Winning the Border War (Part 2)

We rise and fall with our ability to collaborate cross functionally. Eighty-four percent of work is matrixed according to McKinsey. I wrote Part 1 of this in my article posted last week, which gave a roadmap for improving cross functional excellence at the individual level. In short, it offered a five-step process for building leadership influence and capability to scale impact through others without formal title or authority.

Here are two proven strategies for improving collaboration across functions:

1. Use tools as complex as the people they help.

As a CliftonStrengths coach and disciple, I've seen the power of understanding how to work with diversity of thought and behavior that the CliftonStrengths tool captures. The tool's complexity can turn people away, in preference for a simpler tool that's easier to understand.

Our brains crave the easy way and seek a compartmentalized, categorized, and labeled world.

But when every individual is biologically and empirically unique, the compartments, categories, and labels we create just aren't accurate or true. They hurt and impeded. With the 34 themes that CliftonStrengths provides, independent of polarities, every strengths profile is unique.

How beautiful is that? Really. Of the 30 million assessments administered to date, odds are there isn't a single report repeated. In fact, it's not until we get to assessment number 33,340,000 that the math tells us we'll get a repeated profile.

If we want to collaborate across functions in a more effective way, we need to resist the urge to assume we understand, resist the urge to generalize with labels, and use tools like CliftonStrengths that enable individualized insights and strategies that match the uniqueness of the people and functions we work with.

That's number one. A lot more I can say about the power of a shared language, common understanding, and scientifically validated improvements to employee engagement, productivity, and profitability that come from using CliftonStrengths. Message me if you want those data. Happy to share.

2. Have conversations as transparent as the priorities they create.

I run a priorities workshop with cross functional teams called Rowing As One. It is surprisingly simple. All we do is give each leader the stage for a period of time. They discuss what the priorities they are working on. The team discussed how we can help this leader succeed.

Three unexpected things happen:

1. Team members gain insight into the unique challenges and often underappreciated amount of effort each other is giving to move the organization forward. Appreciation, respect, and trust build.
2. Team members offer selfless help. When based on an understanding of what each team member does best, a strengths-based approach to sharing the workload creates faster, better outcomes. Then in a moment of vulnerability, the leader sharing their priorities is offered support. This is how connection happens. Skepticism of self-orientation is removed. That's the root cause to so much distrust on teams. Efficiency, effectiveness, and belonging build.
3. The team figures out where they need to be a team. Typically at this stage in the conversation the teams I work with have established a shared identity and a shared story of where they are, where they are going, and how they will get there. As leaders share their individual priorities, the team discovers overlap they rarely anticipate. The team discovers priorities they need to share and collaborate more directly on in order to get where they are going.

One expected outcome of this cross functional priorities conversation is as the team realizes how much everyone else is doing, they start to get real with each other about what they should do, not just what they could do.

Priority overload is directly addressed to the great relief and bolstering of mental health. The team narrows priorities to what's really most important, not just possible. In so doing they rescue the many bordering on burnout, spread so thin they are frustratingly unable give their full time, attention, and capacity to do their best work.

With so many could's driving their to-do list, they have been kept from completing the infamous "last mile" that would realize the return on all their investment of time, money, and energy. Instead of completing the work and being fulfilled, the work is left undone and people are left feeling empty and questioning their value.

Teams follow these three steps to sort through the could's to the should's.

1. We use ROI to prioritize, of course. That's the first pass. Which of the priorities we've heard from all the leaders get the biggest return for the smallest effort? Those get moved up to the top.
2. The second pass is filtering those high ROI priorities by their alignment to the journey the team is on, to the strategy, to their identity. Which of these priorities align with who we want to be famous for? Which will get us to our end destination faster, better? Is your vision for where you're going clear enough to filter out priorities? Is your purpose specific enough that you can say "No" to priorities? Is your strategy differentiated enough that you can remove even profitable activity in favor of activity that will bring differentiated profitability?
3. The third pass is refining our list of priorities based on our core capabilities. In cultural terms, this is where we take a hard look at what we are able to do, what behaviors we know we can count on consistently delivering. Do we have the capability to deliver excellence, every time on the priorities listed? If not, it may be difficult to see the potential of a pet priority disappear, but you are opening up capacity to put your bets on what you do best. Pick those priorities where your team and organization is perfectly positioned to win, where you are confident you are better than anyone else in the world at it, where you will be #1.

Beyond the cross functional value generated from this simple exercise is team members' work is more visible and more appreciated than ever in how it matters to the organization's mission and purpose. If an organization can go from 33% to 80% of employees seeing how the purpose of their company makes their job important, they will get a 29% increase in quality and a 51% reduction in absenteeism.

This Rowing As One priorities exercise may sound simple and has proven benefit to individuals, teams, and the organization. But the data tell us it's not happening, at least not effectively.

One reason could be that only 22% of employees strongly agree the leaders in their organization have a clear direction for the organization. We have to know where we're going before we can prioritize what will get us there. There is pre-work, like a clear identity and vision, trust building and knowing what we can count on each other for, and established values we are committed to that are necessary inputs to make these Rowing As One priority conversations effective.

Another reason such a simple conversation can go wrong is our inability to self regulate our inherent biases in the conversation. Even being aware of our loss aversion, our confirmation bias, our scarcity mindsets, the power of our language, and what our subconscious intentions are can help make this exercise more effective. Add the needed skills of having hard conversations and effective decision making to avoid getting stuck in the same conversational ruts, and you begin to see why such a simple conversation might not be as simple as it seems.

But when you do get it right, priorities actually become, well, priorities. Success follows.

In place of too many bosses, too many teams, and too many projects, teams get transparent, focused, cross functionally shared targets that can be advanced without burning out.

Following this process to transparent priorities allows cross functional teams to better collaborate to create differentiated value at the seams, and win the border wars that win the admiration and loyalty of employees, customers, investors, communities, and society at large.