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?
Your motives are pure. You want your people to work better together.
But there’s something you need to do first. Here it is, the biggest piece of obvious you will have read for quite some time:
To get your people to work better together, tell them how their roles work together.
That’s it!
Are you laughing? Does this seem too simple to you? Well it is simple. A better word for it is foundational.
Would you agree that it’s a foundational condition for effectiveness that people in roles have an understanding of how their roles fit together? That things are easy when people ‘know where they stand’, when they know who can ask who to do what in terms of their core jobs, the reason they are there?
We need this sorted. Your people need this sorted.
So you have a choice. You can invest in friendship training, and then hope that your people can figure out for themselves how their roles fit together. They might even do so. And if you can afford the coffees and the lunches and your competitors and/or customers are happy to wait….sounds great.
Here’s the other way. Decide, then tell them how their roles work together. Here’s some examples:*
- ‘You have to listen to his advice, but you don’t have to follow it’.
- ‘You have to listen to her advice, and if you don’t agree, hit the puase button and come and see me’.
- ‘You have to listen to his advice, and if you don’t agree, you need to change things until he’s OK for you to keep going’.
- ‘When she calls a meeting, it’s your job to go to the meeting. It’s not an optional extra’.
- ‘This area is going to be asking you to deliver things for them; that’s part of your job. If you hit capacity, see me to sort priorities’.
Do it this way, and you can say the following without an embarrassed smile: ‘In our organisation, we employ people with the capability to add serious value. So we set up the role relationships so that their capability actually does add serious value.’
Here’s the alternative: ‘Come and work for us, we promise to give you lots of training in how to get along with others so hopefully you will be able to influence them enough that you will be able to do what you were hired to do‘.
Which one sounds like your place? Which one would you prefer?
Take out the biggest reason your people are struggling to get along (yes, it’s the unclear role relationships), and the need for friendship training will rapidly dwindle. And ironically, if you remove the biggest obstacle to your people getting along, any friendship training will have a much more positive effect in getting your people to then build increasingly trusting relationships on the solid foundation you have given them.
Massage doesn’t work for broken bones**.
Email me if you want to know more about how to do this.
* You may recognise the role relationships as identified by Elliott Jaques, see Requisite Organization, Cason and Hall Publishing
**Thanks Tim Levett!