No therapy required: How to get your people working together

Have you, or are you about to, invest money in getting your people to work better as a team?  To get them to get along, to understand each other, to form closer bonds so work will truly flow across your organisation like the ball moving from defence to attack?

The right spot for personality tests

When personality tests and cultural surveys come up with clients, they often say a little apologetically “I know you don’t think much of these, but…”. I feel bad when I hear this, because I don’t automatically think they are bad.

Far from it.

I rate things such as Myers-Briggs, the various LSI, OCI, CSI permutations, Facet 5 and all various  letters, spiderwebs and colours as great tools for  raising the performance of teams that already know what they’re doing. Read more…

Stop the battles: Using authorities to set up cross-functional work

There is a way to create a culture of working together and stopping cross-functional work being the bane of your people’s working life, and it does not start with sending everyone away to learn how to handle conflict, find out their personality type or get 360 feedback.

Instead, it involves addressing the issue at its source by managers clarifying what they are each accountable for, confirming with their cross-over manager, then setting up role relationships for their people by integrating accountabilities and authorities.

Elliott Jaques provides  seven different types of authority to match with accountability Read more…

The simple step to improving cross-functional relationships

Something actually quite strange, but common, are Finance areas taking ownership of profitability for an organisation.  You will hear comments like “March should be a big month, which will make Jim (CFO) happy”, and you’ll hear Jim saying things like “my money” and “that’s good for my bottom line”.

We see the exact same thing when HR departments take ownership of culture or employee engagement.

This comes from a good place, from Read more…

Conflict? Just work together!

Here’s a bit of non-genius – getting people to work together across departments requires setting up how they are supposed to work together across departments.   And the reverse – if people don’t work well together across departments, there is a fair chance that we haven’t set up how they are supposed to work together across departments.

Imagine this conversation: Read more…

A crucial cause of work behaviour

There’s a classic old video on youtube called Explorations in Management, and I’m not going to put the link up – the production is just too hard-core 70s and the language so gender exclusive I can’t associate myself with it.  It’s like a serious, boring Goodies episode.  But I’m mentioning it by way of acknowledgement because it makes a simple and fundamental point about what causes people’s behaviour at work.  (If you can’t resist finding it, type ‘Lord Wilfred Brown’ into youtube).

So, without further ado, quoting Lord Wilfred Brown:

“the behaviour of an individual at work is Read more…

How to create organisational silos

Silos - you can do it

If a siloed organisation is what you’re after, here’s how to go about doing it.    The only pre-requisite to being able to form silos is people who have a genuine urge to get work done and who care for the organisation.  Don’t worry, we’ll set it up so these natural instincts are naturally turned toward silo behaviour. Read more…

Politics at work start early

Politics - embedded

Here’s four quick quotes from current jobs being advertised, spot the common word:

• “You will posses demonstrated leadership, influencing and negotiation skills”
• “…excellent communication and influencing skills”
• “..combine specialist knowledge with strong management and influencing skills”
• “Excellent communication and influencing skills at all levels”.

All of these jobs are operational or audit roles, not sales or business development.  Which means the people they are influencing are internal people in the same organisation.  We have set up a political organisation from the start.

Read more…