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Have you ever felt as though you’re playing a game of telephone when it comes to communicating with other teams within your company? Have you ever felt frustrated when vital information fails to make its way to the right team members in other departments ahead of crucial deadlines? Did it result in pricey and preventable errors that cost both time and money? You’re not alone.
Even the most influential and successful orthopedic companies are susceptible to experiencing burdensome communication issues within their own departments and cross-collaboratively with others. Our difficulty with effective communication and collaboration often stems from a lack of structures and guidelines, said Bryan Warren of the healthcare consulting firm Trailhead Strategic Solutions.
“Company goals need to be structured so that each department’s goals roll up, and align,” Warren said. “It’s not uncommon to find a disconnect between how departments view the company’s goals — and thus, they might have goals for themselves that conflict with other departments. Wherever possible, create structures that require — not encourage — cross-department collaboration to achieve common goals. Look for opportunities to reduce silos.”
Warren advised orthopedic industry leaders not to waste chances to collaborate and promote transparency and openness with other teams, even down to individual messages.
“Every meeting, email and text is an opportunity to support a culture of collaboration or to reinforce departmental silos,” he said. “Creating a culture of psychological safety needs to be a priority. People need to be encouraged to ask questions, to ask for help, and to actively support colleagues, especially those from other departments. Most teams don’t spend any time learning about the behaviors and skills that make for effective teams. Leaders and managers need to invest in this education, then model, and reinforce the concepts — on a daily basis.”
When asked what specific factors create cross-department communication challenges for companies, Warren pointed to a sort of tunnel vision that departments can experience when they become too focused on their work and not the needs of their company as a whole.
“Newer managers and leaders may subtly, or even more overtly, compliment and encourage their own team while maligning other departments,” he said. “The instinct is to build a strong sense of collaboration, team and faith among your own team by throwing the rest of the company, other departments, or senior leadership, under the bus. What the leaders or managers often don’t understand is that employees, to be engaged and to perform well, need to not only feel that their direct supervisor supports them but that the entire organization is moving in the right direction. This is important so that they have confidence in the future.
“While cognitive diversity is invaluable, if these people aren’t skilled at working across these lines of expertise, groups can struggle,” Warren said. “This means that special attention needs to be paid to making complex collaboration effective…or goals won’t be achieved. As organizations grow and get more complex, they often fail to acknowledge or address this challenge. It’s important to invest the time in ensuring that the organization structure forces cross-department collaboration, and the work it takes as leaders, to make that collaboration effective.”
What does this look like in a specific example?
Howard Levy, Vice President of Global Sourcing at Zimmer Biomet, points to the need for close cross-functional collaboration when it comes to new product launches. These scenarios require impeccable communication with internal and external partners.
“The tight collaboration, communications and candid, transparent feedback of the cross-functional teams and our supplier partners in new product introductions have proven to be a critical differentiator in our being able to launch and ramp-up new products successfully,” Levy said.
The new product introduction process involves cross-functional teamwork between sourcing, development engineering, supplier quality and supply chain. Their ability to work together is crucial to keeping a launch on time while simultaneously meeting quality, quantity and cost considerations.
“These cross-functional meetings include going on-site to our key suppliers as a team to ensure we maximize the success of the project to fully support our suppliers in handling our rigorous requirements, including any clarifications needed to ensure we have optimized design for manufacturing and assembly,” Levy said. “Plus, as needed, there are escalation meetings with leadership to ensure we have the right aligned cross-functional resources and support as we move from launch readiness to full production acceleration.”
As Warren and Levy point out, companies need to have systems in place so that leaders and managers can model specific cross-functional behavior. But what if your company is too siloed or your best practices break down, as they naturally will from time to time?
It’s important to remind yourself that curiosity is a virtue and silos breed chaos. At the end of the day, you’ll rarely possess all of the answers. You must understand how your colleagues’ work affects your decisions and vice versa. Curiosity and collaboration are foundational blocks for building solid cross-departmental communication, which leads to successful processes and product launches.
We’ve heard such sage advice time and again over the years.
Back in 2017, in talking about important principles leading supply chain professionals adopt, Jeoff Burris, Founder and Principal of Advanced Purchasing Dynamics, said, “Purchasing professionals who excel through their career are good about asking sales what it takes to satisfy a customer and learn the sales perspective. The same thing is true with engineering. Sit down with engineering and understand why tolerances on a print or a design are so tight. Then, when a supplier comments, ‘Jeez these tolerances are so tight,’ you can explain why they’re necessary and what they bring from a customer perspective. In the process of doing that, buyers become much smarter and more valuable to their employers.”
The same advice applies across the board, really. Back in 2019, John Kapitan, CEO of Kapstone Medical, answered a BONEZONE reader question noting that increased regulatory requirements were decreasing their design time. How could they avoid bottlenecks in development? Kapitan answered by saying collaborate earlier in the process and frequently during the process. It can be difficult to delegate responsibilities or ask for help, but no one can do everything alone.
“Sometimes it is difficult to relinquish some control,” Kapitan said. “But it’s a good thing to ask for help and trust other people to contribute to the process.”
