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The head of a large financial services division recently asked me how to encourage his people to take more initiative. He explained that his organization was highly functionalized with separate units for sales, trading, investing, portfolio management, credit, risk, and operations — some of which reported to him and some to the corporate center. With this configuration, the only way to get things done — either internally or for clients — was for people from the different functions to take the initiative to work together. But since each unit was mostly concerned with its own priorities and didn’t necessarily see the bigger picture, much of the cross-functional collaboration just didn’t happen organically.
For example, a product manager in this executive’s division was getting complaints from customers about slow transaction processing. When she talked to the operations team she was told that the problem stemmed from an older system that couldn’t handle peak period volume, and wasn’t scheduled to be updated for another year. She and her customers were basically told to get used to the delays. A week later, when the continuing customer complaints escalated to the division head, he asked this product manager why she hadn’t insisted that the operations and systems people get together and find a solution. Her answer was that they didn’t report to her, so she didn’t have the authority to take that kind of initiative.
This is an all-too-common dynamic. As organizations become increasingly specialized, matrixed, and global, most senior managers — like this executive — recognize that they no longer have control over all of the resources they need to achieve their goals. Instead of getting things done through direct authority, they need to influence peers, share resources, create ad hoc teams, and reset priorities. The problem is that senior executives don’t have nearly enough time to orchestrate all of these shifts singlehandedly. Instead they need their managers to recognize the cross-functional linkages, seek out the people they need, and make things happen. It needs to be part of the culture.
So why don’t managers (many of whom complain about not being empowered) take more initiative to go beyond their narrow functional responsibilities? Why do they hesitate to “reach across the organizational aisle” — especially when it’s so critical to their customers and bosses?
The reality is that all of us live and work within a personal box that constrains what we think we can do. Obviously part of the box is determined by official limits set out in job descriptions, hierarchical arrangements, and formal work rules. But a large part of the box — perhaps even most of it — is self-created and self-imposed. We work within our comfort zones, doing what we think we should do and what we are used to doing. And most of the time we don’t question, challenge, or test those limits, which makes them self-perpetuating.
If managers want to succeed in today’s organizations, they are going to have to redefine their limits and go beyond their traditional comfort zones. Instead of being constrained by reporting lines, they need to do whatever it takes to get results (within the limits of respect and integrity) — and if that means chasing down people in other hierarchical structures, so be it. Of course, once they get through to these people, they will have to influence them to adjust priorities or come up with creative solutions — and it’s very possible that they will ruffle some feathers along the way.
If our product manager had redefined her limits, she would have felt authorized (and empowered) to engage operations’ and systems’ people in solving her customers’ problems. Given that they had other priorities and schedules, it might have led to some tough conversations and may or may not have generated a solution. But without taking the initiative, the only thing that would happen for certain is nothing.
Ron Ashkenas is a senior partner of Schaffer Consulting, a Stamford, Connecticut consulting firm and the author of the book Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done.
Editor’s Note: A version of this blog was cross-posted on HBR.org.
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