No App Can Fix a Broken Team

People First, Technology Second

No matter how amazing a technology or an app, it cannot fix a broken team. To get to the alignment we talked about in the previous article, “Don’t Be Romanced by Technology” — to really listen to concerns — we need the basics of a functioning and collaborative team. To me that means we need to have empathy, trust, and a willingness to make sacrifices to work toward a common goal.

In my first article, “How the Fourth Industrial Revolution Is Shaping Our World,” I introduced my motto: “It’s always about the people, and when we value each other and work together, we can accomplish amazing things.”

I’ve found this to be true time and time again in my work, but I had to learn it the hard way.

New tech alone cannot fix problems within departments or companies. Before implementing new tech within your company, you need to ensure teams and departments are working together toward a common goal to ensure the best outcome.

Communication and Collaboration Are Key

IT departments are in a unique position to see across entire companies. Early in my career at a retail company, I was part of a large systems implementation that was supposed to improve efficiencies, reduce communication time, and improve collaboration. This project crossed all department boundaries.

Before the project started, I knew something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put it into words.

As the project got underway, it quickly became clear that each department’s team was working in a silo instead of working toward a common goal. Each team was competitive and concerned only with their piece of the puzzle.

Project leads and department heads didn’t want to work together. Rather, they attended meetings and participated in the project only to protect their turf — and none of the meetings were productive.

Unsurprisingly, the first round of the project failed because each department was working in a silo and expecting the tech to fix their problems. But no technology in the world could have solved our problems.

Finding the Root Cause

We realized the problem was bigger than the tech but had to dig deeper to find the core issue. Although I wasn’t an executive at this company, I learned quite a bit in my role as technical and operations manager.

All the project team leads and department heads were complaining to the executives. They all had similar reservations about the scope of the project: “This won’t work” and “This is too much work for my team.” Although these are common change management challenges, they used a lot of “us” and “them” language in relation to other teams and their leaders. That should have been a huge red flag, but unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for us to stop and reboot.

When I look back on it now, I can see that there was a gap in the executive leadership team: They were all hearing similar complaints from their team members, so why weren’t they sharing this with each other? Why wasn’t it solved earlier?

I think it’s common to start a project and to think it’s moving along or that only your team is pushing back. Leadership missed the collaborative picture here. Of course it’s easy for me to see what caused problems in hindsight, but I didn’t see it at the time, and even if I had, I would have little power to effect change because I wasn’t in a position to do so.

Taking the Wide View

Phase 1 of the project failed. Afterward, the executive leaders compared notes and started to see or acknowledge that the project was failing not because of the tech but because of the lack of teamwork — the teams were working in silos and not considering the greater good.

Then they brought in outside consultants to uncover the challenges, starting with a painful but pivotal offsite for everyone on the project teams. After that, we dug deep to see where things broke down and formulated a strategic plan to build a more collaborative, less siloed culture.

The executive leaders worked to shift the culture and worked with outside consultants to help foster team togetherness and common goals, and, in some cases, brought on new team members.

We ended up in an environment in which we educated each other on what we do and our perspectives, and we actively listened to one another. There was trust between key stakeholders and their teams. We worked to see the company as a whole and ultimately to advocate for the greater good.

Years later when I learned about design thinking and empathy maps, I thought how helpful that would have been in changing our team dynamics.

How the Tough Lessons Helped Us Grow

This story has a happy ending. After our team dynamics and culture were improved, the company formed an IT steering committee with representatives from each department, including IT. This committee would see all the requests for projects and resources and work together to allocate resources and a budget. I still vividly remember when one department head said to another “Your project will save the company a lot of money; I will hold my request so we can get yours done.”

That conversation was unthinkable a year prior. We had matured as a company and learned how to truly work together. We ended up with several cross-functional technology implementations that helped the business — and they were far more successful than they would have been had we continued to work in silos. We had become the reverse of the myopic world where no technology could solve our issues, and we were leveraging our teamwork to align on overall goals and how we would work toward them (the why and the how).

This was such a powerful lesson for me, and it still guides my work today. Now I really listen when new technology is proposed to see whether it’s trying to fix a business problem or a broken team problem. We can’t wallpaper over a broken team with an app. But when the team is working well and we can align and understand the why and the how — when we have empathy and trust — we can be VERY successful.

Stay Tuned…

In my next article in this series, I’ll discuss how change agents and executive leadership can work together to successfully manage change.

This article was written in collaboration with Sophie Michals of (SM) Edits LLC. Follow her on LinkedIn and subscribe to her newsletter, The Writing Standards Weekly, for tips on delivering clear, concise writing with a consistent brand voice.