Dear Founder,
Well, it appears that you must be having some success in your company. Your team has evolved from a group that was very cohesive and aligned every day, to one that’s big enough to have different agendas and focuses. So, congratulations on your successful growth! Now, let’s dive into what’s going on—and determine how to help fix it.
First, it’s important to realize that this friction you’re experiencing is a natural state. Unfortunately, we don’t automatically embrace and welcome people who are different from us. For example, engineers don’t always intrinsically think sales people are as important as they are. Also, everyone has their own work to do and when a new function or capability arises in the company, it generally brings new demands. Some people find these new demands threatening.
When you were first coding and building your product, you probably didn’t have many interruptions from the sales and marketing teams suggesting new features, or asking you to differentiate your product. Now things are different. Everyone is hired to do a job and is needed, but as a company gets larger, the jobs increasingly require help from others. Most of the time, you only start interfacing with another group when you require something from them. Unfortunately, it’s seldom the case that teams reach out to say, “I know you’re working on something huge, how can I help you?”
That can be a problem. Too often we’re unprepared for this next phase of business. But with a few changes in behavior, we can shift this scenario from something that causes stress, to one that inspires seamless integration and growth. Here are some suggestions on how to tackle cross-functional friction:
- Get peer alignment on goals.I’m a fan of ensuring that everyone at the executive level gets input on one another’s goals and on grading these goals later on. This also includes knowing what trumps what, and which goals matter most. When I first joined eBay, I had the head of development focused on shipping fast and furiously and I had the head of operations focused on availability. Needless to say, there was a lot of head-butting between the organizations. To resolve this, I had to intervene and decide what goal was most important. Eventually, I changed the goals of each team so that ops shared the delivery goals and product development shared the availability goals. When I added customer support to my team, we realized that we needed to add customer satisfaction to all the goals as well. Everything works much more smoothly—and pleasantly—when everyone is working towards the same goals.
- Engage in broader communication. Whatever you’ve been doing regarding communication is very likely not enough. Communication must be constant and it must reach everyone. Marissa Mayer at Yahoo does an “FYI” for all employees every Friday. Yahoo has had its struggles and challenges, but Marissa’s willingness to stand up and face tough questions every week has been a source of inspiration and calm for the company.
- Implement decision-making guidelines. What are the expectations for problem resolution? Who gets to make which decisions? I’m a fan of the RACI model (who is Responsible, who needs to Approve, who needs to be Consulted and who needs to be Informed), but there are a number of methods you can use. What’s most important is that you pick one and diligently stick to it.
- Find ways to surface issues. I ask everyone at WIN to submit things they need help on every week. In my 1:1s, I ask how things are going and why.
- Celebrate the wins and give validation across the whole company. When you see cross-functional behavior that is great, call it out and celebrate it. My customer support team at eBay gave out “silver star awards” to those people who went above and beyond to help them out. There were lots of people at eBay who had the printed award up in their cube.
As you continue to grow and succeed, you’ll need to find new and innovative ways to keep addressing cross-functional friction. Companies that know how to mitigate this (and realize that the enemy is not across the aisle, but outside the building), end up with far more capability and success—not to mention, the people at these companies have a lot more fun.
All the best,
Maynard