Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Can't We All Just Get Along?

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...Can’t we all just get along? In business, as in just about every other facet of life, so much time is wasted fighting each other, with people tending and protecting their silos to the detriment of the entire organization.

Have you ever been part of an organization that had everything in sync, with all team members so aligned that all that mattered was the success of the organization? If you have, you realize how efficient such an organization is, don’t you?

Five-minute meetings in the hallway replace those tedious conference room meetings, where team members are always putting down other team members as if this were some kind of zero-sum game with only one winner. One team member tries to make another look so bad that he can't help but look good. Man, what a complete waste of time!

If every single member of your team is not ready to put the team ahead of himself, then you’ve got real trouble. Such an organizational atmosphere creates nothing if not serious barriers to the success of your organization. Or as my good friend Gray McQuarrie calls these barriers, DAMs. Hence the name of his new book, You have a DAM Problem: How to Identity the Bad Behaviors that are Sabotaging Your Company.

DAM thinking occurs when a person feels it is more important to push his or her own agenda than to contribute to the success of the company’s agenda. There are a number of reasons why a person has DAM thinking, from basic ego issues to control issues, as well as plain old insecurity. But whatever the reason, the results are always the same: Failure. Companies who succumb to their DAM problems will always fail.

As McQuarrie told me, “DAM thinking would be expending energy at work to show you are better than me. Some might call this politics and you can’t get rid of it at work. I would call it bad behavior and you should have a standard that this type of behavior, which for most of us is learned, by the way, is unacceptable. This behavior is just one of the five DAMs, the ego DAM, and this stops the flow of productivity. If you agree with this premise--that two people trying to 'one up' the other aren’t going to work productively together, or when one department sees another as the enemy--this has a huge negative impact on a company’s top and bottom line. And, yes, you are right: No matter what type of initiative you might have going on, like Lean or Six Sigma, you aren’t going to have a sustainable result that justifies the cost and expense or delivers a desirable ROI.”

And to make things even more interesting, or difficult, is the fact that we in this country don’t really like collaborative thinking. We admire the loners; the people who do it on their own, who somehow find a way to make a path through their organizations on the backs of those they have knocked down while crawling their way to the top.

McQuarrie said it well the other day: “The great problem is we are trained and rewarded with DAM thinking and its behaviors. We see collaborative efforts manifested by people working socially, FLOW thinking, as inefficient and weak. And the opposite is true. I believe (I have an ego, too, that needs to be fed) that nobody has written about this as directly as I have in my two books. The reason I wrote the second book is to be more direct; to show the reader they are a big part of the problem. In fact, we all are part of the problem, but it is pointless to feel guilty, or to blame ourselves or each other. Let’s grow, be better people, and make our companies a whole lot stronger!

"We have a motto in my company that says, 'Show me a messed up company and I will show you a messed up owner,' (except we use a much more X-rated word for 'messed up') and time and time again we see this as being true. I have worked in companies where the owner acts like she is listening to her people and then goes out and does exactly what she wants to do regardless of what her staff or trusted associates advised her to do.

"I was once a part of a company that was having literally its most successful year ever. The team was completely out of their silos and working closely together for the good of the company when the president brought in a candidate who had been highly recommended for our top engineering position. We all interviewed this guy and when we met at the end of the day, we all agreed that this guy was obnoxious as well as most likely incompetent and that we should not hire him. The president, citing some book he’d read that said that controversy at the executive level was a good thing, hired him anyway. For the rest of the life of that company, because it went down in flames in less than a year, we spent our time arguing with this guy, having long boring meetings trying to knock down the inane troublemaking statements he enjoyed making. Oh, it was controversial all right, right up to the time that the creditors put the lock on the door. This one individual completely destroyed the cooperative culture we had developed over the years, as well as the company itself."

Take a good, long look at your organization and ask yourself if it is running cooperatively and collaboratively. Ask yourself if you are encouraging your people to work together openly and positively. Ask yourself if it is easy to do the right thing in your company.

Ask yourself if you and your team are going in the right direction. If you are, keep on trucking. If not, find McQuarrie’s books and give them a read or, better yet, contact him and see what he can do for you.

It’s only common sense.