Introduction: Think of a body that has become spastic. It jumps and twitches with no apparent purpose. It simply acts apart from the body’s conscious intentions. Less dramatic, and more common, are impulsive or ill-considered behaviors.
An outside observer can look at someone and scratch his or her head, unable to fathom why that person did what they did.
It’s as if each body part acts to its own agenda. The action in question has no apparent sense to it. Now let’s think about the sales rep who wants production to make what s/he can sell (or when in the customer’s presence promises anything, knowing that production will have big problems as a result, but, “Hey, that’s not my problem.”).
On the other hand, production people get mad because they want the rep to sell more of what they can make easily (“Hey, I thought they were supposed to be able to SELL, why don’t they sell what we make?”). Such situations are rife with opportunities for disconnected action, or even for different parts of the organization to act at cross-purposes to itself.
Is your organization acting against its own best purposes and, like a neurotic patient, wringing its hands and looking to place the blame somewhere else? How much of your executive meeting time is spent trying to sort through who’s to blame and where to assign fault? When decision-making is fragmented, the organization wastes too much energy acting inefficiently and irrelevantly.
What Does Too Many Disconnected Decision-Makers Or Disjointed Decision-Making Look Like? Companies in this situation lack the focus of a shared purpose. The sales team works to optimize its numbers, even if that means lowering margins or promising things (or time frames) that production can’t deliver.
Production wants to set its schedules to optimize operating efficiencies regardless of what it does to customer expectations or needs. It’s about the warehouse operating in isolation, stacking product where there’s room at the moment and then not being able to find it after a change of shift. Everybody does what works for them at the moment, and regardless of the affects on others.
What emerges from this orientation is a culture of blame. People pass the buck. Everyone tries to lobby the CEO in private; they sell their points of view where it can’t be challenged. In meetings, people don’t reveal their true intentions.
Discussions are never completed. People posture and promote their own agendas rather than promoting the agenda of the enterprise as a whole.
When problems arise it becomes a blame game. Issues become more complex and convoluted as people work to avoid blame rather than solve problems. The most aggressive speakers bully others and dominate the discussion. The best debaters win, regardless of the reality of the situation.
So What? Many companies operate on the premise that the best way to be successful is to optimize everyone’s individual results, and then tote the sum of the parts. What’s missed in this approach is the concept of synergy – the idea that the best outcome can be more than the sum of its individual parts.
When people are incented based on their personal results, they work to take care of themselves and are less inclined to take a hit for the team. When people are comfortable in their niche and uncomfortable learning new ways, they work hard to keep a system that lets them win, even if means that the enterprise suffers.
Diagnosing Problems Caused By Too Many Disconnected Decision-Makers Or Disjointed Decision-Making
Indicators:
- People are competitors rather than collaborators, giving an illusion of high performance, but creating problems that are difficult to diagnose and resolve.
- Weakness at handoffs across boundaries – from person to person, from department to department and between the organization and the world outside.
- An organization that lacks a clear, shared purpose against which to benchmark priorities and decisions.
- Duplicated efforts and wasted resources.
- Other issues that may be operating in your company.
Remedying Problems Caused By Too Many Disconnected Decision-Makers Or Disjointed Decision-Making – Action Steps
Steps to take:
- Provide incentives, recognition and rewards to people for collaborating, creating joint solutions and supporting the success of the enterprise as a whole.
- Ensure that people talk about the work across boundaries, hand off their work product to the next person or group down the line effectively, and make the key connections as strong as possible.
- Use a solution-oriented approach to problem solving that looks toward generating desired outcomes instead of assigning blame. The team needs to be managed as a coordinated team.