Today's topic is all about getting along with other people.  I know that sounds potentially generic or vague, but it is a vital skill when you work for any company, large or small.  Personally, I'm inspired by the time I spent at a really big company when there were infrastructure changes. There were many reorganizations of groups, many layoffs, many changeovers of responsibilities.

Personally, I had about four different bosses in four years.  So every 10 months or so, I found myself in the position of having to navigate through a situation where everything had changed. I had a new boss that I had to educate about what my team did; I had new HR personnel that I had to educate about where we were in different promotion cycles; and I had new colleagues that I had to make friends with and also educate and sort of show the value of what my team did so that we could get started off on a good foot.  

To boot, I also had to get my budget re-approved, and there's major implications for that budget not being approved, such as people losing their jobs. So these were pretty tense stakes, pretty HIGH stakes, and I had to get really good at relationship management and communication skills. 

I know that given the landscape, there's a lot of you out there that had to deal with the same things.  So when I was thinking about what tool or skill helped me the most, I actually suddenly remembered something really important that I want to share with you.  What I'm about to say is the key to resolving friction, ensuring good cross collaboration, and getting along with other individuals or teams. 

It boils down to something that sounds really simple, but is actually really hard to do.  You need to make the other person, the other team, or for lack of a better word, your adversary, see you as an extension of themselves and therefore not a threat to them.  How do you do this? Well, you make your adversary see you as a friend by actually being a friend. 

And in return, you see your adversary as your friend by letting go of the need for absolute control. You need to figure out how to do that in order to survive. And if you run a team, in order for your team to survive.  And the reason I'm being so point blank about this is because I really saw the exact opposite in many situations where there were corporate shifts.

It just doesn't work to hold on with a death grip to what you think you deserve. It doesn't work. It makes you look weak, and hard to work with.

So you gotta come at it from a different angle.  To say it differently: don't become insular.  No one is an island, no matter how much sometimes we dearly love to avoid other human beings. You need other people and other people need you.  Don't hold on for dear life to your identity and your own team and the power that you feel is your own. 

You have to learn to broaden what your idea of being YOU means.  

At this point, I want to back up and list out some specific scenarios so that you know really what I'm talking about and you can recognize these scenarios as being something that either you've seen, you've heard about, happened to one of your friends, or maybe has happened to you.

Overall Context: Your Company Is Going Through Changes

Okay, so here's the overall context: Let's pretend you work for an office supply company.  We're going to call that company Blayples. And Blayples is going through a few changes. And the following situations occur as a result of those changes.  

SCENARIO ONE:
The first scenario is that some of the responsibilities from your team have been transferred to another.  Blayples has just been purchased by Office Shmeepo. There's a team in Office Shmeepo that makes all of their corporate branded packaging. Your team has historically made those things for Blayples.  It's decided that Office Shmeepo team should do them from now on.  The people on your team are a little bit worried about what this means for them. What do you do?  

SCENARIO TWO:

Second scenario,  your group has been transferred to another group.  At Blayples, your job is running the stapler team.  The company leadership decides, for whatever reason, that it makes more sense for your stapler team to be combined into the paperclip team.  The head of the paperclip team is now your boss. 

You're not wild about this, not just because you lost your autonomy, but because paperclips are sort of lo fi and you're more high tech. It makes no sense to you that you'd be grouped together with them. They don't use the same kind of hardware. They have a totally different process.  The paperclip folks aren't wild about it either.

Your team seems like a bunch of overprivileged upstarts to them, and they got here first. It's a tense situation, and there's a lot of resentment and various disagreements. What do you do?  

SCENARIO THREE:

The third scenario is that you need to collaborate on a project with a bunch of other teams.  The CMO has asked your stapler team to be partnered with other paper collation goods teams to create a special bundled package that includes staples, paperclips, sticky notes, binders, and rubber bands.

All of those are from separate teams, and all of those teams are used to retaining creative control. What do you do?  

All of these types of scenarios are things that I've personally dealt with or that I've seen other colleagues deal with. And human nature is human nature.  It's really common for, for people or for us to feel that if we allow other people to come in and run things or control things, then we'll lose all of our autonomy, we'll lose our power. 

And we have to just, like, fight for dear life to whatever, like, tiny bit of control we have.  But I really want to encourage you to take a step back if something like this occurs in your daily life. I can't think of anything worse for retaining your team, retaining your job, than to try to squeeze and hold on with a death grip to everything you have.

It actually has the opposite effect. It can make you lose what you have more quickly. And it makes people that you work with or deal with less likely to trust your recommendations because it seems obvious to everyone around you that everything you do is motivated by your desire to remain in control. 

So I have to say for the first point, the first scenario of having some of your responsibilities transferred, Being willing to share or sacrifice certain responsibilities in favor of having them done by somebody that might make more sense to you, or even if you don't think it's making sense, you have the ability to understand that from the organization's point of view, it makes more sense.

When people see you able to make that leap of doing what's best for the greater good or for the company, you show up as somebody who looks more senior than your counterparts and people become more willing to trust you with different kinds of decisions that maybe, maybe you wouldn't have had access to before.

It could also be great to give over some of your responsibilities because maybe it means that you can focus on something else.  Now, I have some thoughts around if you're running a team, how you structure your team so that it's easy to pivot and you don't get the rug pulled out from under you if directions change or responsibilities change, but I'm going to have to put that in a different episode.

For now, I just want to express that will go better if you don't try to fight [the changeover in responsibilities], unless it actually makes sense, unless what you're doing  is better for the company's bottom line, and you can demonstrate that with some kind of data.  

So for the situation of having your team being absorbed by another team,  listen, we're all human beings and it's going to feel a certain way to us when we get reorganized or absorbed.

And I'm not asking you to not be a human being. But I want you to imagine what is the greater good and how could this actually be to your advantage. Because sometimes it can be. Especially when the team that you're absorbed into historically has been either seen as duplicative of your team or like maybe there's been some tension. When you're put together or combined, suddenly everyone is educated to see you as part of them, and them as part of you. And I have to say that that squashes a lot of that tension right away. Because once you are part of somebody, or they're part of you, you're no longer going to be put in the situation of seeing them as a threat.

And that usually has the effect of making, like, everything kind of easier.  The other thing is that sometimes it's great to be more consolidated because there is strength in numbers. Let's say my paperclip boss [from Office Schmeepo] has a higher title than mine, that person's also going to have more organizational power to save us from potential layoffs when they, when they come around. Regardless of whatever personal reservations you have about like the way that you do things, if the organization that you've been combined into has more power than you used to have on your own, that can be a really, really good thing for you.

And you shouldn't overlook that and get lost trying to fight battles that no longer really matter.  

So, the third scenario of the cross collaborative project, I'm guessing that those of you who work at really large corporations deal with this all the time, whereas if you work at a small place, there's going to be less of a division of labor and perhaps it might seem silly to you that there would be all this disagreement.

In a company that's large enough for there to be large different creative teams that work on very different specific pieces, you do find yourself in a situation where one team is responsible for the print design of a campaign, another whole team is responsible for the digital media that is put out with the campaign, another whole team is responsible for the trailer that gets cut to go alongside the campaign. And all of those teams are autonomous teams, they're used to their own creative control. They don't want to be overshadowed by anyone in the process (and of course that includes you too). 

So for that specific example, one thing I found to be super helpful is a tool called a RACI diagram.

RACI is an acronym, it stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. I'm not going to get into what all of those things mean individually, just know that it's a sort of methodology that allows a group of people to  minutely identify the things that they feel they want to have direct impact on versus just be, you know, sort of like cc'd on the final draft.

And that has been a really, really helpful tool in those scenarios where you're, you're working with other groups and group leads who are used to having control over certain aspects. And it allows you to compromise without feeling like the thing that you are, that you most identify with being in charge of has been taken away from you. 

And so that can be a really great tool for making it possible for two groups that might have felt like they were completely separate things working together in a, in an easier way.  

I'm going to close this with just some practical advice with that type of, with that type of cross collaboration too. It also can help to have an experimental project, something that isn't going into production or that maybe is research for something that is going into production, something that isn't high stakes from a deliverable standpoint, that you can have the two teams work together on in a really close way.  Like, you have two people who are partnered from each team and they each contribute to it and then do a presentation at the end that shows all the possibilities. This kind of environment where the final deliverable isn't hanging on how well the collaboration works can be a really great way of allowing people to discover that they actually like each other - and they actually can be part of a team that works together without being stepped on without feeling like their ability to make decisions is being taken away.

With all that being said, I think my main point is, when things change, and they will, you have to recognize that there's a lot you don't have any control over.

So, you can't clutch your pearls and hem and haw and bemoan the fact that you should have been consulted before this action was taken. I know that we all do that anyways, to some degree, including me. We're all human. Just know that that's not gonna help you. And even though you might see, like, your favorite drama on TV, where the lead character marches in, guns blazing, and just gives everyone an earful, and, you know, sticks up for themselves and talks about how great they are - in real life, that type of reaction doesn't work because people basically want to work with people that they get along with.

And if you come, you come in there and be a stick in the mud and refuse to work with anyone else, that's usually going to be a really bad thing for you.  

Here's a more positive way of thinking about this too, because I don't, I also don't want to fear-monger. I don't want to be like, "if you don't do this [exact advice I'm giving you], you're going to get fired." etc etc.

What I'm trying to say is that we need to be responsible to create the world that we want to live in. And part of that is imagining a scenario where everyone can get along and actively working towards that and actively not assuming people are out to get you, that is part of creating a world that we all want to live in.

And so I think that this little, this little step of just contemplating, "How do I see this other person as me? How do they see me as them?" That's a way to nudge yourself towards that action.