in that same half an hour of getting from one place to another, at peak time it would take you 68 minutes. That makes it over double the normal time it takes and significantly less efficient than the example above. How would you feel about losing 32 minutes twice a day because of poor planning?

The Importance of Systems

Why am I sharing this with you? Because we often blame the chaotic traffic in a city on so many factors but fail to look at the real reason. Which is, roads not built with efficacy and alignment in mind. When big cities, still allow you to get from A to B in an acceptable amount of time, then we see efficiency in the way not only the roads are structured but also how the city has been designed and the town planning is coordinated. No one factor determines efficiency or not it needs to be looked at in consideration of the other systems and how they will impact each other or benefit.

So, cities built to maximize efficiency and make it easier for all users including participants in the traffic, resemble the effective systems used in companies. However, most companies don’t take the time to look at how systems, departments and functions interact together to achieve the best outcome for the business and most cases they work independently until they have a joint deliverable and then it comes down to human interaction to get the outcome.

Let’s make a few important points clear, though. It’s not one person’s responsibility to build efficiency in a city. It can’t be, there is no one person that oversees the entire city. It’s everyone’s job that has an impact on work, construction, industry, transport to look at the big picture, to understand how they all fit together and the impact. In this case, that is the view of the city, including all roads. To clear traffic through the city, the minds behind the road network need to collaborate, to see things in perspective, before focusing on each single piece of the puzzle and doing it right.

A Holistic Approach to Business

When creating a system, be it for a city or for a business, you need to think and act holistically. That is, to take into consideration the whole rather than just the elements involved in it, and to work with it in mind. The strategy must always be kept in mind and the measurements of success. There are always trade odds.

Good business is about efficiency, effectiveness and delivering a great outcome. Below are 4 common mistakes I’ve seen happen in business that have no aligned systems:

1. Letting people work in silos

When a person is hired by a company, they enter a department. It’s easy to focus solely on what’s going on in there, and even keep your social circle small and stick to the projects concerning only that field. Unfortunately, that’s most often not the new employee’s fault. Instead, it’s how the company treats them – as a worker in a department, who’ll likely never find out what happens outside of it.

There’s a specific phrase for that phenomena. It’s called the silo mentality and it occurs in the workplace way too often. Sadly, it doesn’t need to be the way of thinking and working of individuals, but it’s the mindset of the whole organization. You can recognize it when everyone in the business is doing their job and are convinced that it is not their responsibility to even know what others are working on, not to mention that the projects in other departments are something they will probably never ask or care about.

The bigger more systematic problem with this is that people fail to have an appreciation of what the other departments do, what their goals and outcomes are, and they incorrectly assume that they are the same as their own. This leads to focusing only on their individual outcomes and that of the team without understanding that everything I do impacts someone else. Businesses are like living organisms that are all interdependent on each other a bad decision in marketing flows into the sales team. Accounts not processing invoices flows into customer service etc.

Solution

When you hire people, hire them to work for your organization they just happen to be in a role in a department. Maintain the link to the organization and keep people informed what’s happening in other areas and people will feel part of the whole and part of a larger team. Give them the big picture, the strategy and explain where they fit into the strategy. Have different departments involved in the hiring, recruitment and onboarding process.

2. Lack of input into decisions by other teams

Usually when a big decision has been made in a certain department, be it marketing or sales, it’s the team and their Manager that took part in making it. But imagine if you brought other teams in this, asked for their input and the impact of the decision on their area.

Every time you don’t do that, you’re contributing to making the current silos stronger, and creating new ones. Because every time you make a decision with your team, based solely on your knowledge, expertise and opinion, or that of one team you’re making the other teams in the company accommodate that, instead of building awareness and understanding the flow on effect and you miss the opportunity to create a better solution and save money because you had a narrow focus on the solution.

I have seen decisions made that cost millions of dollars. Money that could have been saved if the decision process had included other people outside of the function. These people when told of the decision had different perspectives, they asked dumb questions and made suggestions that would have been cheaper and more effective. However, they were not involved in the process and their unique vision of the issue and possible solutions went untapped.

A better outcome would have been achieved when those other people had been brought into that discussion. If you try to do that next time, you’ll see them raising their concerns and generating ideas. Thus, implementing a holistic approach to business, rather than just working with what they got in their department. A narrow focus can create efficiency in one department and huge impacts in another just by a simple decision. Involving people with diverse views slows down the decision-making process but it improves the quality of the output.

3. Setting people up to believe that the only way to succeed is through their individual results.

This creates a big ‘us and them’ mentality. People in the business start thinking they create certain results due to their actions solely, so not seeking input or engagement with others becomes the norm. If you measure performance solely on results and exclude company values and how they operate you will be experiencing your team making poor choices, short term decisions and a lack of insight into impacts. A lack of focus on the customer as the competition between teams rises.

If you change your approach, though, and explain to the team how important the strategy is, and how we work together to achieve the outcome you create long term sustainable results, the competition for status and significance will stop as it doesn’t get rewarded. The business growth can accelerate by simply encouraging and rewarding everyone to look in the same direction and gather all their powers to take the business further, instead of trying to prove themselves in one of the departments.

Create a culture saying, ‘we are all in this together’, and you’ll be amazed by not just the contributions of everyone, team and department, but also with the progress you see in the company goals.

Making decisions on the fly

This is one of the worst mistakes I see being made repeatedly. So often decisions made quickly, based on the opinion of an individual or the emotions of somebody. When in fact we should base decision making on the vision we’re all trying to achieve, on the environment around us and how it fits into it, and whether it’s aligned with our strategy.

There are always time pressures in business and so often decisions are rushed due to a looming deadline. In the drive to achieve the deadline often key information is overlooked usually because the people making the decision are most often not the ones that perform the task and lack the detailed knowledge to understand the flow on effect of the decision. The people that perform this task then need to live with the decision or create solutions to counter the impact.

I see this happen repeatedly a hasty decision is often a bad decision. What is even worse is when the decision maker purposely excludes people because they will raise too many concerns and slow down the process. If they are raising questions and objections shouldn’t you be asking why? A better questions might be Why what are we not considering?

Don’t make decisions based on emotions or deadlines and then justify it later. Instead, ask yourself many questions before making each a final one, at each step ask do I have the information to make an informed decision, who should be included in this discussion, how does this decision impact the rest of the business and does it align with how we operate and our overall strategy.

So, are you letting people work in silos? Do you lack alignment in your individual department strategies? Do you make people think they are on their own in this, and not let other teams help with a decision? Do you make decisions quickly?

CONCLUSION

You see these symptoms in your business, then your team are working independently from each other and your team see themselves as belonging to a team (silo)rather than the business. Are you creating bureaucracy and roadblocks in your business without being aware? Is your business-like Kansas? efficient and effective, everyone knowing their role and working together to achieve the bigger picture or are you like Moscow? where everything comes to a grinding halt and everyone is fighting between each other for what they need. A lack of alignment will cause you heart aches that you will be feeling all across your business.

Creating Efficiency and Alignment within your business