There are some projects that you work on in life that change how you see things – completely.
I am in the midst of one of these now. The project was just a website. Done a hundred before, but this one was bigger in scope and in importance to the company’s future success.
For this project to be successful, a lot of people had to come together on issues where they held very different points of view. We knew it had to be fixed. But not by ramming a new website through the organization. No one would buy into or support such a one-sided approach.
– Each business unit and each sales team worked in a culture of relative independence.
– The business models and messages that resulted, while consistent within business units, were not consistent as a whole.
– The orientation of the website was clearly US-centric, but the company was global.
Result: the website had become a complicated morass that defied business focus and customer usability.
– How do you overcome a culture of silos and create a website that could grow business for the whole company?
– How do you use such a project to spawn a more cohesive company-wide brand positioning?
– How do you overcome personal opinions that are in conflict with one another?
I often think back on some of my college classes where the professor put us on team projects. I always felt it was unfair because the sandbaggers got the same grade as the pushers. But learning to collaborate was one of the most critical skills that came out of those four years. I just didn’t know it at the time. Collaboration on this big, global project was essential.
The first barrier we broke down was our US-centricity.
We packed bags and took the entire US development team to Brussels to meet with our marketing counterparts in our European headquarters. We met for three days. It took us awhile to hear what they were really saying. In part, because we were still clinging to “the truth as we knew it” and were not hearing the facts as they saw them. Again, those listening skills from back in college became important. But along the way in life, we seem to listen less and talk more. This time we listened, and it changed how we thought about this project in deep fundamental ways.
Then we pursued common focus across silos.
The conversations in Brussels and back home in Cincinnati set us in a new direction, especially in evolving what would stand as a new global value message that could help all our business units and all our geographic regions.
The most important thing we did in all this was – to listen.
Amazingly simple thing to say you will do, but oh so hard to execute. To listen means you have to put your own ego aside. It means you have to go into a service-mentality. It does not mean rolling over to everything you hear, but instead requires you to hear what people need, to diagnose what you hear, to resolve conflict, to find a winning strategy and eventually to hold firmly to a common vision. Otherwise, listening can create the camel when you wanted to create the race horse. But it begins with listening.
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