When we interact with the organisations in the initial phase of our facilitation , it most often becomes evident that people in the organisation build their plans and strategies of business on the assumption that others in their firm are ready and willing to be team players, act collectively to create or achieve something in the future for the organisation.
The observation, however, is that most often the organisation operates in a fragmented way. The technical people are pulling the resources in one direction, the marketing guys demand better attention to their requirements, finance have seemingly lopsided approach to their allocations and HR brings their own issues unconnected to business. The very resources meant for growing the business are pulling it apart.
In spite of these experiences, organisations are in the habit of assuming that once a good strategy is evolved at the top, people in the organisation will readily act, participate and contribute in a focused way according to the new found strategy.
An orchestra that is ready to play the same song does not come into being naturally but have to be worked out. Similarly every organisation has to create a pre-condition of shared understanding and shared commitment as they build the strategy. This is what is building ‘social capital’. This capital is the most prominent for a business organisation in the modern scenario and is even more scarce and important than the financial capital.
It is quirky to identify and create collective feeling of what “we” (i.e., the firm) should do if there is no strong sense of “we” – a mutual commitment and sense of group loyalty and cohesiveness. Similarly, it can be meaningless if the members of the firm are not committed to go on a journey together into the future.
Most organisations are clueless on how to create such feeling of ‘we’ the collective intelligence or the social capital. One attempt by many organisations to build social bonding is to celebrate the birthdays / anniversaries of the employees or having cultural get together etc on occasions of public festivities such as Onam, Christmas, Diwali etc. Secondly, on encountering inter-departmental turmoil, interpersonal conflicts and other employee behavioral issues, mostly companies resort to training programs on team building, leadership, communication skills, interpersonal skills, etc to the employees. Even after several training programs the conditions in the organisations do not improve which leads to cutting training budgets, snipping certain employees (even though they are valuable to the business), restructuring the organisation, abandoning the attempts to improve with ‘we-have-to live – with it’ attitude etc.
Actually there may be nothing wrong with the employees or with strategy or with the intentions of the business owners. The fragmented functioning in the organisation is somehow subtly connected with the view of ‘big picture’, a shared understanding and the commitment of the people in the organisation. These three are essentials for an organisation to work effectively. Training is not the solution, neither impersonal communications aides such as bulletin boards, manuals, sign posts, websites or awareness building programs. Top management fiat also is not effective in this situation.
But it is possible to develop a social architecture suited for each business / organisation. The only way known now is to lubricate the wheels and gears of existing social system. The traditional meetings need to be converted into animated dialogues. A facilitator who has the knowledge and skill of handling the group dynamics may be engaged to bring together the diverse stakeholders and facilitate to bring out the shared understanding and commitment. Engaging a facilitator for organisational planning is quiet unconventional, but it is needed and there is no other way known how to tackle the organisational fragmentation.
contributed by Sasikanth Prabhu
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