Employees in dysfunctional organizations spend a lot of extra time second-guessing others: marketing questions sales, research and development questions project management, sales questions supply chain… and the list can go on.
To illustrate how this leads to even greater problems, lets overuse an overused analogy, and compare this to sport; specifically a children’s soccer team.
If you have watched young kids play soccer (football) for the first time, you notice that all the kids will run as a large group surrounding the ball, expending all their energy trying to be the one that scores the goal. As kids develop teamwork, they learn that there are benefits to playing a position, and coming up with strategies to maximize the chances of the team scoring a goal, and not having a goal scored against them. They see that playing positions on the field allows some players to rest while others are running with the ball. They also learn the benefits of becoming specialized at certain roles (e.g. the goalie).
When things are going wrong in a business, it is just human nature for people to try and identify external sources of their problems, and often these observations are justified. The trouble is, time spent worrying about how someone else is doing their job is time not doing your own. This is very much like a group of kids all crowding the ball as it goes up the field, with their goalie in tow! To get energy focused in the right places, these workers have to be convinced to play their own positions.
The resistance: “How can I focus if I can’t trust that things I need are getting done?”
If leaders strive to keep their teams focused, they have to make sure they create an environment where it is encouraged that problems get identified, but also that there is closure. This doesn’t mean that these problems will always get fixed, but that it is clear when improvement is coming, and when the team should just move on.
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