Transforming Teams

Tips for Improving Collaboration and Building Trust

SPHR, SHRM-SCP, Claudia St. John, SPHR St. John

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498777506
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Human resources and management consultants are frequently asked to help their clients address fundamental breakdowns within their organizations. More often than not, these breakdowns occur between conflicting functional areas, such as sales and customer service, sales and operations, or creative and operations management. This book explains why the

Chapter 1

Eliza’s Bad Monday at HDS Tech

Eliza sat alone in her office with the door tightly shut—a rarity for her. She was a strong proponent of being an accessible and approachable president and CEO, but on this Monday morning she needed a little quiet time to think. She didn’t have a great weekend; instead of enjoying her time with her daughters and husband, she was preoccupied by work concerns. Normally, Eliza was able to separate home from work. When she was home with the kids, she always made an effort to be fully present for them. She set up a place on her desk in her home office where she would regularly deposit her smartphone and her laptop so that she wouldn’t be tempted to check and recheck e-mails or return phone calls during family time. She was good at setting up boundaries and systems in order to manage her time effectively. But today, time management wasn’t her problem. Nor, for that matter, were her work troubles on her phone or laptop. Her troubles were back at work, and she couldn’t stop thinking about them.

Her production team at work seemed suddenly overwhelmed, and this wasn’t even their busy period, as crunch time was still a couple of months away. They had experienced some turnover in staff that Eliza was concerned about, and she had detected from exit interviews some serious potential issues with morale and employee engagement. But worst of all, the fighting between her VP of client services and her VP of sales was moving beyond bickering: it was becoming toxic and personal.

Claire, her VP of client services, and Dave, her VP of sales, had never been close. They often worked at cross purposes, which Eliza knew was typical with outside sales and internal operational functions. In fact, she had seen it in all of her previous jobs. But recently, their disagreements seemed to have become more vicious, more scathing. Eliza was also observing that, for the first time, this animosity was spilling over into the lower levels of the sales and customer service functions. She had actually overheard two of the sales reps complain, “Just you wait until customer service gets a hold of that new big KarBan order. Guaranteed their response will be: ‘No, that can’t be done’ or ‘more work that we don’t have time for.’” And in a recent staff meeting that Eliza had held with her senior management team, Claire had described the salesforce as “out-of-control mavericks.”

For the first time in her four years as head of the company, Eliza dreaded going to work on Monday morning. And it didn’t take long for her to realize the dread was more than justified. Having been in the office for just three hours, she had already mediated two arguments, learned of another resignation, and discovered that a significant sales order was in jeopardy. Without a doubt, things were worse today than at any other point since she had joined the company.

But the biggest concern for Eliza was that she was having difficulty pinpointing why and how things had gone so awry.

This shouldn’t be happening, she thought. By all accounts, HDS Tech was a highly successful company. Its capital investments in technology, manufacturing, and R&D helped it gain substantial market share and increased sales, gross profit, and EBITDA.* The board of directors was more than happy. The company was meeting all of its numbers and was ahead of all of its competitors. And, for the first time in a couple of years, year-end bonuses promised to be substantial.

* EBITDA: Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

Eliza and her team had worked hard to bring the company to this point. Yet now that they were on the brink of revolutionary growth for the company, things were beginning to fall apart. Sure, she anticipated that there would be some production challenges in order to meet increasing demand, and indeed production was tight. But that’s not where her worries seemed to stem from. Rather, they were coming from the sales and customer service divisions and were beginning to have a dangerously debilitating impact on the company.

Frustrating Eliza even more was the fact that she had little time to worry about interpersonal bickering or having to referee petty battles among her senior management staff. Her plate was already full. She was busy preparing her testimony on behalf of the industry before the state telecommunications committee on the topic of cybersecurity, which was two weeks away. She was still knee-deep in negotiations with the bank to try to secure a bridge loan to cover some of the current product expansion, which needed to be done by the end of the month. She was working on a large Department of Defense proposal that the board of directors was pushing her to pursue. And she was a mom with two little kids. She was busy and didn’t have time for these current troubles.

* * *

Eliza’s bad day started at her regularly scheduled Monday morning staff meeting with her senior management team, usually comprised of Claire, Kirby, the VP of manufacturing, and Dave. This morning, Dave was running late, as usual.

Claire arrived with a long list of concerns: delivery dates were off by more than a week, customer complaints were up by 20 percent, and close time for open customer tickets had increased to more than four days. But the worst bit of news that she offered was that a major new client that HDS Tech had brought on board last quarter, Cynsis Technologies, had threatened to pull their account because of what they were saying was a “gross misrepresentation” of HDS Tech’s capabilities.

“What do they mean by that, Claire? What ‘gross misrepresentation’ are they talking about?” asked Eliza.

“They said that Dave told them our newest module package would integrate with their internal operating system, but it doesn’t. They loaded it on Thursday and it didn’t work. The customer called me on Friday telling me that Dave had sold them a bunch of garbage. This is embarrassing, Eliza. Dave sold them more than 300 custom modules to be installed, but we can’t even get the first demo module to work at their headquarters!”

“Kirby, what do you know about this?” asked Eliza, clearly alarmed.

“We’re almost done manufacturing the modules. It’s a big, custom run. We had to build it to their specifications. I have no idea why it doesn’t run, but I do know that if they pull it, we won’t be able to resell it because it’s a complete custom job,” said Kirby. “We’ll be up the creek for sure.”

Virtually all of the company’s modular products are custom run, which Eliza knew made them both expensive and a high risk for error.

Claire went on, adding to the sense of drama. “Eliza, that mistake will cost us more than $660,000 on this one product alone, not to mention what it will do to our reputation! Lord knows what Dave was thinking in selling this to Cynsis, but I don’t think he’s going to be happy with his sales numbers if we have to throw all of these modules in the garbage.”

Eliza was frustrated that Dave wasn’t in the meeting to address Claire’s concerns. He had sent a text saying he was dealing with a major client issue and wouldn’t be in the office until later. She wondered if what he was working on had anything to do with this Cynsis blowup.

“Claire, did you review the spec sheets when Dave submitted them? Did you and Kirby discuss them before they went into manufacturing?” Eliza asked.

“Yes, Dave showed them to me. But he didn’t actually go over them with me. He just handed them to me and I took them to Kirby, and he and I went over them together, right?” she said as she looked toward Kirby. He nodded in agreement.

“These modules were built exactly to the specs that Dave provided and are to order based on what Dave submitted,” Kirby added.

“Kirby, what do you know about the specs?” Eliza asked.

“Dave and I had a couple of calls with their system provider, so I just assumed that the module would work. I mean, nothing looked off to me,” he said.

“But the demo module built with those specs doesn’t work!” said Claire, raising her voice. “Eliza, I had to have a very difficult conversation with Cynsis’ lead technician. I had to admit to them that I had no idea what Dave was doing with those specs. I admitted to him that we had never had a screw-up this bad before and that we would make them whole, although I’m not sure how we’re going to do that.

“I just can’t believe that Dave would be so eager to sell something that he would make a mistake this big. I knew he was aggressive, but this is ridiculous. I think we’re in big trouble over this one.”

Eliza was in no mood for Claire’s drama. “Well, obviously we’ll know more when Dave gets in, won’t we? One last question: what did Dave say when you discussed this with him last week?”

“I haven’t spoken to him yet. He’s never around. I figured I’d talk with him about it here but . . .” Claire said with a roll of her eyes toward Dave’s empty chair.

“Claire, we can’t jump to conclusions until we know the story from Dave’s perspective. Don’t you think you should have tried to reach him when this all blew up?” Eliza pressed.

“Eliza, I was dealing with this all Friday afternoon! By the time I got off the phone with the client, Dave was gone. Probably off golfing.”

“Alright, alright,” said Eliza. “Look, as of now, if anyone from Cynsis calls about this before you’ve spoken to Dave, forward them to me. Otherwise, just keep your team focused on the other open client tickets.” She then dismissed them both and looked at the clock: it was only 10 a.m. This was going to be a long day.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, Eliza reconvened her meeting with Kirby, Claire, and a newly arrived Dave. She was doing her best to contain the situation. Before Dave was able to explain his side of the story, Claire jumped in: “While you were off golfing, Dave, I was stuck apologizing to the Cynsis lead technician for this colossal mistake. I tried to convince them you didn’t sell them a bill of goods, which wasn’t the easiest thing to do. They are hopping mad about this.”

“What do you mean you told them this was a mistake?” asked Dave in disbelief. “There’s no mistake! Why would you have said that without talking with me first?”

“How could I? You weren’t around on Friday afternoon when all the bad news came rolling in,” answered Claire defiantly.

“Oh, really? Have you ever heard of a cell phone Claire? I happen to carry one because I work around the clock, and just because I’m not sitting under your nose doesn’t mean that I’m not working,” shouted Dave.

“If you had just picked up the phone and called me,” he continued, “you would have reached me and I could have told you the modules don’t work because Cynsis is going through a system migration that will be completed in 45 days. Our module doesn’t work on the current system that their headquarters is on because that system is obsolete. The modules are designed to work with the new system that will soon be rolled out company-wide. I spent about two weeks working out the specs with Kirby and the new systems provider. That module will work in their pilot locations—Phoenix and Des Moines—but it won’t work in their headquarters . . . it was never designed to!”

He turned to Eliza and said, “Their CEO called me and tore me up this morning, saying that our own customer service team told them I sold them an expensive, worthless module. First, it took me 10 minutes to calm the guy down. And then, once he understood why it didn’t work, he started yelling at me, asking why our VP of customer service didn’t know the specs of the system we sold them.”

Dave turned to Claire and said, “So, you basically told them I screwed up before you could even call me to figure out what the real situation was. Now they think that one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing . . . which I guess is the truth! It took me nine months to land this account, and by throwing me under the bus it has taken you only 15 minutes to put a big dent in it. Way to go, Claire!” yelled Dave as he picked up his belongings and stormed out of the room.

Eliza, Claire, and Kirby sat back in their chairs in a stunned silence. Turning to Claire, Eliza said, “You need to call your tech contact back and tell them what happened. Tell them we’ll FedEx a demo module to Phoenix or Des Moines for them to test tomorrow. And, Claire, you need to fix this. You need to take responsibility for jumping to such a conclusion,” Eliza said firmly.

“Eliza, Dave never told us this was for a new system. I didn’t even know they were going through a system conversion,” said Claire. She turned to Kirby. “Did you know?”

“No. I mean, I did work with their new systems provider to match their specs, but I didn’t know whether that was for one location or all of them,” said Kirby. “I never knew the context or that it was part of a whole, corporate-wide system conversion.”

Claire continued. “Eliza, I’ll admit that I was wrong to jump to conclusions on this one, but on a day-to-day basis, it’s my team that’s on the front line with the clients once Dave has sold the account. He has no accountability once the product is sold and the specs are finalized and his commission rate is calculated. But we need to know everything that is going on with our clients. He should have told us about all this in advance and not waited for us to ask about it.”

Eliza nodded in agreement as Claire picked up her things and left the room with Kirby following her out. She could feel a stress headache coming on and reached for an Advil.

Chapter 2

Golden Nuggets

After answering a few e-mails and phone calls, Eliza went down the hall to Dave’s office to check on him. He was still fuming as she sat down across from him.

“I just got off the phone with their CEO again. They are definitely rattled, but I told them Claire just didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Do you want me to call him myself?” Eliza asked.

“No, I think I walked him back from the cliff. But what the hell, Eliza? If you had learned on Friday that the client thought the entire order was wrong, wouldn’t you have called me? Wouldn’t you have called someone? I mean, tell me if it’s just me, but knowing how important these guys are to our product line expansion, I’m just stunned that Claire didn’t at least shoot me an e-mail or something! She let it fester for the whole weekend! Seriously, sometimes I think Claire can only stare at the trees and is totally clueless that she’s standing in the middle of a big, fat, freaking forest!

“And Kirby should have known!” he thundered. “He was with me for all of the calls. Did he think that I was requiring these specifications for my own amusement?

“Honestly, Eliza, you have no idea how frust...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Eliza’s Bad Monday at HDS Tech
• 2 Golden Nuggets
• 3 Bedtime with Badger and Coyote
• 4 Quiet Kirby
• 5 The Stories We Tell
• 6 Dear Old School Days
• 7 The Communication Preferences of Homo sapiens
• 8 The Language of DISC
• 9 Sales vs. Customer Service
• 10 The Only One You Can Change Is You
• 11 Dave’s Critical Conversations
• 12 Feedback for Claire
• 13 Lunch with Karen
• 14 It’s All about Trust
• 15 Making Promises
• 16 Managing Promises
• 17 Unpacking Baggage and Restoring Trust
• 18 Actions vs. Intentions
• 19 Components of Collaboration
• 20 What Eliza Knows—Resources for Managers: Components of Collaboration
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Resources for Managers from Affinity HR Group, LLC
• Index
• About the Author