How teams fail at cross-team collaborations
You may have seen great cross-functional teams with excellent experts. When working in such teams, it looks like a dream team. Trust, happiness, creativity, teamwork, leadership, and every other element that makes a successful team is there, but they still don’t move the needle. The output of their work is excellent, but they might not produce an impactful outcome for the company. Instead, the company struggles with constant cross-team confrontations and conflicts. Sales complain about product management, product management blames another engineering team, those engineers blame PM and the business stakeholders. Everyone claim they want to do something good for the business, but they are just not listening to each other.
A company is not a team of individuals, but it is a collection of different teams and departments working together to do a successful business. Sometimes it’s even more complicated as one company is a subsidiary of a giant parent corporation that owns many smaller companies. All of these sub-companies should work together to make a successful corporate. But unfortunately, more teams mean more conflicts and complexities. So how come some companies with hundreds of teams and many subsidiaries constantly succeed and even change the lives of their customers, but many companies with a handful of good teams struggle to confront each other every few weeks. I believe these companies fail at one of these three stages:
- Vision
- Strategy
- Execution
Vision
Vision is the picture that a company draws about its future state. That’s the company’s destination in the next five to ten years. The CEO and other executives of the company must ensure the company has a vision and everyone is actively trying to achieve the goals that make the vision a reality. When there is no clear vision, or the vision is not that important, every team defines its own vision and works on its own agenda. Don’t get me wrong. Having visions at the team level is not bad as long as there is a clear company vision and teams’ visions are aligned with the company vision. A well-defined vision should unite the teams and give them shared goals to work together.
Strategy
Vision is just a destination, but there are always many different ways to reach a destination. That’s another reason for cross-team conflicts. Each team can define different focus areas, define their own priorities, and sometimes work in a completely different direction that contradicts each other’s work. When a company has a vision but no strategy or a strategy that is not related to vision, it means the vision is just a nice motto for their website. It’s just a sweet dream that nobody believes should come true. That’s where the directors and heads of departments fail to sit together and set directions and draw plans. If the department heads plan together, then there would be way fewer problems in the teams working with each other. Instead, sometimes, they come up with a general strategy that may not even relate to the vision.
For example, a company made a vision to make online shopping easy and pleasant for everyone. Then one of the strategies they announced was to increase net sales by x percent by closing more deals with the sellers they lost in the past few years. Internet users are bothered by tracking and lack of respecting their privacy. In 2023 Google Chrome is going to sunset the 3rd party cookies. Product and Engineering teams decide to develop solutions that do NOT rely on 3rd party cookies to keep online shopping experiences easy and pleasant for everyone. They are looking for alternative product recommendation solutions that are not depending on tracking a user around the web but still suggest something that the user needs. Suddenly Sales team is pushing the Product and Engineering teams to create a heavily 3rd party cookie-dependent feature to make one of the giant lost sellers happy to bring them back. In this case, both teams confront each other. The sales team can claim they are following the strategy; however, it is entirely different from how Product and Engineering teams want to fulfill the company vision. This example shows the company failed at the head level to agree and align on the proper direction that not just increases the net sales but also increases it through sustainable solutions that benefit the company’s vision. They can’t make online shopping easy and pleasant for everyone (their vision) by not respecting users’ privacy or making unstable seller relationships via building features that are not working for more than a year.
Execution
Lousy execution is the common reason for cross-team failures. Execution is when mid-level managers like Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and Business Managers fail to unite the individual contributors to work together. Often the biggest misconception of these managers is that they forget people are making a system. Unfortunately, they fail to make a healthy people relationship because of biases, lack of transparency, poor communication, flawed processes, sacrificing teamwork for speed, etc. Here are some examples:
- A PM constantly says no to business stakeholders without listening or checking their evidence based on previous bad experiences (bias)
- A business or product management team is in a rush to deliver a new product with the help of an external tech team without involving the actual Product Design and Engineering teams. They finally inform those teams when they need their support to fix a problem. (sacrificing teamwork for speed | poor communication)
- Design and Engineering teams should deliver a feature without having enough context about why they are building it and how it benefits the strategy or company vision. (lack of transparency)
- The engineering team doesn’t want to implement the feedback of the design team because they consider the change as nice to have. (flawed processes | poor communication)
- An engineering or design team never measures the impact and success of what they have built because they don’t know what to measure or have no access to the BI tools. (flawed processes | poor communication | lack of transparency)
Team retrospective sessions are an excellent opportunity for the teams to identify why they could not collaborate with another group well and how to improve next time. 1on1 sessions are also good times to discuss biases and coach for better communication and relationships. Building trust, solving conflicts, and working together at the execution level can be addressed through making a culture which I explained in another Medium post: Making a culture of product and innovation
Having cross-team conflicts is absolutely normal. The problem arises when the teams decide to confront each other instead of solving a problem. No matter you are a C-level manager, a VP / Director, a team lead, or an individual contributor, you should investigate how your actions or inaction create unnecessary conflicts and try to avoid them.
