Are You One Organization

“We are one (NAME of company here)” has become a mantra of sorts for many complex organizations. Internal communications and branding are rife with the image of people and teams pulling together as one, working toward the one mission and vision of the organization. 

There is just one hitch. For many organizations, this image is inaccurate.  

In many cases, internal systems conspire against an organization’s “oneness.” Incentive and recognition programs reward results by department, function, or other discrete unit. As a result, a team in sales, for instance, has little direct stake in what happens at quality, as long as the sales team members hit the targets that deliver the reward. The tangible connections between functions—in this case, the fact that deficiencies in quality could potentially hurt sales—do not have the same resonance as the incentives, and therefore may not receive the same level of attention. 

The incentive structure is symptomatic of a larger issue: the internal competition that detracts from the “one organization” image. Units that are not meeting their goals or winning internal awards for performance often experience a sense of failure; this sense, in turn, may prevent them from reaching out to the winners to learn best practices. As a result, units miss out on critical knowledge transfer that would help them perform better. Conversely, if only one unit can win, what is there to encourage the winning unit to share knowledge and improve the processes of the “losers”? This only increases the winner’s odds of losing next time.  

This sense of evaluation—success or failure, good or bad—also pervades performance appraisals. Reviews are seen not as opportunities for movement or change, but as judgments of the goodness or badness of performance (or even the intrinsic value of the person or team in question). 

A lot rides on correcting these challenges to “one organization.” A sense of competition prevents critical knowledge transfer that could result in higher performance overall. It also diverts time and energy away from achieving the mission, vision, and strategies of the organization. What could help us here? 

The fundamental response is to remove the incentives to internal competition. Few measures are more effective in this area than the consistent inclusion of people across teams, departments, and functions. It is much more difficult to compete as one team against others when, every day, you collaborate and co-create with people on the other team.  

Formal structures can facilitate this kind of inclusion. In our firm, separate teams handle the client acquisition process from initial recruitment to contracts to first invoice. The process itself, of course, is more fluid than that, so we schedule a regular meeting across team boundaries to discuss current and prospective clients, where each is in the client pipeline, and who owns next steps. These meetings often feature baton conversations, in which we discuss how best to pass the baton (the client relationship) to the next team. This is intended to create a seamless experience from the client viewpoint and ensure that we are consistently identifying possible gaps in our handoff.  

All the formal inclusion structures in the world, however, will only succeed if people make a fundamental shift in their stance toward others—from judging to joining. In judging mode, we evaluate people before we even consider trusting them; we see them as competitors or even as adversaries. While judging has its place in an organizational setting, it often establishes a distance between us and others, puts limits or boundaries on the contributions of the person being judged, and in the process creates a climate primed for internal competition.  

In joining, by contrast, we begin with the assumption that we are working for the common good—that each of us has something to offer the other. People who join tend to listen to one another as allies, link to one another’s ideas, and find ways to help others succeed. Rather than divide people and teams into silos, joining focuses on partnership, collaboration, and co-creation. It is a we that not only crosses but eradicates boundaries.  

When our fundamental approach to one another is a joining mode, when the structures of our organizations encourage collaboration and co-creation rather than competition and win-lose, when our recognition and financial rewards and incentives are aligned with the new mindset, a lasting shift toward this we can begin to take place. Working for the common good and shared success becomes a habit. We really do begin to think and act as one organization. 

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