Employee bickering, departmental disconnects, the blame game, ugly competition.

Should an executive spend 25% of her time acting as a referee, mediator or frustrated parent?

Stella is the General Manager of the Atlanta branch of The Perfect Office, a national office equipment company. In November of 2005, Stella reached the end of her rope. She was leaving the office every night with clinched fists and shoulders set like granite. Most of her days were spent deconstructing and resolving internal disputes, while the real work sat untouched.  In a single day, she faced four “personnel issues”:

1. The dispatch manager called for the sales manager to be fired for incompetence – he always agreed to delivery dates that could not be met.
2. The customer service manager screamed at a CSR in front of the rest of the department – and the CSR is threatening to sue.
3. Sales Rep A accused the manager of favoritism because Sales Rep B was given the peak sales schedule – again.
4. Accounting refused to release a huge sales order because the paperwork wasn’t in order – but they didn’t tell Sales, who did the paperwork.

Stella’s usually productive team was paralyzed by conflict and unexpected obstacles. No two accounts of the issue at hand matched – every department was gunning for another group.

Stella decided to take a giant step back and see if she could get some clarity on the real problem.

She took an online team effectiveness survey, and the report was as stunning as the conflict outside her office door. The survey said that her team wasn’t focused on a common goal.

How could that be? They were all totally fixated on making their year-end numbers! In fact, their jobs depended on it.

With only seven weeks remaining in 2005, Stella decided the unprecedented disruption required an extreme correction. She orchestrated a business intervention.

Stella and her 13 team leaders completed an online behavior assessment, to remember their innate strengths and discover how others saw them.

Then they participated in a six-hour team communication workshop. Stella realized that she had inadvertently focused every individual on meeting their own goals – at the expense of other teams, even at the expense of their own customers. The threat of layoffs caused the team to see each other as the competition. They became deceptive, uncooperative, accusatory and defensive. As a group, they set a realistic team strategy, learned recognize other communication styles and created workable action plans.

The results were immediate and remarkable.

1. Tensions were reduced. The work environment changed immediately, as the leaders looked at themselves and shared their behavior reports.
2. Collaboration replaced competition. Stella made it clear that individual accomplishments were only recognized if they fulfilled the team’s goals.
3. Goal surpassed. By working together, the team exceeded their goal by 10%.
4. New process implemented. As 2006 began, they devised a new process that called for quarterly team meetings and a defined team strategy for success.

Now as 2006 comes to a close, Stella and her team are looking at each other smiling – they’ve had a banner year – in sales and in morale – and they have no worries over shipping orders in time or about layoffs in 2007.

Run the Numbers.