Building coalitions of the willing

It’s all about politics, really. Political parties are not monolithic: they are all coalitions of one kind or another. The same is true of management teams, especially in complex businesses. By complex, here I mean corporations that have grown through merger, acquisition, or by extending out from their home base to a number of other countries or sectors.

In each case, you can see the fault lines between old, well-established zones of influence for years after the merger, acquisition or new market entry has taken place. And where these fault lines exist, so does the need to build a “coalition of the willing” before you can carry out new initiatives (pretty much anything except everyday business as usual, in fact).

I have no doubt that you need to be entirely realistic about this if you want to achieve your goals. That’s why we think of internal coalition-building as an integral aspect of our approach to partnering. Honestly, it’s pretty nearly irrelevant whether the partners all have the same company name on their business cards or not.

They all have their own centres of influence, constituencies, followers and business agendas - and we need to understand how the balance of power works within a corporation before going too much further.

This is where problems often start. If you are trying to build a partnership between very different companies it is often easier to unite people around a clear goal because everyone involved knows from the start that the task will be difficult. It is to find common ground, build bridges and, little by little, establish mutual confidence.

People are naturally cautious in this position: they are not inclined to walk before they can run and they are happy to succeed in a limited way, establishing a foundation for the future. Yet when all the parties concerned come from the same company, the same sense of cautious realism is often quite absent.

In addition, even quite senior managers can be most unwilling to get their hands dirty in the little matter of internal politics, because they know it is a dangerous game to play. Careers can be damaged and powerful enemies made rapidly, even if you have the very best of intentions. Coalition-building within a single company can be more dangerous than establishing partnerships between different businesses.

Yet, as corporations become every more complex, this nettle has to be grasped. There may even, one day, come to be a new job description of ‘internal negotiator’ specifically to get sclerotic organisations moving and to improve the prospects of tricky, but potentially exciting, projects getting off the ground.

In the meantime, however, what can be done in order to deal with the world as we find it more effectively and, by doing so, give your company the chance to move more quickly and decisively than your competitors? Here are our practical tips on getting this tricky task successfully completed.

> part 2