Breaking the Walls around You

In an organization, when people operate as teams, they are unconsciously building a wall around their team, an impregnable wall. Every attempt at collaboration by a person not belonging to that team is seen as a threat from that person whose agenda is suspected either as reconnaissance or as an ambitious foray – “Guilty until proven innocent”.

This attitude and fierce team loyalty can be detrimental to the organization, festering hostility and acting as barriers in creating a really transparent, energetic and positive company. The vision of any company should be to come together to achieve more than what we will individually – the more the merrier. Often, in real world, when the size of the organization increases, the ‘achieving more’ per person becomes less and less until it fades away completely and some teams pull the weight of other non-performing teams. This creates further disharmony and the quality of output declines. Market share goes south, profitability gets hit, customers see your company as just another company and the worst part, the part that happened to giants like Nokia, your company or brand fades out of the consideration set of your target group of customers.

To enjoy the benefits of “being young at heart always,” a company should encourage people to open up and talk about what they are doing and what more they want to do, in the form of periodic informal gatherings moderated by someone from the senior management. The only rule is that the tone should be positive. Even problems should be conveyed as challenges. And the cardinal rule is: no comparisons. Let’s talk about how we will do things better than comparing ourselves with our colleagues or comparing our company with a competitor. Delighting a customer will only happen when a company’s employees feel good about themselves and the place they are at.

There is a clear business case not to sacrifice harmony in the altar of unbridled ambition. Designations, promotions, recognition and rewards will only fill the void left by the absence of “excitement in coming to work every day.”