Ever hear talk at the office about how Sales and Operations can’t seem to get along? Marketing and Sales aren’t on the same page? What about the tension caused by the different rules that employees in the IT department play by? Want to fix it?
Want everyone to work well together and solve problems productively? It starts at the top!
The executive team sets the tone for the organization. If your executives act independently without concern for other areas of the company, so will your employees. As go the executives, so go the employees.
I was speaking with the Vice President at a large company one day when he lamented that he didn’t know why his Operations managers were struggling to build productive partnerships with their Sales counterparts. He was genuinely frustrated with the situation. When I countered with the observation that he had not built a productive partnership with the VP of Sales, he retorted with a comment about me “not pulling any punches.” What I learned that day is that executives do not always realize how closely their employees (all the way down the chain) are looking at their behavior. Executives do not always see that they are setting the tone and the culture.
If you are a senior leader in your company and you see behaviors that you don’t like from the members of your team, perhaps you should look at how you and your peer group are behaving. High functioning executive teams set the tone for their organizations.
At Dorsey Management Consulting, we help our clients learn new skills and expand their leadership capacity to better lead their organizations into the future. We help leadership teams learn how to work together more effectively and efficiently, enabling them to make sound and timely decisions in pursuit of achieving greater success. We partner with our clients to design and build succession plans and develop their future leaders. We coach executives to achieve higher self-awareness and be more effective leaders of people. We do this in service of learning, helping each of our clients become better versions of themselves and achieving organizational goals.