Promote External and Internal Communication
You can expect demand for change to come from both inside and outside the organization. Too often, however, managers cut them- selves off from critical information sources over time because they’re so busy trying to build an organization that will be operationally efficient and self-sustaining. And when the pressures for profit and efficiency are greatest, these managers may even mistakenly act to eliminate or severely limit the very things that provide the new ideas they need to weather the storms of uncertainty—by cutting the budgets for travel and training, for example. Unless external communication is actively encouraged, people interact with outsid- ers less and less frequently, and new ideas are cut off.
This was precisely the conclusion of classic studies by MIT Sloan School of Management professors Ralph Katz and Tom Allen.20 They examined the relationship between how long people had been working together in a particular project area—what they called “group longevity”—and three areas of interpersonal oral communi- cation (intraproject, organizational, and professional communica- tion) for the project groups at various stages of their existence. Each team’s technical performance was also measured by department man- agers and laboratory directors.
The higher-performing groups had significantly more com- munication with people outside their labs, whether with organiza- tional units, such as marketing and manufacturing, or with outside
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been together the longest reported lower levels of communication in all three areas and “were significantly more isolated from exter- nal sources of new ideas and technological advances and from information within other organizational divisions, especially mar- keting and manufacturing.”21 The long-lived teams cut themselves off from the kind of information they needed the most to come up with new ideas, and thus reduced their performance. They’d been together so long, it appears, that they felt they didn’t need to talk to outsiders; they were content just to talk to each other. It’s easy to understand how some workgroups and organizations become myopic and unimaginative. The people themselves aren’t dull or slow witted; they’ve just become too familiar with their routines and too isolated from outside influences.
Sudeep Padiyar, software development manager at Cisco, ap- preciates the importance of having a free flow of ideas with his team, and makes sure that no one works in a silo. He believes that “problems and their solutions are both collective team efforts, and that reduces the pressure and burden from individuals.” He has removed organizational boundaries and encourages everyone on the team to take initiative. Sudeep has organized technical seminars and brainstorming sessions in which guest speakers as well as tech- nical leaders are invited to share experiences and ideas. These in- ternal and external communication mechanisms, he says, have substantially increased the sharing of ideas and have resulted in innovative solutions to technical challenges that the team had been dealing with previously. In addition, they use wikis for team mem- bers to pose their questions, thoughts, and solutions on an intranet site to which the engineering community has access. The stimulat- ing and thought-provoking discussions on these online message boards have helped people solve complex problems collectively.
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According to Sudeep, “The free flow of ideas and access to the best brains in the industry have created a channel that enables inno- vation to thrive and problems to have elegant solutions in quick time.”
Just as Sudeep did, you’ve got to tap into the rich field of ideas that exist outside your own borders. It is imperative that you listen to the world outside. For example, P&G has moved from an internal to an external focus when it comes to looking for innovations. These days more than one-third to one-half of their new products have elements that originated from outside the company or have key ele- ments that were discovered externally. This is quite a shift for a company that had previously developed almost all of its new prod- ucts internally or had acquired other companies in order to buy the new offerings. You never know just where a great idea will come from, which means that you have to both remain connected and increase your connections.22