Turf Wars and Silos and Bears, Oh My!

Patrick squinted at the screen in front of him. It wasn’t the first time he had needed to turn ten pages of rather good advice into 200 pages of mediocre narrative, but this time was tougher. He had his protagonist all picked out and, of course, the long-suffering Greek Chorus Wife role was a stock item, but he needed the irrelevant dramatic event on which to turn the plot and remind his readers that just about everything is more important than management issues.

As with most of Patrick Lencioni’s books, Silos, Politics and Turf Wars is really a Harvard Business Review  article turned into a fable. Personally, I’d rather he just got to the point and not make me wade through a tedious storyline with too many characters and a predictable hero epic.

If you’re in a hurry, try jumping to page 175 for the theory. Here you find Lencioni’s insight about fixing silos, which is essentially to pull the company into a siege mentality, which forces previously competitive groups to suck it up and play nicely. Lencioni offers up a hospital, a hotel, a fitness equipment company, a technology corporation and a church to illustrate his points.

Poor, insecure, Jude Cousins, having been rudely treated by the technology company, becomes a consultant and runs from one to the next attempting to pull its grumpy executives into line and lead their people to cooperative happiness.

The situations Lencioni presents should be more delicious. Anyone who has spent anytime in any organization has plenty of tales of ego, sneakiness, power plays, betrayals, nastiness and karmic redemption which could illustrate much of what he’s trying to do here. Instead, his situations are really quite civil and the passion he attempts to put into his characters doesn’t ring true since the worst they’ve done to one another is steal the odd paperclip or upset a customer. That’s not fun. What we need here is backstabbing, screaming, swearing internal sabotage and a few redemptive firings. Maybe even a perp walk.  Now that’s fun.

I’m most disappointed in the church scenario, since volunteer groups, in my experience, can deliver some of the snarkiest silos and turf wars ever. For some reason Lencioni lets Father Ralph off the hook and sends his hero after the other four.

So if you’re too lazy to read even the last 25 pages, here is what he prescribes for companies mired in political bullshit:

First come up with a thematic goal or rallying cry which is short-term but not tactical. He recommends it have a singular focus, be qualitative in nature, have a best before date and be something the leadership team backs unanimously.

Under that, we need a set of defining objectives that are the components each team will contribute to the goal. These, too, should be qualitative, shared and time-bound, but they should not be confused with the regular stuff people have to deliver, which are the Standard Operating Objectives.

That’s pretty much the whole shebang and Lencioni does an excellent job of illustrating each with some cases at the end of the book. He could do a better job of his last section on getting started, which presupposes that executives everywhere know they have a problem, care about it and are willing to be the champions of an ugly leadership effort at the top of the house. In fact, in the narrative bit of the book, Jude seems to have an unrealistic amount of luck finding willing internal champions who are at a level senior enough to impose a discussion among executives. I’m fairly certain that doesn’t happen in real life and would be interested in his take on how a less senior manager would push something like this up the ladder.

So as with all Lencioni books, there is good advice wrapped in tepid stories which you read because the book cost $27.00 and that should entitle you to at least a couple of hours out of the thing.  By the way, this isn’t a new book, it was published in 2006. I hadn’t seen it before and I stole it off a colleague’s desk I’m going to put it back now. He’ll never notice. It’s part of my plan.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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