One challenge of working within a large organization is that there are lots of people with control of the brakes and few people protecting the champions who are trying to affect change. I realize there is a need for occasional braking, but too much pressure on the brakes could lead to a very slow moving organization and will eventually suffocate out the innovators.

How do you fix this? I think it is a trust issue. I think the book Five Dysfunctions of a Team agrees with this. Perhaps my next book should be The SPEED of Trust.

Right now, I’m applying principles of the Dysfunctions book to facilitate better trust between myself and colleagues, and between the members of my team. It forces me to be brutally honest about things, to speak up, and to allow myself to be vulnerable.

Does anyone have any experience in this arena?

Photo by gabork

Photo By: Jim Lange

Earlier this month, Ryan Money gave a keynote address talking about some challenges he sees in working within a large corporation vs a start-up. Having come from the start-up world, I could relate with some of the frustrations he has also experienced while moving into big corporations. One of the challenges he talked about was Ownership, which I believe is a huge factor in the success of an organization.

Within a large organization, it is easy to get caught up in our own silos with tunnel vision on the things that we work on. We work tirelessly to empty the queue of work that is given to us individually or as a team, but we rarely step back to think of how our work integrates with the rest of the organization.

It is easy to look at things that are wrong that are “not my job” and do nothing about it. Today, I almost passed up reporting a typo on a survey thinking “that’s not my job”, but I decided to take some responsibility for our products (all of them) and took a screenshot and forwarded it to the people who could fix it.

I manage a few people that do a great job of taking ownership of things. I’m grateful to work with those people.