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Speaker: Welcome back to yet another episode of The Commercial Leader Podcast. My name is Bram Lagrou. Today, we're talking about the clash between departments. Just think about it for a moment. As you step away from your organization, whether it's a small, medium, or large enterprise, there's always different departments, and they very easily have issues with each other.
You got the admin department or finance or IT, clashing with, for example, sales that just wants to sign up somebody really quickly. Then there's a bit of a disconnect. It takes a little bit of time to set up the account, in, the finance department and start trading with the new clients that the sales team just got on board There's a clash between one that wants speed, decisiveness, [00:01:00] let's get going, and the other department, which is all about accuracy, checking, verifying the facts, doing checks, making sure that everything is balanced before they actually can start trading, because they wanna reduce risk.
Notice now, this is just one of very many, challenges that I see that organizations are experiencing. The more people they have, the more departments they have with specialists looking after specific tasks, the more this sort of disconnect occurs. Let's also take a few others. senior executive team, they are responsible for commercial results.
They need to make more money. They need to reduce risk. They need to find ways to grow the business through mergers, acquisitions, or organic growth, and all of these sorts of metrics then become, let's say, they hold their people below them, responsible for achieving [00:02:00] certain KPIs. Now, those KPIs are very commercially driven, and there's a certain timeframe by which we are expected to deliver those outcomes, and if we don't do 'em, there might be consequences.
Notice now, this is very much of a very strategic, very outcome-focused, very results-based thing where basically there's no hard feelings. It's a commercial thing. You either achieve it or you miss it, and obviously, there's consequences if we fail to achieve the outcomes. Now, whether we are a stock exchange-listed company where the investor's expecting us to return him a dividend, well, right, or it's a privately held family business or private company, it, it kinda doesn't matter.
Ultimately, the business is in the business for trading and doing well. And so how people feel, what sort of... How people get along in itself is not the main reason why the top executives and the board will [00:03:00] approve certain things over others. It's the outcomes that matter instead, outcomes that are very commercially driven Profit margin.
It might be, exponential growth, shareholder prices, stock prices, All these things, they are decisive because they fuel the next chapter of the business, and if the business isn't producing, if the business isn't really delivering or satisfying the expectations of the people at the top, then obviously there's no room for the people below.
And so this is where I sometimes see that the cohorts below fear their decision-making at the top, so they start becoming scared of their jobs. They might not necessarily voice their concerns. They might not necessarily, hold other people up for the behaviors that they're emitting that are intolerable.
And so there's again a clash not just between departments, but even at [00:04:00] different hierarchies. And why am I now saying all this? The clashes, whether it's between departments or seniority levels versus below the ranks, they're always going back to the same behavioral mechanism and dynamic. That is, if people don't fully understand, if they are not clear about why people expect this or why they are behaving this way, if they don't understand it in their head, it's very easy to fall back into what we call judgment When we gossip, when we talk behind each other's backs, when we start pointing fingers at things, it's because we fail to take ownership of something that we believe other people are responsible for.
Now, there's obviously a mindset perspective here, but I think, [00:05:00] if you just go back to fundamental behavior, people, like what makes them tick, which is my background as a psychologist, this is what I've learnt. It's that people will always point fingers at something that they cannot understand.
It's the reason why so often we have wars. It's the reason why people have fights between themselves. It's the reason why departments go in clash with each other, because they cannot understand where the others are coming from, and therefore there's an us and them. So that's basically broken down the whole dynamic into a few simple sentences.
People are predictable. I keep saying it. And issues with people are preventable. So what do we need really? What we really need is an operating system that grounds understanding of human behavior [00:06:00] and disseminates it across the whole organization where everybody understands, where everybody has the clarity why people behave their way, why they expect certain things over others, and why at times they might not necessarily be forthcoming with the things that we personally want, because our needs are not the same as theirs, in a nutshell.
And so it's very easy again to go back to sabotaging, undermining, saying, "Hey, they didn't treat me the right way, so I will do the same thing back," and have a tit for tat sort of thing. We all know that doesn't get us anywhere. Everything slows down. Everything comes to a halt. Everything starts becoming more costly, taking more time, more errors happen, and so on and so forth, in lack of the right operating system.
Now, I'm not talking about the next ERP system or your CRM [00:07:00] or another system in that sense, or, you know, a Windows or Linux or whatever, you know, driver on computers, or a Mac in my case. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about what fundamentally brings people together in their head so that they understand why people behave in certain ways differently to what we personally do.
But also, the most important thing is that we then also find compassion, empathy, and appreciation in our hearts, connecting the head and the heart, so to speak. And notice now what happens in organizations that do this really well, where this operating system is implemented across different hierarchies, senior leadership team, middle management, and everybody below, and between different departments, finance, sales logistics and operations, [00:08:00] manufacturing, admin, customer service, you name it.
If you have all these departments having the same operating system, it's the same as with your IT. If you all have the same systems, it's easy to make it all go in sync with each other. But if you start putting two different things together, they don't necessarily talk well to another.
There's cracks within the system. Things go missing. Things are misunderstood, and this is what we see day in, day out in organizations large and small, and everything in between. People are predictable. Difficulties with people are preventable. So imagine now that you're installing this operating system, which I call Communication Mastery, in an organization, and it's cascading down from the top down, and it also connects all of the different departments together.
Then [00:09:00] suddenly, the people that are very factual, analytical, task-based, and, they kinda take emotions out of the equations because it's about getting a job done rather than making people feel a certain way. Those people suddenly start seeing the bigger picture, and they start seeing that most of the people, for example, in, the Western world are not like that.
For every three task-based people out of 10, there's seven of them that are more feelings driven. And so they appreciate a little email that says, "Hey, how are you?" And then continue on with the job, as opposed to jumping right into it. The other thing is some people, they appreciate having a personal relationship developed before somebody asks them to do something for them.
So imagine now that you invest in that relationship first of all, and the people feel comfortable with you because you've earned their trust. Now you can ask them to come and help you out with certain things, and [00:10:00] provide you certain facts and documents, and fill out a questionnaire, and fill out a survey, and provide more legal things.
Now they'll start rallying for you because they're not feeling that you're against them anymore. And this is, again, just simple examples here of where, for example, people in IT, finance, legal and, programming, how these people sometimes get really challenged by people that are on the opposite side of the DISC.
And yes, I keep talking about DISC because I firmly believe after having seen hundreds and hundreds of assessments as a psychologist, we learn a lot of assessments in our university years. And then, of course, once you go into the work environment, you get a taste of this plethora of different assessments that are available out there.
I have seen nothing that predicts outcomes [00:11:00] and improves outcomes like DISC provided, this is now the catchphrase, provided that it's installed in the right way. Because not all DISCs are created equal, and not all application of the DISC is created equal. Case in point If you, for example, use DISC in an environment to, make teams grow together and, work across departments and different hierarchies, and try to install this operating system where people understand and appreciate where they're all coming from.
Too often, I've seen it applied as a good-to-know self-awareness sort of exercise, and that is not installing an operating system. That's basically trying the freemium model for a little while to then afterwards say, "Oh, that was interesting. What's next?" And then [00:12:00] move on to the next shiny object. This is scratching the surface, as I call it.
It's not going deep enough and embedding it in an organization. It's all fine and well if you start thinking that DISC is pigeonholing and all these objections that, fairly, people bring to me. At the same time, I also see that those same people, when they come to one of our Communication Mastery programs, just to get a glimpse of what it can do on the deeper level, that people then suddenly say, "Goodness, I've seen and done this many times over, and I've had all these assessments over my years as a general manager or a sales manager or a GM or whatever they might be.
I've seen so many of these things before, and now finally the way that you presenting it, A light bulb moment went off. I could suddenly see where we're missing the mark, where we're leaving money on the table, where we, have failed to really embed this at a deeper level so that all of our metrics improve."
And honestly, as a [00:13:00] commercial leader, you and I, we're all responsible for outcomes. So whether that it's more HR and people and culture related metrics, or it is more sales related metrics and business metrics like that, or it's more operational metrics where it's about, production rate, less downtime, more output, any of those sorts of things.
Like, or even less incidents at work, or you're more in the legal space where you need to have less claims and, less people on work claims and sick day leaves, And, and there's might be bullying and unfair dismissal claims and so on and so forth. These are all metrics that either cost money or make money for an organization.
And the more we are fine-tuning the people component through the operating system, this is what we've seen years and years in every single organization that gets it and wants to go deep enough All those metrics improve for the better. So whether you [00:14:00] wanna increase something or lower something, those metrics directly go back to what we all say is the change management effort.
We know that great CRM systems and ERP systems, don't run by themselves, and the data quality predicts the outcome of the reporting. the forecasting largely depends on how well people feed the machine. all the tech might be stacking up, but you need the adoption and people doing the right thing by the tech in order to make it work so that the change management efforts are paying a dividend, a commercial dividend.
And this is again where the people side sometimes gets missed. I see organizations spend so much money on the next ERP integration or other tech that they wanna embed or, a Salesforce project that is, a million dollars or more just to get it up and running. And then, yes, they'll teach people on how to use it, [00:15:00] and they show how to do this.
But once again, even in that delivery, they fail to get people on board and create the buy-in by understanding who are the users in this case. Too often, there's a focus on the product or the service rather than who is going to be using this system. Example, if I am, a very methodical, conscientious, step-by-step and procedural type person, I'll do what I need to do to learn how the system works, and I'll go step and step by doing it because this is how I operate naturally, easily.
If, however, I'm somebody who is, let's say, with preconceived ideas that, "Oh, I, I'm not very tech-savvy," first, obstruction. Secondly, [00:16:00] when they say, "Ah, you know what? It just takes too much time for me to get up to speed with it. I can do it quicker in my old way." Example, iPad versus written on paper. "Ah, you know what?
It's easier for me to scribble something down on a piece of paper versus, learning how to work with this iPad." I've seen this very often with salespeople. Salespeople, they're fast-paced people. If something goes too slowly for their liking, they'll find excuses and reasons why to procrastinate on it, and it's predictable.
So what the change management effort there, what the operating system needs to embed is for those people to understand how it's actually gonna speed them up, and you gotta help them to experience it that way.
So notice now I'm going out of my way to explain differences so that the user experience for a fast-paced, [00:17:00] in this case, salesperson, is going to be one that they appreciate so that they too are set up for success. 'Cause you can send them a lot of pre-work, it won't get done unless you've found a way to gamify it, to make it fun in the lead-up to it, and where there's gonna be some level of recognition and award at the end of the preparation.
Now I started thinking, "Who are my users?" And I cater for their different needs. Some might be very procedural, factual, analytical, task-focused. They like preparing and planning and doing things step by step. A lot of self-study programs online are catered for that audience.
But then if you have to have somebody who's more intuitive, big-picture focused, and fast-paced, that [00:18:00] are more creatives, then they gotta find their own way in the user experience to make it fun. And we don't always in organizations see that new software integrations, for example, or change management overall is done with the users in mind, and cater for the differences.
Some people will, need to discuss their concerns and voice them and work through it long before the project is taking off, and it's predictable who in your team across all departments will be like that. That's an integral emotional need that unless it's satisfied, will stall the change management adoption.
There's other people that will love running with it, but they get easily disinterested, potentially lured by something else instead. [00:19:00] They get bored, as I hear a lot of them also say, by things that take too long to get up to speed with. And so you'll start seeing that people are voicing their feedback.
Hopefully they do, because that's a good sign and at least they feel comfortable in opening up. But also some people will hold back unless you also know how to tease the information out of them. And so we, for example, know that certain people will voice their concerns in the public or one-on-one, whilst others feel more comfortable to do it in a completely anonymous survey online.
And there's a lot of, let's say, different ways on how people will deal with this. Now again, let's go back to the whole starting point of this conversation today for this podcast, which was the clash between departments. Departments and also different layers of management versus the people at the bottom will clash [00:20:00] because there's a disconnect between how they understand that the other people operate and how they judge it in their heart where they're coming from.
That disconnect between head and heart is one that plays out all the time in organizations if they don't get the operating system right, the operating system that brings people together, and in the absence thereof, makes them drift apart. If you now notice that certain people are not getting along, let alone departments are criticizing each other all the time and pointing fingers at one another, that is the feedback that you need to say, "I can keep trying to fight this thing, or I can listen to it and acknowledge that we have a broken operating system that now we should do something about."
If this is something that [00:21:00] resonates with you and that you'd like to explore how Communication Mastery can be that operating system for you, that isn't just DISC at the surface level where you just say, "Oh, you're this, and I'm that, That is obviously just a very superficial exercise.
What you need is the deep level, the deep level where people understand finally in their head and appreciate in their heart where other people are coming from and have made ways to improve the dynamics between each other, and even optimize the use of systems so that everybody, their needs are met, and everybody can work better together towards commercial outcomes.
Yes, indeed, 'cause that's ultimately what we're all there for. I recently listened to a podcast where, a very successful senior leader mentioned that it's not about being a family at work, [00:22:00] it's about being a sports team. Sports teams understand that they're in it to go all the way to winning.
They have to produce an outcome. It's not that they're just gonna sit and do a powwow and feel good together. That's nice, but it's not enough to have. Sometimes also you gotta be stretched out of your comfort zone and feel uncomfortable for a little while before it gets better, and that's exactly what sports teams do.
So let's forget about being a family at work. Let's go for being a sports team at work, and in the best of cases, not be a sports team where we are a team of champions, individuals, so to speak, put in the same team, but we're actually becoming a champion team where none of them really is a star player per se, but could be, but where they're all playing so well together that they have to win and do.
This is [00:23:00] Where differences in departments become actually the glue for more output and more productivity, and yes, more commercial outcomes. Any thoughts or questions, please let me know. And once again, if you ever would like to have a conversation and explore how Communication Mastery as an operating system could help your business or organization, please reach out.
My name is Bram Lagrou. Thank you again for joining in, and I look forward to seeing you again in the next episode.
