I just love Scrat, the saber-tooth squirrel from the Ice Age movies. He always creates some minor little crack that looks harmless, but as the crack propagates, it begins to create all kinds of havoc in his world with major consequences. Such ‘cracks’ can be destructive and debilitating in corporations.
Image Source: Lars Hammer, Creative Commons
I was working with a couple major functional divisions within one corporation, trying to do some team building. These functions needed to cooperate with each other in order for the company to be healthy and thrive, they just couldn’t seem to get along. After a few of the normal approaches to overcome differences didn’t seem to produce any progress, I began to dig deeper.
The story that began to emerge was that the people in the functions had no problem working with each other and, in fact, preferred it. The problem was that their top leaders wouldn’t allow or, more impact-fully, didn’t want the cooperation to happen.
When I sat down with the first of the two senior VP’s that were responsible for one of the functions and asked about the oppositional position he had with the other senior VP, his response was, “Oh, there’s no opposition between us. We worked that out long ago.” I thought great, an answer exists, we just need to get the message down to the functions. So I asked, “Tell me about the solution the two of you worked out.” His response? “We simply agreed to disagree!” Well, that was very gentlemanly (and lady like in this case) of him but very destructive.
The difference between them didn’t go away, but like Scrat’s minor crack, propagated deeply into the organization. As I would talk to members down in either organization, they knew that their ultimate bosses disagreed and many of them took it on as their job to make sure the other function failed in a belief that their particular boss would be vindicated or somehow pleased.
Senior leaders cannot agree to disagree. They must build consensus. (More about how to build consensus later.) They’re part of a leadership team. If members of a team agree to disagree, there is no team.
Have you experienced a peer who just didn’t agree with you but was also unwilling to even work on the issue, preferring to agree to disagree?
How has disagreement of leaders above you on the org. chart impacted how you work with your peers?
1 comment
[…] That one really hit home for me. I see this so often in the corporate world. When things are going even reasonably well there just doesn’t seem to be the will power to handle the tough issues. All too often leaders simply agree to disagree which drives deep wedges down through the organization (for more on that thought – see Consensus: The Split at the Top). […]