Are you treading water, feeling all alone, within an Us versus Them business model? This business model segregates employees within discipline-specific silos.
Culturally, departments hoard information within their specific silos, rather than sharing and collaborating across the organization. As a result, each department’s territoriality can add up to organizational compromise, competitively.
As a result, you feel as though you continuously are treading water, when working deals, resolving problems or designing outcomes. First, you are not certain you have all the information you need. In fact, you gradually realize you only may have whatever information you can get your hands on. In addition, you begin to wonder whether the competition operates in a more cross-functional, collaborative environment. What would that type of employee experience be like?
The Us versus Them Business Model creates barriers to effective cross-functional collaboration.
In reviewing the 2017 Gallup Global Workforce Study, key findings include that command-control leadership, combined with legacy business models, reinforce Us versus Them siloed mindset. Are your leaders fortunate enough to attend high-profile meetings, featuring extremely well-educated thought-leaders? Then what happens, once they return to the workplace? Do they embrace, or resist, the recommendations made by the insightful speakers?
Then again, in small and mid-market organizations, your leadership often has a literal investment in the organization’s Us versus Them business model. Consequently, cross-functional collaboration becomes synonymous with Change and Risk. So, they hunker back down into “what got us to where we are today” mode, sticking to what still appears to be working.
As a result, enlightened sales, marketing, engineering and IT professionals, like you, attempt to cobble together a cross-functional, collaborative internal network to stay competitive. You discover that not everyone in the organization views sharing information as mortal combat. Consequently, you now have company, treading water together, embracing change and assuming the risk which should be your leadership’s responsibility. Your collaborative colleagues are your life-savers.
Are you one of the folks treading water in an Us versus Them business model?
Is your leadership hesitant, even resistant, when it comes to Change mindset?
Clearly, you are innovators, not order-takers. And you yearn for a cultural environment, processes, tools and business model to create collaborative, extraordinary and enduring customer experiences.
What are your next steps? Is it time to stop treading water, alone? How about learning how to develop and execute a strategy for identifying collaborative, life-saving colleagues?
Take the next steps towards professional innovation and cross-functional collaboration. What are you waiting for?
- Read these related posts on professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention.
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Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ serves organizations as a corporate catalyst and innovative speaker, strategist, coach and storyteller. Hire her to speak at your next event. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention, especially in challenging Industrial Internet of Things environments. Babette’s playbook of IIoT team collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
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