Your team members must be on the same page to optimize productivity, meet deadlines, and work toward the same goals. Unfortunately, it’s quite easy and common for conflicting objectives to arise within teams. One manager may have a pet project they want to carry out, so they instruct their subordinates to get cracking on it. Meanwhile, another department is working on a similar — or worse, diametrically opposed — project. In the best-case scenario, there will be duplicated effort; in the worst, there will be outright conflict.
As a business leader, it’s in your best interest to foster collaboration and align individual tasks with the company’s broader vision. Here’s what to know about the harms of working at cross purposes and how to align your team.
Why Teams Sometimes Work at Cross Purposes
There are many reasons teams might work at cross purposes. Sometimes, a disconnect develops between team members and managers because a manager doesn’t know how to clearly communicate expectations. A disconnect could also occur when a manager is too disorganized or overburdened to provide clear direction to individual team members. Without concise guidance about how to proceed, employees may feel the need to figure things out on their own. This could lead to multiple team members inadvertently pulling in different directions.
Another common reason teams work at cross purposes is that the organization lacks strategy alignment. Senior management has failed to clearly convey the organization’s overarching goals and the initiatives that are necessary to achieve them. As a result, middle managers and individual contributors don’t understand how their efforts should align with broader corporate objectives. That’s how those needless pet projects are born.
Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Is Important
Working at cross purposes can negatively impact team productivity. When employees duplicate work or unwittingly chase conflicting goals, it can lead to frustration, lack of initiative, and declining morale. Workers are more likely to feel stressed and anxious when expectations aren’t clear. This can eventually lead to burnout if it isn’t resolved quickly.
On the other hand, teams that receive clear instructions from management are more likely to become reliable, high-performance ones. They have the information necessary to deliver the desired outcomes time after time. They are also more likely to feel a strong camaraderie with each other and develop positive morale.
How to Help Your Team Collaborate Effectively
Now that you know the potential harms caused by conflicting goals within teams, it’s time to discuss prevention options. If you want your team to collaborate more effectively, there are many things you can do to achieve this aim. Here are some tips for helping your team to pull in the same direction.
Provide Strategic Alignment
If the absence of strategic alignment is what’s causing your team to work at cross purposes, then that’s where you need to focus first. This can best be accomplished from the top down. Senior management must convey the organization’s position in the marketplace and its vision for the future. Then, they must lay out the concrete business goals that will get the organization from here to there.
When middle managers and front-line employees know how their projects and individual tasks ladder up to organizational goals, it provides a sense of purpose. While that’s motivating in itself, this knowledge also enables everyone to identify efforts that contribute to the goals and those that don’t. By aligning their work with the organization’s overall objectives, team members can stay in sync and collaborate more effectively.
Use Digital Collaboration Tools
With the organization’s direction set, the next step is to find ways to facilitate collaboration and enforce alignment. Given that online collaboration tools can increase workplace productivity by as much as 30%, you clearly want tech on your side. A robust project management tool is a great place to start. These cloud-based solutions allow leaders to break higher-level initiatives into concrete projects, bringing strategic objectives down to the operational and tactical levels.
With such tools, projects can be broken down into discrete tasks and assigned to individual contributors. All project team members can see what deliverables they’re responsible for and by when. They also see who precedes and follows them in the workflow, so if questions or issues arise, they know whom to ask or notify. With strategically aligned tasks orchestrated in this way, team members are almost guaranteed to stay in sync. And the visibility these tools provide keeps managers apprised of project progress at every stage, enabling them to step in when required.
Incentivize Team Performance
There’s nothing wrong with recognizing and giving credit for outstanding individual efforts. In fact, employee recognition can help boost productivity and may reduce your turnover rate. Rewarding individual efforts is an important strategy for any good manager to embrace.
But if your primary goal is to help your team members collaborate, you should also recognize and reward team performance. You can incentivize team performance by throwing team parties, offering bonuses, or providing extra vacation time for milestones reached. Doing so will encourage your employees to work together toward established common goals. It will also discourage team members from working at cross purposes in an effort to elevate themselves above their colleagues.
Your team is only as strong as the individuals that comprise it. If you’ve noticed a tendency for team members to work at cross purposes, it’s important to take action. Establishing strategic alignment, using collaboration software, and incentivizing team performance are effective ways to prevent conflicting goals within your team.
