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 NEWSFlying off over office politics By Libby Mulitz November 3, 2000 From paper planes to Silly Putty, companies look for ways to ease interdepartmental tensions
Brent Vance, Tivoli Systems' director of global employee communications, wanted it that way. "The less you know going in, the more knowledge you take out," Vance says.  Keeping employees in the dark isn't always the best plan of action. But in this case Vance wanted Tivoli managers to participate in an interdepartmental team-building exercise without preconceived notions and negative attitudes. Vance, his direct reports, and managers of various teams "reorganized" to run Paper Planes Inc., a business simulation created by Discovery Learning, a developer of leadership and organizational development products, in Greensboro, N.C. Forget the old office politics. By removing work titles and combining several departments into new teams, the simulation exposes interdepartmental communication barriers. Technologically driven pressures can bring a swift end to companies with weak teams, says Chris Musselwhite, chief designer of Paper Planes Inc. and CEO of Discovery Learning. Surviving rapid growth and producing strong teams were major factors for Vance in deciding to participate in the exercise. "We had enough growing pains to worry about. I didn't want office politics to become one of them," Vance says. Rapid growth means that employees and managers of different departments often haven't time or opportunity to bond. For Vance, the exercise helped break the ice among employees from six Tivoli offices around the world. The exercise began with the arbitrary assignment of Tivoli-turned-Paper-Planes employees to one of 13 positions, such as wing cutter, notcher, and line manager. These "employees," who face conflicting departmental goals back in the real world, have 30 minutes to make the factory a success. They must manufacture and sell as many standard-specific planes as possible. Under these time constraints, everyone must be perfectly in tune or production nosedives. In minutes, the simulation gets to the root of office politics -- identifying hostilities and communication barriers. Skeptics may wonder how a day spent producing paper planes can build strong teams ready for the long haul. It works, Musselwhite says. "The program is designed to point to real business problems so that you can start tearing down those cross-functional barriers." Stumbling blocks to success generally arise when departments work independently on the same project and fail to communicate. As an employee of Paper Planes, "you realize real quickly that if you want to sell, you have to work together. That means it's really important to know what's going on all around you," Musselwhite says. Failure runs rampant in the exercise. "Out of more than 250 companies that have participated, the average number of planes made [that meet specifications] is zero ... well, 0.4 to be exact," Musselwhite says. Office politics are to blame for teams bombing during the exercise. "First time around, most people think like they do at work. They focus on their own solution, like they alone can make these planes." As participants try again something begins to happen -- teamwork. Think globally An "all for none" attitude won't fly at Paper Planes or in the workplace."Factory" employees discover this as they fail to meet their company goals in the first production cycle and often in the second and third. Tivoli CIO Jones bears witness to this truth. "[Tivoli participants] thought they could do it their way. As IT people, we're ready with a solution before we know what the problem is. In this case, the biggest problem [was] that you couldn't just focus on your part. No one was thinking about what anyone else was doing or how we all fit together." After the first-round failure, participants are debriefed by a Discovery Learning exercise leader. The facilitator poses a few structured questions designed to identify what worked and what didn't. The employees then discuss ways to team and improve quality, decrease time to market, and increase revenues during the second and third rounds. "By the third phase, the teams almost always sell more than the past two rounds combined. Their goals are no longer in conflict because they've realized the value not only of working together but also of learning together," Musselwhite says. "Once we saw how we fit in, we knew what to do," says Robin Williamson, former plane maker and manager of Tivoli Service Center in Austin, Texas. As a result, "we went from being centrally focused to globally focused [and] more integrated," she says. Move beyond titles Wing cutter, airfoil technician, test pilot -- these "factory" titles bust stereotypes that real-world titles bring to the office. The simulation offers participants their first glimpse at the success that's possible when the office pecking order is left behind. "A new dynamic develops when employees give up their work titles. Suddenly, you see each other in a different light -- as peers. Then it's that much easier to work together," says Musselwhite, Discovery Learning's CEO. Tivoli's Jones agrees. "It got people away from the day-to-day and helped them see the big picture. It taught me a real appreciation for different teams -- what they do, who they are." Don't take personality personally Sometimes titles aren't the problem,work styles are. Faye West is convinced of that. An IT professional with more than 30 years experience, West, president of the Canadian Information Processing Society and IS director at the Alberta Research Council, in Edmonton, Alberta, says that understanding each other is what solving interdepartmental conflicts is all about. "Generally speaking, IT people and marketing people work, think, and react very differently. I've seen people drive each other crazy because they won't accept that work style is part of the person's personality." West suggests taking a less serious but just as significant approach to the personality problem. Try giving everyone the Myers-Briggs personality test. Then compare results by having everyone wear their newfound personality code on their work badges, West says. Personality is intertwined with pride. "Everyone thinks they're doing it right and everyone else is wrong," Musselwhite says. An I'm-so-right/you're-wrong attitude produces bad blood between departments and can be reinforced by the corporate culture. "Implicit in most corporate systems is the perception that people are to blame," Musselwhite says. Often the focus is on finding someone to blame rather than on figuring out what went wrong. Blame then shifts from one person to the entire department, West says. "When you're not looking at the big picture, it's much easier to dismiss issues because 'you can never understand those IT people anyway,' or 'those product managers never know what they're talking about,' than taking a look at the problem itself and [accepting] that maybe you might have some part in it," West says. Paper Planes factory employees fail to meet goals and come to realize that putting personal or department interests ahead of interdepartment or corporate goals doesn't work, Vance says. "After the first phase people realized 'I can't fix this alone.' That triggered what I was hoping for, the need to confirm with each other, see how their individual pieces fit in the big picture." Build trust with Silly Putty Another simple childhood toy, Silly Putty, can help in the quest to integrate departments, according to Susan Loconto Penta and Michael Goldberger, co-founders of Midior Consulting, a management consulting firm, in Cambridge, Mass. "You wouldn't believe how much a little Silly Putty can diffuse the tension," Penta says. Tensions run high at the beginning of their two-hour team-building workshops which are often conducted for companies in transition or experiencing rapid growth. "Sometimes we're dealing with people who don't want to be in the same room together," Penta says. Play it's not -- even with the Silly Putty in hand. That's because serious business is to be done at Midior's coincidentally titled Discovery Workshops, such as re-establishing trust and communication between departments. With the pliable mixture at the ready, workshop participants gather around a table and answer detailed and often challenging questions. These queries, posed by exercise leaders, help identify communication issues and get colleagues talking about how to work better together. The discussions can be brutal. Penta tells workshop participants to be prepared for an in-depth discussion that requires complete honesty, openness to constructive criticism, and the breakdown of interdepartmental politics. As tensions run high, the participants use the Silly Putty as an outlet. "Thinking with your hands," as Penta and Goldberger call it, gives participants something very different to do that helps them let go of their work worries. "We find that it makes it easier to speak honestly, be open to suggestions, and even see your co-workers in a new light," Goldberger says. "Besides, with a lump of Silly Putty in your hands it's difficult to do any finger pointing, which is forbidden at the workshop." Communication difficulties often arise between people in the IT and sales departments. Such was the case for Midior client Funk Software, a communications software developer, in Cambridge, Mass. President Paul Funk and four of his sales and marketing people were worried about their marketing approach. During the Silly Putty workshop, the Funk group realized the problem boiled down to a difference in perspective. They came to an important conclusion. "We realized that our VARs [value-added resellers], in addition to being a distribution channel, were also a market segment for our software in their own right," Funk says. The value of work lies not just in the actual project results, but in the process as well, Penta says. This becomes very clear to workshop participants as they "work" on communication. Goldberger and Penta highlight the value of taking time to analyze every step of a project. They suggest creating a system that allows for making mistakes early on, so the consequences will be less dire for everyone. They also suggest approaching each project as an experiment, something that is based on learning what works and what doesn't. Find value in mistakes There are lessons to be learned in errors, managers say. But the real trick is building an environment that allows cross-departmental teams to learn and benefit from their errors. Once the focus is off the outcome of the interdepartmental project, mistakes become something valuable to watch for because they provide information critical to learning and succeeding. Creating an environment where people feel safe making mistakes helps everyone feel more at ease about the project and the players involved. But they won't feel comfortable making mistakes, not to mention telling others about them, if projects are being tightly controlled instead of facilitated, Penta and Goldberger warn. West stresses, "Set an example by being a flexible leader, one who is open to suggestions and willing to consider logical arguments for another way of doing things." Being unapproachable means others will be less likely to address a problem directly, which means they'll take issues elsewhere. Tensions build and the office politics begin. Build a common language To promote peaceful relations between departments, West suggests "all involved, including the manager have an equal understanding of the project." That means get or give a thorough explanation of the project from the beginning and be prepared to clarify issues along the way. Things go more smoothly when everyone knows the goal and their part in it. But how does a common understanding come about when administrative, sales, or marketing professionals aren't speaking the same language as the IT professionals? In order to ensure a global understanding of the process, managers must make sure discussions are in terms everyone from IT to marketing can understand, experts say. That's where developing a common language comes in, which is exactly what the people at Tivoli discovered they needed to do at Paper Planes Inc. "When we couldn't sell one plane the first round, we got to be real talkative real quick. We even developed our own jargon," Jones says. For people at Tivoli, Paper Planes Inc. was a reference point that encouraged a genesis of a new jargon that Williamson says has helped Tivoli people work well together since the great airplane incident. "Even today when things come up we refer to the exercise to help everyone get on the same page," Vance says. A consistent terminology is one of the best ways to ensure a cross-functional understanding and eliminate cross-departmental conflict. But in order to get everyone invested in the language, managers must make sure the terms are not drawn from one department alone. Designating one department's language as the common one is a surefire way to get the other departments on your bad side. "As a manager, if you want everyone to get along better you can't play favorites, which extends to how you treat entire departments," West says. A shared experience, such as Paper Planes Inc. or the Discovery Workshop, takes everyone out of the office and gives each person the opportunity to leave their daily work roles behind. Once in a place where title and position have no power, those troublesome political ties weaken too. So if you're serious about curbing office politics, it's time to get everyone on neutral ground and start using the more accessible language of shared experience. Libby Mulitz is a free-lance writer in San Francisco. Contact her at lmulitz@netscape.net.
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