I once agreed to coach a new client, let's call him John, who was quite upset in our first meeting.
I tried to understand the problem, but his anger made it so that the only thing I could gather was that his boss was incompetent and micro-managing. It had gone so far that John was contemplating looking for a new job. Another client from a different company, let’s call her Jane, told me a similar story. Jane's team was supposed to provide business support, but according to Jane, she found it impossible to collaborate with the director who is their internal client. One of her team members had resigned, and the last time I met Jane, she mentioned considering leaving too.
John and Jane both defined the problem as being a certain person. I'll discuss this aspect further down. But my experience tells me that more often than not, problems with collaboration stem from lacking organisational conditions rather than difficult individuals. Let's see how the analysis unfolded in each case.
I asked John to take a deep breath and describe the corporate structure and how different roles were supposed to interact. The more he drew on the whiteboard, the more confused I became. Eventually, I told him that the organisational structure, with solid and dotted lines going in all possible directions, made no sense. John agreed. The impression was that the powers that be had patched things up without much thought, and we speculated on how the structure had come about. When working with fast-growing and entrepreneurial companies, I've more than once encountered the phenomenon where the criterion for creating a role is that the person who will hold the role has the right stuff. This may well be true, and the criterion might even be reasonable in smaller companies. However, as the company grows, the demands for formality increase. A more relevant criterion should then be to consider what kind of organisational structure supports the business. With that established, one should consider which roles are needed and then it's time to think about which people are suitable. The aforementioned might sound obvious, but over the years I have seen that reality doesn't always follow this principle.
Back to John: Thanks to the cluttered whiteboard, he could see that it probably wasn't as simple as the boss being incompetent, but rather that the boss as well as everyone else, were doing their best in the organisational maze.
In analysing Jane's case, it became apparent that there hadn't been a discussion within the company about how responsibilities and mandates should be distributed among different functions. Jane realised that due to the lack of clarity, she, her team members, and the director had made different interpretations, fuelling an unnecessary power struggle.
Is it never the individual who is the problem? Of course, it can be. For example, in this article you can read about a difficult decision a CEO made about a manager who was indeed a top performer but not a team player. When I'm in business meetings discussing a potential collaboration for management team development and hear the client describing a member of the team being problematic, I apply the following litmus test: Is the individual problematic in several contexts, or is the issue mainly visible in the management team? The more contexts in which the problem is visible, the greater the chance that the individual is in fact the problem. In such cases I usually underscore that the diagnosis and treatment need to be aligned. If the diagnosis indicates that the individual isn’t for example very agreeable, it won't be fixed with a management team development initiative.
However, if personality traits aren’t the problem, still the question remains to what extent you have the power to influence the conditions or the group dynamics. If they're limited, it might be a healthy decision to eject.
If reading this made you start thinking of what conditions might restrain cooperation in your organisation, I recommend my free guide on organisational development.
The clients who reach out to me are managing directors, management teams, and executives who want to realise the potential in their organisations and accomplish extraordinary results. They reach out to me because of my ability to transform individuals, teams, and organisations.