Germane Insights

ON LEADING AND BE-ING HUMAN

Aligning Corporate Silos: Find the Itch – Share the Scratcher

"Wherever you draw organizational boundaries, you will have conflict." This pearl of wisdom seemed to be an underlying factor in the current case of Too-Much-Success-Syndrome

A client reported that she had come down with TMSS (Too Much Success Syndrome) and asked for help learning how to combat the symptoms or, better yet, rid herself and her organization of the disorder. There was, however, one caveat. She did not want to give up recent successes or compromise those in process for the future.

I thought learning to align corporate silos might be the answer.

 

The Situation Room

Shaharazad is the director of a large medical specialty group. She has succeeded in raising her organization’s patient and employee satisfaction scores. Note: Employees refers to support staff only and not providers aka Doctors.

How did she do this? She involved all employees in identifying problems and their solutions. She employed “lean” principles and methods. She set, tracked and communicated clear results against goals and celebrated her people’s success.

Symptoms of the syndrome appeared when for the first time in the history of the larger institution, satisfaction surveys indicated patients were more satisfied with the clinic at large than they were with their own doctors; and that non-physician employees were more satisfied than physicians. After seeing these results, doctors began to cooperate less and to express more dissatisfaction with changes Shaharazad’s organization was implementing. These changes resulted in faster phone response times, less time in the waiting room, more accurate records and billing, etc.

Conflict Across Silos

“Wherever you draw organizational boundaries, you will have conflict.” Bob Marshak, one of my professors at American University’s graduate program in Organizational Behavior, dropped that pearl of wisdom years before, and it seemed to be an underlying factor in the current case. It is a principle that is both simple and profound, much like the law of gravity “What goes up must come down.”

Boundaries typically mark different goals, expertise, priorities, and perspectives. In Sharazad’s case she was driving towards and rewarded for patient and employee satisfaction, while the Docs were concerned with physician satisfaction scores. Hmmm, Dilemma.

The Solution

As if often the case with conflicts across organizational boundaries, the solution relies on individuals. How could Shaharazad create mutually beneficial goals to bridge the divide? Might she humble herself by expressing the need for physicians to help maintain and increase the scores for the clinic and for themselves? In my mind patient satisfaction was the common goal and if it became the focus everything else and everyone else would benefit, regardless of boundaries.

The Plan

Before we met, Shaharazad planned to present the physicians with a list of all the things they were doing or not doing to cause problems with the support staff and patients. As the expression goes, that would have gone over like a led balloon.

We decided on an approach with more than a led balloon’s likelihood of success. She would align herself with their goal of improving physician satisfaction scores. How? If physicians get on board and become deliberate about increasing patient satisfaction, patients will take note and attribute the improvement to physicians. Physicians, in turn, would receive higher satisfaction scores from patients.

The Principles

To lead successful change and prevent an outbreak of TMSS

1. Involve people as much as is practical and possible to identify the problems and the solutions.

2. Create and align around mutual goals with organizations on the other side of the boundary line, commonly referred to as silos. Involve them in the change as well.

3. Maintain an attitude of humility and confidence when offering help across organizational boundaries.

4. Celebrate their successes as well as your own.

Operate according to the back scratch rule:

If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

Add this:

Where does it itch?

And this:

I have a back scratcher and would be more than happy to share it.

 

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Aligning Corporate Silos: Find the Itch - Share the Scratcher