It’s been said that the United States and England are “two countries divided by a common language.” The same words one might use to give a compliment in one country may be understood as an insult in the other.
Similar divisions can happen between divisions within an organization. And as a leader, it becomes your responsibility to help reconcile those differences.
I recall several occasions in my career where tensions rose between the Software Development teams and the Hardware Operations teams when computer systems ran out of resources and performance negatively impacted our customers.
For a bit of background, our datacenters held massive computers that were subdivided into virtual computers for our software products to run on. Both teams would look at measurements for the software’s consumption of things like compute power, memory, storage, and data throughput.
The two teams used the same words to describe what they were measuring, but they reached vastly different conclusions. The software team believed their systems were using hardly anything while the hardware team believed those same systems were being excessive.
As a leader, it was my job to bridge the gap between those two perspectives. And you’ll face similar situations in your own organization.
In our case, the difference was not over what resources each team thought was reasonable for the system to use. The problem was that they were actually measuring two different things, but calling them by the same name.
The hardware team reported what the massive host server claimed the smaller system was using, while the software team reported what the virtual computer’s operating system claimed it was using.
Both teams were right. And they were both using the measurement that was most meaningful and most useful for their context. And only when we realized that the different perspectives reported very different numbers for the same concept were we able to uncover and resolve the root of the issue.
The same kind of disconnect can happen with jargon, relationships, incentives, and so many aspects of corporate culture. If you’d like help bridging a culture gap so you can be the manager your team needs, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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