Truth 56
It's Not All About the Ivory Tower

One of my jobs at Microsoft was running the Corporate Procurement Group. This group was responsible for managing and influencing several billion dollars in purchases, ranging from personal computers to marketing materials to outsourced services. My organization had about 30 procurement managers who resided at headquarters and worked with various organizations around Microsoft to help get better value for our purchases. To better expand our global influence, we started working with procurement organizations in Microsoft subsidiaries around the world to understand their purchases and to find areas where we could partner. What we learned was more than what we had anticipated—not necessarily about their purchases, but about how they worked and the significance of urgency versus importance in their jobs. For example, in some of the smaller subsidiaries, the person responsible for procurement was also responsible for facilities management—meaning that if the toilets didn't flush, it was his responsibility to get them fixed. Given the choice between working on a global procurement contract and getting the toilets fixed, he would tend to the toilets first (rightly so). Getting this exposure to the subsidiaries taught me a very important lesson about working with organizations outside headquarters: It's not all about the ivory tower.

Given the choice between working on a global procurement contract and getting the toilets fixed, he chose the toilets.

As I discussed in Truth 2, understanding communication expectations is very important to establishing an effective transfer of information between you and your colleague. When it comes to communicating across organizations or cultures, understanding what other people do, what their priorities are, and what is important to them also contributes to getting your point across effectively. Now, I'm not saying that if you're going to have a conversation with someone you need to research his job and priorities. I am referring to situations where you will be communicating with a colleague on a regular basis in order to get something done together.

When faced with regular communication with a colleague in another organization or culture, pave the way using some of these techniques:

• Understand your colleague's job responsibilities. Just as in the preceding example, you may have a colleague who has a job title similar to yours but could have a radically different set of responsibilities. Assume little about job titles; get an understanding from your colleague of what she is responsible for.
• Understand your colleague's priorities. In addition to responsibilities, understand your colleague's relative priorities. The fact that she has three primary responsibilities doesn't mean that she spends equal time on each or that the priorities don't change. Understanding her priorities will help set your expectations for when she can respond to you and when she can't.
• Tailor your communication to what is important to your colleague. Communicating with your colleague is great, but she may not have the same degree of interest or need for the things you see as important in your job. Understanding what is important to her will help ensure that your communication is more targeted and that your colleague will read what you send her.

Just because you have the same job title and are part of the same organization doesn't mean you do the same things. Take time to understand what your colleague does and what she considers important. Target your communications to meet her needs. Doing so will better ensure that your colleague gets the information that is most important to her and ensures that you aren't wasting your time creating irrelevant information.