“If I work with two or three of their teams, it’s like working with two or three different companies.”
I’ve heard versions of that comment countless times over the last thirty years. It’s one of the clearest signs that an organisation has become fragmented. Internally, people may barely notice; but customers always do.
Sometimes, organisations have actively encouraged this silo thinking through the structures they have evolved. Often, though, they’re unaware that it exists. In just about every case, though, this internal separation becomes tangible externally, and the business suffers.
The good news, though, is that if it can be turned around, the benefits of becoming “one company” again are enormous.
One of the most satisfying client projects I’ve been involved in had exactly this problem at its core. The leadership team hadn’t been aware of it, until we reported back on our research among their client base.
We were able to show them how global contracts were under threat (or in one extreme case, lost) because of the inconsistency of their clients’ experience. Although we had been engaged on a brand strategy project, we recommended that there was no point developing that until they could act and present themselves as truly one company.
The nature of our engagement changed fundamentally: the client asked us to help them create that ethos. Our starting point was to rip up the corporate strategy and Value Proposition work that had been written by one of the giant consulting firms. We worked with their 120 global office managers to understand and instil new values and behaviours.
And then, everything went quiet. For nine months, while the client ensured everything was properly embedded across their organisation, and that it felt ‘theirs’ as a programme.
After nine months, the client CEO invited me to their Head Office for a meeting the following week. I was met in Reception by another CEO. He led what had, until that morning, been one of our client’s main competitors. That morning, it was announced that our client had acquired this business – which, although much more an established brand, and critical to our client’s global ambition because of its own geographic base, committed immediately to adopting our client’s brand.
“When we saw your One Company work, we knew we had to be a part of it,” he told me.
It wasn’t our work, it was our client’s, but what was evident was that by recognising the harm this painfully visible killer was doing, our client leadership team purposefully created a ‘one company’ ethos that drove new operational standards and efficiencies. They aligned their performance, culture and reputation to such a level that they achieved a massive leap in commercial stature.
Once the organisation started acting as one company, employees were proud of their one company. customers experienced one company, and eventually another company wanted to become part of it.
That was probably one of the earliest moments when I began to understand the commercial value of organisational coherence.