【中英双语】跨部门协作难如登天？你肯定没做到这4点
Cross-Silo Leadership
蒂齐亚纳·卡夏罗（Tiziana Casciaro）艾米·埃德蒙森（Amy C. Edmondson）江素金（Sujin Jang）| 文
Though most executives recognize the importance of breaking down silos to help people collaborate across boundaries, they struggle to make it happen. That’s understandable: It is devilishly difficult.
大多数高管都认可打破孤岛，帮助员工跨部门合作的重要性，但太难实现，这也情有可原，因为这件事的确难如登天。
Think about your own relationships at work—the people you report to and those who report to you, for starters. Now consider the people in other functions, units, or geographies whose work touches yours in some way. Which relationships get prioritized in your day-to-day job? We’ve posed that question to managers, engineers, salespeople, and consultants in companies around the world. The response we get is almost always the same: vertical relationships. But when we ask, “Which relationships are most important for creating value for customers?” the answers flip. Today the vast majority of innovation and business-development opportunities lie in the interfaces between functions, offices, or organizations. In short, the integrated solutions that most customers want—but companies wrestle with developing—require horizontal collaboration.
先从你的职场关系说起吧：想想你的上下级，然后考虑一下其他部门、分公司、异地和你工作有交集的人。日常工作中，谁是你的优先级？我们向全球多家公司的管理者、工程师、销售人员以及咨询顾问提出了这个问题，答案几乎不谋而合：垂直关系。但当我们问道，“哪些关系最能够为顾客创造价值？”答案恰恰相反。如今，企业多数创新和业务发展机会都来自不同部门、分支或机构间的交流联络。简言之，需要水平协作提供的整合解决方案。
The value of horizontal teamwork is widely recognized. Employees who can reach outside their silos to find colleagues with complementary expertise learn more, sell more, and gain skills faster. Harvard’s Heidi Gardner has found that firms with more cross-boundary collaboration achieve greater customer loyalty and higher margins.
大家都认可水平协作的价值。能在部门外找到和自己专业互补的同事，这样的人学得更多，业绩更好，掌握技能更快。哈佛大学的海蒂·加德纳（Heidi Gardner）发现，跨部门协作更多的机构，利润更高，顾客更忠诚。
The core challenges of operating effectively at interfaces are simple: learning about people on the other side and relating to them. But simple does not mean easy; human beings have always struggled to understand and relate to those who are different. Leaders need to help people develop the capacity to overcome these challenges on both individual and organizational levels. That means providing training in and support for four practices that enable effective interface work.
高效跨部门运营的核心挑战很简单：了解对方并共情。但简单并不代表容易，人类总是很难理解并共情和自己不同的人。领导者需要从个人和机构层面，帮助员工提高解决这些难题的能力。这意味着从四个方面入手，促进高效跨部门合作，为员工提供培训和支持。
Develop and Deploy Cultural Brokers
培养并部署文化中介
Fortunately, in most companies there are people who already excel at interface collaboration. They usually have experiences and relationships that span multiple sectors, functions, or domains and informally serve as links between them. We call these people cultural brokers. Cultural brokers promote cross-boundary work in one of two ways: by acting as a bridge or as an adhesive.
幸运的是，多数企业都会有一些在跨部门合作方面很出色的人。他们通常拥有不同领域、部门或辖区的工作经验或人脉，在非正式的情况下担任部门间的联络人，我们称其为文化中介。文化中介通过两种方式提高跨领域合作：作为桥梁或黏合剂。
A bridge offers himself as a go-between, allowing people in different functions or geographies to collaborate with minimal disruption to their day-to-day routine. Bridges are most effective when they have considerable knowledge of both sides and can figure out what each one needs.
桥梁是指，文化中介作为不同部门或地区的中间人，尽量让大家在协作时，保证日常工作流程不被打乱。当作为桥梁的中间人了解双方领域，懂得双方需要时，作用最大。
This is why the champagne and spirits distributor Moët Hennessy España hired two enologists, or wine experts, to help coordinate the work of its marketing and sales groups, which had a history of miscommunication and conflict. The enologists could relate to both groups equally: They could speak to marketers about the emotional content (the ephemeral “bouquet”) of brands, while also providing pragmatic salespeople with details on the distinctive features of products they needed to win over retailers. Understanding both worlds, the enologists were able to communicate the rationale for each group’s modus operandi to the other, allowing marketing and sales to work more synergistically even without directly interacting. This kind of cultural brokerage is efficient because it lets disparate parties work around differences without investing in learning the other side’s perspective or changing how they work. It’s especially valuable for one-off collaborations or when the company is under intense time pressure to deliver results.
鉴于此，香槟及酒类经销商酩悦轩尼诗（西班牙）聘请了两位酿酒师（葡萄酒专家）帮助营销和销售团队协调工作，这两个部门在过去因为沟通误会，产生冲突。酿酒师可以设身处地为两个部门着想：他们可以和营销人员沟通品牌的情感内容（转瞬即逝的“酒香”），也可以给实用主义的销售人员提供产品区别性的特征细节，帮助他们获得零售商的青睐。酿酒师理解这两个部门的工作，可以向对方解释另一个部门的做法和逻辑，让营销和销售部门在即使没有直接互动的情况下更好地协作。这种文化中间人的操作是高效的，因为通过这种方式，不同部门的人可以求同存异地进行合作，无需花时间学习对方的工作内容，也不需要改变各自的工作方式。在一次性合作或公司需要即刻交付结果的情况下，更能体现这种方式的价值。
Adhesives, in contrast, bring people together and help build mutual understanding and lasting relationships. Take one manager we spoke with at National Instruments, a global producer of automated test equipment. He frequently connects colleagues from different regions and functions. “I think of it as building up the relationships between them,” he told us. “If a colleague needs to work with someone in another office or function, I would tell them, ‘OK, here’s the person to call.’ Then I’d take the time to sit down and say, ‘Well, let me tell you a little bit about how these guys work.’” Adhesives facilitate collaboration by vouching for people and helping them decipher one another’s language. Unlike bridges, adhesives develop others’ capacity to work across a boundary in the future without their assistance.
黏合剂则正好相反，它将大家聚在一起，增进理解，形成持久关系。举例说，我们采访了全球自动化测试仪器生产商NationalInstruments的一位经理，他经常介绍不同地区和部门的同事认识。“我这么做是为帮助大家建立联系。”他说，“如果一位同事需要和另一个办公室或部门的同事合作，我会说‘好的，你可以打给这个人’。然后我会花点时间坐下来告诉他‘这些同事的工作方式是这样的，我给你简单介绍下’。”黏合剂通过为同事提供担保，帮助彼此理解对方的沟通方式来促进协作。和桥梁不同，黏合剂的目的是帮助其他人提高跨领域合作的能力，以便在未来可以不再需要协助，独立合作。
Encourage People to Ask the Right Questions
鼓励员工提出正确问题
It’s nearly impossible to work across boundaries without asking a lot of questions. Inquiry is critical because what we see and take for granted on one side of an interface is not the same as what people experience on the other side.
跨界工作的过程中难以避免地要提出大量问题。提问至关重要，因为我们所看到和视为理所当然的东西，对方的体验并不相同。
But all of us are vulnerable to forgetting the crucial practice of asking questions as we move up the ladder. High-achieving people in particular frequently fail to wonder what others are seeing. Worse, when we do recognize that we don’t know something, we may avoid asking a question out of (misguided) fear that it will make us look incompetent or weak. “Not asking questions is a big mistake many professionals make,” Norma Kraay, the managing partner of talent for Deloitte Canada, told us. “Expert advisers want to offer a solution. That’s what they’re trained to do.”
随着在公司的不断晋升，我们都很容易忘记提问对于工作的重要性。表现出色的人尤其会常常忘记他人的视角。更糟的是，当我们意识到自己确实不懂某些事，因为害怕被视作无能或软弱（错误的恐惧），我们会避免提问。“很多职场人士都会犯不提问的大错，”加拿大德勤事务所人才管理合伙人诺尔玛·克雷（Norma Kraay）告诉我们，“专业顾问总想给出解决方案，这是他们一直以来所受的训练。”
Leaders can encourage inquiry in two important ways—and in the process help create an organization where it’s psychologically safe to ask questions.
领导者可以通过下面两种方式鼓励员工提问，同时创造一个适宜的工作环境，让员工感到可以安心提问。
Be a role model. When leaders show interest in what others are seeing and thinking by asking questions, it has a stunning effect: It prompts people in their organizations to do the same.
成为榜样。当领导者通过提问，展现出对他人观点和想法的兴趣时，效果惊人：这会促使机构中的员工效仿。
Asking questions also conveys the humility that more and more business leaders and researchers are pointing to as vital to success. According to Laszlo Bock, Google’s former senior vice president of people operations, humble people are better at bringing others together to solve tough problems. In a fast-changing business environment, humility—not to be confused with false modesty—is simply a strength. Its power comes from realism (as in It really is a complex, challenging world out there; if we don’t work together, we don’t stand a chance).
很多企业领导者和研究人员都提到了谦逊对成功的重要性，提问也传达了谦逊的态度。谷歌前任人力运营高级副总裁拉斯洛·博克（Laszlo Bock）说，谦逊的人能更好地凝聚众人之力，解决难题。在快速变化的商业环境中，谦逊而非假谦虚，是一种力量，因为它符合现实（商业环境复杂且充满挑战，如果我们不携手合作，根本没有任何机会）。
Teach employees the art of inquiry. Training can help expand the range and frequency of questions employees ask and, according to Hal Gregersen of the MIT Leadership Center, can reinvigorate their sense of curiosity. But some questions are better than others. And if you simply tell people to raise more questions, you might unleash interrogation tactics that inhibit rather than encourage the development of new perspectives. As MIT’s Edgar Schein explains in his book Humble Inquiry, questions are the secret to productive work relationships—but they must be driven by genuine interest in understanding another’s view.
传授员工提问的艺术。员工可以通过培训，拓展提问范围和频率。麻省理工学院领导力中心哈尔·格雷格森（Hal Gregersen）认为，培训还可以提振员工好奇心，但问题质量有高低之分。如果公司仅仅要求员工踊跃提问，可能会引发讯问战术，妨碍而非鼓励新角度。MIT的艾德加·施恩（Edgar Schein）在著作《谦逊提问》（Humble Inquiry）中解释道，提问是富有成效的工作关系的秘诀，但提问的原因必须是真心想了解对方的观点。
It’s also important to learn how to request information in the least biased way possible. This means asking open-ended questions that minimize preconceptions, rather than yes-or-no questions. For instance, “What do you see as the key opportunity in this space?” will generate a richer dialogue than “Do you think this is the right opportunity to pursue?”
另一个很重要的因素是，要学习如何尽可能以不带偏见的方式索要信息。这意味着提出不易引发偏见的开放式问题，而不是答案为“是或否”的问题。例如，“你认为这个领域的关键机会是什么？”这样的提问比“你认为这个机会应该抓住吗？”更能引发丰富的对话。
How you process the answers also matters. It’s natural, as conversations unfold, to assume you understand what’s being said. But what people hear is biased by their expertise and experiences. So it’s important to train people to check whether they’re truly getting their colleagues’ meaning, by using language like “This is what I’m hearing—did I miss anything?” or “Can you help me fill in the gaps?” or “I think what you said means the project is on track. Is that correct?”
处理答案的方式也很重要。随着谈话展开，对方会觉得你听懂了他的意思，但每个人对问题的理解会受专业和经验影响。因此，可以培训员工通过询问“我是这么理解你的话的——有没有漏掉什么？”或者“有个地方我不理解，你能帮我解释下吗？”或者“我觉得你的意思是项目正走上正轨，是这样吗？”等方式，确保自己理解了同事的意思。
Finally, periodic temperature taking is needed to examine the collaborative process itself. The only way to find out how others are experiencing a project or relationship is by asking questions such as “How do you think the project is going?” and “What could we do to work together more effectively?”
最后，有必要定期“量体温”，检查协作流程是否顺畅。想要理解他人对某个项目或关系的感受，唯一的方式是通过提问，例如“你觉得项目进行得如何？”和“为了合作更高效，我们可以做些什么？”
Get People to See the World Through Others’ Eyes
让员工站在他人角度思考问题
It’s vital, therefore, to help people learn how to take the perspectives of others.
帮助员工理解如何从他人角度思考问题也至关重要。
In a study of jazz bands and Broadway productions, Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University found that leaders of successful teams had an unusual ability to assume other people’s viewpoints. These leaders could speak the multiple “languages” of their teammates. Other research has shown that when members of a diverse team proactively take the perspectives of others, it enhances the positive effect of information sharing and increases the team’s creativity.
西北大学布莱恩·乌奇（Brian Uzzi）在研究爵士乐队和百老汇戏剧制作时，发现成功团队领导者特别擅长理解他人观点。这些领导者可以用团队成员的“语言”沟通。其他研究表明，多样化团队的成员主动站在他人角度思考问题时，会提高信息分享的积极效果，增加团队创造力。
Leaders can provide some motivation by emphasizing to their teams how much the integration of diverse expertise enhances new value creation. But a couple of other tactics will help:
领导者可以采取以下策略帮助员工从他人角度思考：
Organize cross-silo dialogues. Instead of holding one-way information sessions, leaders should set up cross-silo discussions that help employees see the world through the eyes of customers or colleagues in other parts of the company. The goal is to get everyone to share knowledge and work on synthesizing that diverse input into new solutions. This happens best in face-to-face meetings that are carefully structured to allow people time to listen to one another’s thinking. Sometimes the process includes customers; one consulting firm we know started to replace traditional meetings, at which the firm conveyed information to clients, with a workshop format designed to explore questions and develop solutions in collaboration with them. The new format gives both the clients and the consultants a chance to learn from each other.
组织跨部门对话。领导者应该放弃单向信息分享会议，促进跨部门讨论，帮助员工通过客户或其他部门同事的角度思考问题。目标是让大家共享知识，齐心协力工作，各展所长，打造新的解决方案。在精心设计的面对面会议中，大家可以有时间倾听彼此的想法，这样效果最佳。有时客户也会参加。我们所知道的一家咨询公司，已经开始用这种方式替代传统会议，公司在会议上向客户传达信息，以工作坊的形式，和客户探索问题并研究解决方案。新形式让客户和顾问有机会互相学习。
Hire for curiosity and empathy. You can boost your company’s capacity to see the world from different perspectives by bringing on board people who relate to and sympathize with the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of others. Southwest Airlines, which hires fewer than 2% of all applicants, selects people with empathy and enthusiasm for customer service, evaluating them through behavioral interviews (“Tell me about a time when…”) and team interviews in which candidates are observed interacting.
雇用有好奇心和同理心的人。你可以在招聘时，寻找能体会他人感受、想法以及态度的人。西南航空公司的录取率不足2%，公司会选择对客户服务有同理心和热情的人，通过行为采访（“给我讲一件你⋯⋯的事情”）评估候选人，在团队采访中观察候选人和其他人的互动。
Broaden Your Employees’ Vision
拓展员工视野
Here are some ways that leaders can create opportunities for employees to widen their horizons, both within the company and beyond it.
领导者可以通过以下方式，为员工在公司内外创造拓展视野的机会。
Bring employees from diverse groups together on initiatives. As a rule, cross-functional teams give people across silos a chance to identify various kinds of expertise within their organization, map how they’re connected or disconnected, and see how the internal knowledge network can be linked to enable valuable collaboration.
在项目中召集来自不同团队的员工。跨部门团队会给不同部门员工提供机会，找出各自在组织中的专长，梳理彼此沟通顺畅或不畅的情况，思考怎样连接内部知识网络，从而带来价值协作。
At one global consulting firm, the leader of the digital health-care practice used to have its consultants speak just to clients’ CIOs and CTOs. But she realized that that “unnecessarily limited the practice’s ability to identify opportunities to serve clients beyond IT,” she says. So she began to set up sessions with the entire C-suite at clients and brought in consultants from across all her firm’s health-care practices—including systems redesign, operations excellence, strategy, and financing—to provide a more integrated look at the firm’s health-care innovation expertise.
在一家全球咨询公司，数字医疗实践部门的负责人过去只让顾问和客户企业的CIO以及CTO沟通。但她意识到这样做“限制了机构发现机会、服务除IT以外客户的能力”。因此，她开始约见所有C级高管，并组织全公司医疗实践部门，包括系统再设计、运营、战略及金融部门的顾问，为该公司的医疗创新能力提供更整合的看法。
Those meetings allowed the consultants to discover the connections among the practices in the health-care division, identify the people best positioned to bridge the different practices, and see novel ways to combine the firm’s various kinds of expertise to meet clients’ needs. That helped the consultants spot value-generating opportunities for services at the interfaces between the practices. The new approach was so effective that, in short order, the leader was asked to head up a new practice that served as an interface across all the practices in the IT division so that she could replicate her success in other parts of the firm.
通过这些会议，咨询顾问发现了各个医疗实践部门之间的联系，找出最适合担任不同实践部门桥梁的人，获得整合企业不同专业知识，满足客户需求的全新方式。顾问因此在不同实践部门的交界面，发现了创造价值的服务机会。新方法效果很好，该负责人很快被任命为新实践部门的领导，负责连接所有IT部门的实践活动，在公司其他部门复制这一成功模式。
Urge employees to explore distant networks. Employees also need to be pushed to tap into expertise outside the company and even outside the industry. The domains of human knowledge span science, technology, business, geography, politics, history, the arts, the humanities, and beyond, and any interface between them could hold new business opportunities. Consider the work of the innovation consultancy IDEO. By bringing design techniques from technology, science, and the arts to business, it has been able to create revolutionary products, like the first Apple mouse (which it developed from a Xerox PARC prototype into a commercial offering), and help companies in many industries embrace design thinking as an innovation strategy.
鼓励员工拓展网络。企业需要敦促员工在公司外甚至行业外挖掘专业知识。人类的知识领域跨越自然科学、技术、商业、地理、政治、历史、艺术和人文科学等，任何交界面都存在新的商业机会。以创新咨询公司IDEO的实践为例。该公司将科技、自然科学和艺术中的设计技巧带入商业世界，打造出革命性的产品，例如第一款苹果鼠标（从帕洛阿尔托研究中心的原型发展为一款行业产品），帮助多个行业的公司将设计思维作为创新战略。
Breaking Down Silos. In today’s economy everyone knows that finding new ways to combine an organization’s diverse knowledge is a winning strategy for creating lasting value. But it doesn’t happen unless employees have the opportunities and tools to work together productively across silos. To unleash the potential of horizontal collaboration, leaders must equip people to learn and to relate to one another across cultural and logistical divides. The four practices we’ve just described can help.
打破孤岛。在如今的经济环境下，大家都知道寻找能整合机构多样化知识的新方式，是创造持久价值的赢者战略。但只有员工拥有机会和工具后，打破孤岛的高效合作才能成为现实。为了释放水平协作的潜力，领导者必须给员工机会学习并理解不同文化和地区背景下的同事。我们在上文描述的四种方法会有所帮助。
Not only is each one useful on its own in tackling the distinct challenges of interface work, but together these practices are mutually enhancing: Engaging in one promotes competency in another. Deploying cultural brokers who build connections across groups gets people to ask questions and learn what employees in other groups are thinking.
每种方法都可以解决一种交界面工作的独特挑战，四种方法互为助力：采用一种方法可以提高另一种方法的能力。在机构中安排促进不同团队沟通的文化中介，可以让员工有机会提问并了解其他团队的想法。
When people start asking better questions, they’re immediately better positioned to understand others’ perspectives and challenges. Seeing things from someone else’s perspective—walking in his or her moccasins—in turn makes it easier to detect more pockets of knowledge. And network scanning illuminates interfaces where cultural brokers might be able to help groups collaborate effectively.
当员工开始提出更好的问题，很快会理解他人的观点和挑战。站在别人的角度看问题——设身处地——会让员工更容易发现更多知识领域。通过在各个领域搜索，可以找到文化中介帮助团队高效协作的交界面。
Over time these practices—none of which require advanced degrees or deep technical smarts—dissolve the barriers that make boundary-crossing work so difficult. When leaders create conditions that encourage and support these practices, collaboration across the interface will ultimately become second nature.
这些方法都不需要多么高深的技术智能，但假以时日，会逐渐消除跨领域工作的障碍。领导者为这些实践创造出适宜条件后，交界面的协作会水到渠成。
蒂齐亚纳·卡夏罗是多伦多罗特曼管理学院组织行为学教授。艾米·埃德蒙森是哈佛商学院领导力和管理学Novartis教授，著有《无畏的组织》（The Fearless Organization）一书（2019年，Wiley出版社）。江素金是英士国际商学院组织行为学助理教授。
牛文静 | 译 时青靖 | 校 李源| 编辑
本文有删节，原文参见《哈佛商业评论》中文版2019年6月刊。
