The Challenge

I was a part of a technology division in a company that was undergoing significant change. Translation – layoffs and major organizational changes. We had new bosses and our bosses had new bosses. The jobs most of us were doing varied greatly from what we had previously done. We were all feeling the effects of change.

My team reported to the new leader of our IT/ Software Development organization. Before we had even closed out our former jobs, he gave us a new assignment. It was ambitious and he clearly had a vision of what he wanted to accomplish.

We got to work. We began building deliverables based on his requirements. We were asking questions that had not been asked broadly before and requesting information that had not been previously tracked consistently throughout the organization. We were leading major change in the organization and our leader was pleased with our results. More importantly, his clients were pleased with the deliverables coming out of this division, so yippee, right?

Not quite.

We got the information we needed and we built several well-received deliverables. But we also stepped on a lot of toes and we pissed a lot of people off. One of those groups was an operations team that supported the change we were driving.

There was a combination of role confusion, lack of trust, and probably ego that contributed to the friction between teams.

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I am a big fan of rallying a team around a common goal, especially when leading change. We shared our goals and strategy with the team; we began engaging them sooner and more often. We made delivery of our Leader’s requirements a shared goal. Great strategy – but how did we put that into practice?

Below are some of the steps we took.

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The Details

“What problem?”

There is no point in denying there is friction on the teams. Everyone can see the awkward interactions – the forced small talk and the body language during meetings is a dead giveaway.

We tried to have a meeting between the two teams to talk through the details.  Doing this with 8-10 people in the room, with levels from Manager to VP proved very difficult. Politics will dictate reactions and these meetings often end up being inefficient and ineffective because no one says what needs to be said.

So instead, two of us took on the brave challenge of building a bridge between our strategy and operations teams.

Turns out we both had strong fundamental backgrounds and were interested in driving change for the betterment of the organization. We had come from environments where we had seen capabilities in place and knew the value that it would bring both for our leader and for our company. We were able to build rapport through a shared view of the opportunities and challenges in driving change in the organization. We both knew the significance of our efforts and that we would be building unprecedented capabilities in our organization.

WHAT??? This was a game changer. We got to work.

To add to our collaboration challenge – we were located in 2 different office locations – so face-to-face meetings needed to be highly coordinated. You forget how easy it is to build relationships when you can walk over to someone’s desk.

The operations team lead and I met bi-weekly. We aligned on priorities and upcoming activities and we kept our teams and leadership informed on what we discussed.

 Open and immediate feedback is critical to making increased communications valuable and our weekly check-ins were very important. But even more important was the fact that we began to pick up the phone in between those check-ins. It changes the collaboration dynamic when you are open to having a bi-directional conversation with someone as opposed to the well-thought-out-here’s-the-solution-that-I’m-telling-you email.

Step 4: Develop Champions

The one-on-one touchpoints were great for keeping the strategy and operations teams in synch. However, to successfully lead change across the entire organization, my team also needed a committee of champions within the divisions. We set up a cross-functional committee to do just that. The team met monthly to solve some of our most pressing challenges and to vet potential solutions prior to presenting them to the Senior Leadership Team. We also reinforced changes and captured feedback for initiatives already underway.

A few months later and we were able to influence significant change in the organization. We drove adoption for our initiatives and improved the organization’s resource management and project management capabilities. Together, a group of individuals created tremendous value for the company’s leadership.