Breaking down the walls

In the past few weeks, I have spoken to several people within very well-known, highly successful and professional businesses. They have little in common except for that they all struggle with the need to connect processes and functions that are divided by the equivalent of a separation wall.

Good people in good companies, in other words, are in no doubt that the problem of integration (or rather the lack of it) remains a constant, serious and troublesome concern that holds their businesses back. In the past two months I’ve given some ideas about why these issues arise and why they remain so hard to change, despite the lip service paid by management and consultants the world over to the need for agility and collaboration.

Practical change
This month, let’s think about practical steps, available to us all, for achieving rapid improvement.

Step 1: the key functions
Where to start? I have no doubt about this: if you honestly want to bring down barriers in your business, then start with the areas in which better integration will make you more profitable. That means sales, marketing and delivery: the three pillars of your business (of any business, in fact). If these three all-important functions can be brought closer together, you will gain competitive advantage - and fast.

Step 2: understand the ownership landscape
It is obvious to everyone that sales, marketing and delivery should be at the very least closely connected. You can’t sell unless you know you can deliver, and you shouldn’t do either unless you have a strategic view of where you should be positioned in the market.

Yet in most companies, these functions belong to different people with different reporting lines and, frequently, with different agendas, too. You will go precisely nowhere with any programme of change unless you are absolutely clear about who owns what, who influences whom, what their own personal views and preferences are and what levers you can use to make an impact on their thinking. This takes time and careful research, but it is time well spent. Don’t start anything till you have mapped the landscape thoroughly.

Step 3: reasons for involvement
To establish effective integration across functional boundaries, we need to broker an agreement on end-to-end “co-ownership”. That is, we need to ensure that the heads of sales, marketing and delivery agree to act as joint leaders of one large process, rather than sole leaders of three smaller fiefdoms. This goes against the instincts of most business leaders: agreeing even to strictly limited co-ownership is a major behavioural change for them and you have to show them good reasons for doing it.

As I suggested two months ago, I think you need to think of these fellow executives as if they were external partners: it becomes much easier then to identify what they want, as individuals, and prove that joint success as co-owners of a straight through process will deliver this. For one of them it could be filling a gap in their resumé; for another it could mean unlocking a significant bonus; for yet another, it might be an essential stepping stone to a much bigger job elsewhere. I don’t want to sound like Machiavelli, here, but building co-ownership is about human psychology as much as plain, ordinary business. You need to learn these skills if you want to deliver the results.

> part 2