The last few years have required modern companies to make several big changes. Consider the overlapping challenges of dealing with a younger workforce, the pressure to improve earnings while lowering costs, new political, civic and environmental influences, and the arrival of new business technologies like big data and automation.
This is no time for C-suite representatives to become disconnected from each other, or from the rest of the organization they serve. Below are just some of the ways that closer collaboration can, and must, play a larger role in overall business success.
Cooperation Creates a Common Mission
Deloitte Insights coined the term “symphonic C-suite” to describe an approach to culture that helps companies improve cooperation and innovation across multiple departments.
The symphonic C-suite is one where experts at the higher leadership levels form a group to lead teams. Senior leaders may be used to working in silos with their respective departments. A symphonic approach sees these leaders and subject matter experts work closely as a team plot a rational, balanced and mutually beneficial course together.
In 2018, 85% of respondents to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends Survey said this type of C-suite integration and cooperation is vital for company success. In the same survey, however, 73% said senior leaders work far more often within their respective silos than they do with each other.
Cooperation Connects the Dots
The next question is how this level of cooperation between division leaders benefits the company as a whole and contributes to business success.
Consider the most common organizational paradigm in business: The chief executive officer leads, directs and delegates tasks to division representatives. Those reps return to their teams to carry out the instructions and move on to the next steps.
Encouraging your entire C-suite to pool their talents and points of view before returning to their own teams is becoming a vital step in the running of a successful company. The business community is buzzing about ways to bring data analytics into their processes for greater efficiency and profitability. Not keeping data in silos — and not keeping each team in the dark about what the others are doing — is rule No. 1 in a successful organizational data science roll out.
Likewise, you don’t want your organization’s talent and insights to remain in silos, either. Each team supports and depends upon the others. That means any successful goal, assignment or realignment of values has to begin with close collaboration between each subject matter expert. These people are resources who know the separate processes and moving pieces that come together in harmony. They’re better together than apart.
Cooperation Brings New Disciplines Into Decision-Making
You might be wondering where the partitioned C-suite come from in the first place. Why haven’t we always placed an emphasis on cooperation?
To put it one way, it was because business culture so far has supported the “divide and conquer” model. Each of the Cs in C-suite — chief financial officers, chief human resources officers, chief technology officers, etc. — had their own domains, and little overlap was required with the others.
However, the business community has been talking for years about a transition to what some call hyper-specialization. Part of the problem is that companies have vitally important departments today that weren’t common or didn’t even exist in the 1800s and 1900s.
Depending on the company, a chief technology officer is probably many more times as important to business success and compliance than they were a decade or two ago. Chief data officer is an almost brand-new, senior-level leadership position in the grand scheme of things. Chief compliance officers have additional responsibilities involving cybersecurity, data custody and more.
Companies large and small have grown more complex and internally intertwined. They're also much more specific in how individual roles and teams are broken out within the larger organization.
Cooperation Makes Companies More Future-Proof
What changed all this? It was a host of things — including globalization and increasing competition, rapid technological change, and more frequent and varied marketplace disruptions. When a company encounters a problem or wants to grow in a new direction, it’s not a matter of one pair of hands turning the tiller in a different direction.
It’s more important than ever that every department within a company contributes knowledge and effort to making major decisions about investments, new approaches or a change in direction.
