Is Your Team Suffering from a Communication Breakdown?

How to identify communication breakdowns across your business teams and mend them

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate…” (Cool Hand Luke)

You might recall that quote from a famous movie: Cool Hand Luke. The quote represents what this post is all about.

It’s also partly inspired by the fact that I am traveling on the road for the next few weeks and starting to feel the strain of long-distant communications and the potential for communication breakdowns, large and small, everywhere. And that is not because we are particularly bad at communicating. It’s just a function of the increasingly complex web of interactions that we’re apart of, being both active investors in the software technology space, engaged consultants with our growing portfolio of companies, and active contributors of best practices and discussions on building great expansion stage companies across multiple websites and media.

Do the following four questions apply to you?

1. As part of a software company leadership, you find that the senior leadership team becomes more and more involved in running their part of the business at the expense of the close-knit collaboration that characterized the beginning of your organization
2. You find that you rely more and more on subordinates to interact with other departments, and have little time and opportunity to actually talk to your counterparts in other groups on specific issues.
3. Increasingly, you find that your departments (sales, marketing or product management, for example), speak a very specific language that is not common among other departments. Other departments also start to build their own internal languages that are unfamiliar to you.
4. You find that it takes progressively more time and effort, especially in meetings and presentations, to present your views as well as your subordinates’ views and ideas, and to win other teams’ approval and support.

I am in no way trying to describe an organization that is thoroughly “siloed” into combative departments, but rather a natural development of a startup as it grows over time. For most companies, silos naturally form around business lines such as sales, marketing, etc., but communication gaps can form between business units, or even sub units of the same groups, such as key account management and new sales teams.

As these units grow and develop their own internal hierarchy and specialized knowledge, it is going to be even harder to get them to work together. It will also be difficult to form cross-functional teams that can address multi-disciplinary and strategic issues such as selecting the right market segments and defining/developing whole product differentiation (which requires both actual product development services and support development).

That’s the bad news. The good news is that even fast growing expansion stage companies are still compact enough to address such communication gaps, which plague major corporations and are a chief cause of their inefficiencies.

As business leaders in the organization, you can contribute to the solutions both up and down the company.

How you can contribute to your organization

• Communicate your concerns about these gaps with other senior team members and outline an action plan to continuously address them.
• Actively encourage your team members and subordinates to collaborate with others from outside of your business/functional units.
• Actively build trust with your fellow senior managers and communicate the level of trust to all of your employees as an example for them to emulate
• Invest in collaboration tools and systems to help teams across functions work together. The first attempts at collaborating will be extremely painful, as the diverging jargon and the departmental mentality compel the team members to step into each other’s shoes and find the common ground. But without such effort, the company’s employees will never find its unified voice and be able to define a set of shared objectives that they can use as guideposts for their work together.
• Encourage rotations of junior employees in different projects and possibly different departments, and ensure that they have sufficient opportunity to succeed in those positions. You want to groom future leaders for your organization who are sufficiently familiar with the different parts and functions of the business.
• Create a culture of openness and accessibility in your organization: disavow any “us vs. them” types of arguments. Always seek to consider solutions and processes in relation to other teams’ goals and capabilities.
• Reward handsomely those who overcome communication gaps or contribute to the “transparency culture” of the company
• Hold other senior leadership team members responsible for their support of collaboration efforts.

What are your strategies to overcome communications gaps?