I once had lunch with a friend of a friend who worked at a very large, well-known company in Silicon Valley. She worked in the marketing department, and had been charged to create policies and activities around employee volunteering, product donations to nonprofits and schools, financial grants to nonprofits and schools, and all other philanthropic activities the company untertook, or wanted to undertake. Since I had run such a program at a Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley back in the early 1990s, she wanted advice.

My advice was, more or less, this:

You’ve got this great resource already at your company, I’ve no doubt: it’s called the BNA Index. Your human resources department or your corporate library has it. It’s a series of notebooks that has samples of just about any policy or procedure you can think of. It’s frequently updated. I used its samples as models for the policies we developed at such-and-such company for all of our philanthropic activities. It’s awesome! 

(note: BNA stands for Bureau of National Affairs, the early name of what is now Bloomberg BNA).

She smiled in a wow-that-is-totally-not-helpful way, and said, firmly, “The marketing department is in charge of our philanthropy activities, NOT the HR department. HR would really like to be in charge of it. So I’m not going to them. That’s out of the question.”

I gently pointed out that she didn’t have to tell the HR department why she wanted to see the BNA Index – just that she wanted to look up a policy. And that I didn’t see how telling HR staff what she was looking up would somehow give them the power to take the activity away from her. That just made her – well, kind of hysterical. The rest of the lunch was super awkward and we haven’t spoken since.

I wish I could say departments not getting along is unusual, but it’s not: I find this story again and again from people that work for corporations, as well as people that work with government agencies or nonprofits. I’ve encountered it at many organizations where I’ve worked as well. The siege mentality that so many individual departments have is unhealthy to the organization and counter productive to everything that organization is trying to accomplish.

I’ve always wondered: are executive directors of these organiations aware that departments within their own agency are refusing to work with each other? Not one to mince words, I have brought up such circumstances in meetings: “That’s a great idea. Do you think the IT department will support us though, because based on such-and-such incident, I’m not sure they will help out with this.” Awkward silence follows… but what’s funny is that the department in question is then usually shamed into helping because their past non-support has been talked about so openly and officially.

I look at fellow employees as my customers. They have needs, and part of my job is to support those needs. In any position, I look at the requests of fellow staff members as priorities, and I treat them as I would like to be treated. It’s but one of my many wacky approaches to working.

I’ve also suggested at several organizations that staff performance reviews include rankings of all departments by all other departments:

• are the staff charged with evaluation providing your department the data it needs in a timely manner?
• is the IT department supporting you with the tools and resources you need to meet your department’s goals in support of the organization’s mission?
• on a scale of 1 – 10, with 10 being an absolutely perfect score, how would you rate the customer service of the human resources department?

I’ve been turned down every time…

Are you brave enough to explore how well employees, volunteers and consultants, grouped by department, get along with each other?