Ask yourself; as a general rule, where are the biggest choke points in organizations – the places where much of the conflict, dysfunction, and inefficiency exists?  Most people would answer something to the effect of; “at the interface between two or more groups”.  And they would be right.  Whether we are talking about trying to break down the silos of conventional hierarchies, attempting to create collaboration between teams, or divisions, or companies, building one organization out of a merger or acquisition, etc., the interface is almost certainly where stresses and strains and disconnects are most apparent and most impactful – and where the greatest potential for transformation and quantum-level productivity improvement lies. 
 
In my experience over almost fifty years as a manager, OD practitioner, and coach, inefficiencies at the interface are almost universal.  They are so foundational and continuous that most of them are unconsciously accepted as simply inevitable costs of doing business – or more likely not even recognized at all.  Estimates of the cost of ineffective collaboration & communication range as high as $11,000 to $25,000 per employee, per year, world-wide.  Taking the lower figure and aggregating across just the global white-collar workforce, the cost is in the trillions of dollars per year, world-wide.  Personally, I believe that the real inefficiencies and frictions are so great that even these astronomical numbers are likely an underestimate of the true magnitude of the problem. 
 
Collaboration is a management obsession at the moment.  And yet, I would argue that much of what management is focused on – collaboration technologies, collaborative office space, intensified communications – is beside the point.  Collaboration is not a “thing” problem, it is a “people” problem.  Technology can be helpful but only after the people problem has been addressed.  And even when management focuses on the people issue, for instance with training to improve interpersonal skill, that training is almost always delivered on one side or other of the interface, rather than in the interface itself.
 
I want to suggest a different approach – in fact, a different mindset.  I think organizations have to start viewing their interfaces as organizations in and of themselves; meta-organizations.  A “meta-organization” is simply an organization of organizations.  The word has largely been used to describe grand, global collaborations of many, many organizations.  That said, I think there is great value in applying it more simply as a way to highlight the most important point: whenever two or more organizations have to work together, their collaboration should be viewed as a meta-organization – a legitimate organizational entity in its own right.
 
Let me illustrate why it is so important to focus on the reality of the meta-organization.
 
I had a client several years ago; a very large, privately-held global logistics company.  They in turn accrued most of their considerable revenue from a single client; a global food service giant.  These two businesses had been grown side-by-side by a pair of entrepreneurs who needed each other.  One wanted to open a second restaurant and needed to manage his supply chain, the other had a truck, a warehouse, and a nascent shipping business.  The trucker came to manage logistics for the restauranteur, and as the number of restaurants grew to ten, then a hundred, then a thousand, the logistics company grew at the same time, to the benefit of both.  Inevitably, old age intervened.  One of the collaborators died and health issues drove the other away from active management.  Global trends began to eat away at the profitability and market share of the food services company, which in turn began to demand more and more for less and less from the logistics company, threatening to utilize other providers.  What had been a generative collaboration personally nurtured by life-long friends began to unravel as each of the organizations more and more managed the relationship through the narrow lens of their own institutional self-interest.  When I started to work with them, I was struck by the obvious stress and anxiety of the logistics company project managers.  At every break, the Blackberries came out and anxious calls were made to increasingly demanding product managers on the other side. Lunches were spent in crisis mode, as “those people” doubled down on their quest for greater “value-added” in the relationship.
 
If ever there was a “meta-organization”, the collaboration between these two companies was it.  Yet the fact that they had effectively merged along the interface, forming a meta-organization with its own needs and culture and realities, was never recognized.  Both organizations spent money sending their people to classes on Emotional Intelligence and Crucial Conversations, but they did this separately.  To this day, and to their individual and collective detriment, the sparks are still flying along the organizational interface and revenues continue their downward trend.
 
But what would have happened had they recognized the legitimacy of the meta-organization and begun to enhance the relationships and mutuality of understanding through joint training, team development, and business planning?  By doing so, they would have had the opportunity to create a more constructive collaborative relationship wherein the legitimate interests of both organizations were accepted as legitimate.                  
 
Viewing it a slightly different way, this is sequestered value.  An organization that was able to increase collaborative efficiency by even a small fraction could realize considerable value-added.  And in an increasingly competitive world, even marginal increases in value-added can have major impacts on organizational effectiveness, efficiency, and profitability.
 
Viewing it in still another way, ineffective collaboration is a source of significant frustration and stress for employees.  An organization that can improve collaboration can not only reduce costs and increase value-added, but also improve employee satisfaction and engagement in the process.
 
Organizations pursue different theories as to how to improve collaboration.  Many have presumed that the Physical Environment plays an important role.  And so they have spent tens of billions of dollars in the United States alone on creating collaborative workspaces; lowering or eliminating walls and dividers, creating “pods” of workstations, etc.  The sorry reality is that most such well-intentioned efforts have precisely the opposite effect.  Offices become like libraries, with employees tiptoeing through and speaking - if they speak at all - in whispers, lest they incur the wrath of the floor Quiet Nazis.
 
Another theory has been that of Communication Efficiency, and so organizations are spending even more billions to electronically knit their employees even closer to each other with instant messaging, dashboards, and other state-of-the-art communication tools.  Again, the impact has often been negative.  Employees report even more stress and even lower job satisfaction as they are constantly bombarded with ever more information and requests for interaction.
 
The reality is that collaboration is not a “thing” problem, it is a “people” problem.  The most artfully crafted collaboration platform or the most efficient knowledge management system is useless if people are not motivated to fully engage.  The focus on technology obscures the real problem and can actually make it worse.
 
To me, the answer lies in tried and true techniques of Change Management, Team Development, Conflict Management, etc., but they must be applied to the meta-organization itself.  It is insufficient (frankly, I’d argue it’s really a waste of time) to train and intervene at the parent organization level to deal with interface issues.  Meta-organizations exist – They are true organizations in their own right, regardless of how long or short-lived, and the greatest power and leverage of intervention and development lies there. 

Coaching in the Amber of Organizations
 
A colleague of mine tells a story about one of her very first coaching clients.  In addition to being a respected credentialed professional in his technical field, this client managed a technical practice group.  The problem was that his organization was beset with acute daily conflicts and dissention.  He felt that his lack of skill as a manager and leader must be exacerbating the situation, so he resolved to initiate coaching. 

​My colleague prepared quite carefully, interviewing the client at length before agreeing to coach him.  The two of them created a simple but effective contract and commenced their sessions, all to be completed in a highly-intense manner over a three-month period.  The work went extremely well; the client was open and active, voraciously reading, unflinching in the face of his own realizations and insights, and sincerely interested in becoming more effective as a manager and leader.  In this relatively short period, he made major strides in understanding himself and making personal commitments to developing a more emotionally intelligent approach to leadership.  After the three months of twice-weekly sessions, and excited to try out his new-found insights and developing skills, he returned to work.
 
Things did not go well.  Not only did the conflict and dissention continue, but others in the office responded poorly to his new approaches to interpersonal communication and collaborative leadership.  Partners and staff alike openly wondered what had “happened” to him, and were not trustful of his behavior.  In order to restore a modicum of order, he regretfully found it necessary to return to a more directive, hierarchical, and authority-based management style.  That certainly would not cure the organization’s ills, but at least it did not make matters worse.  He eventually left that practice group to start another, building it from the ground up.  Presumably he is happier in his new context, but I do not know.
 
The point of this anecdote is simple: people exist in their organizational context, bound within its mores and culture like flies encased in amber.  Changing the perspectives and practices of single individuals is likely to have very little impact up against the strength of organizational culture.  Moreover, as this gentleman experienced, no matter how dysfunctional an organization’s norms may be, when individuals change in a manner that is at odds with those cultural norms and then clumsily introduced, it will make matters worse, not better.
 
Coaches who coach individuals can improve the impact of their coaching by being overtly sensitive to these issues of organizational context.  As we’ve seen from the anecdote (and as I have directly experienced in a wide variety of organizational contexts), no matter how objectively skilled a coach may be and how highly-motivated a client may be, the pair ignore the organizational context at their collective peril.   
 
Objectively and over time, a developing personal skillset will certainly have value for the coachee.  That said, it is critical to be sensitive to organizational culture and cultural challenges in order to assure organizational effectiveness in addition to personal development.
 
I believe it is critical to develop an understanding of an organization’s culture as a necessary part of preparation for a coaching engagement.  That said, a less-than-scientific and highly-anecdotal poll of a number of fellow coaches leads me to conclude that very few coaches overtly explore organizational culture, either with their coachee or with other organizational resources (HR, OD/TD, more senior managers, etc.)  Questions like, “What is it like to work here?”, “How do things get done around here?”, “What do people do to succeed in this organization?”, “What are the key traits of mainstream leaders in this organization?”, and “Can people successfully disagree here, and if so, how?” are simply a few examples of questions coaches can use to begin to better understand an organization’s cultural mores.  Ideally, a coach should try to interview people both inside and outside the management chain.
 
In addition, it is essential to be overt about culture with the client, particularly toward the end of the coaching engagement.  Coaches need to actively discuss likely cultural issues and then work with the client as they formulate appropriate strategies and tactics for successful “re-entry”.  In my leadership development programs, we have inserted an entire afternoon devoted to back-at-work planning, with a specific focus on cultural re-entry. 
 
Beyond this, though, lies the realm of Team Coaching, wherein all the members of a team are collectively coached in the team context.  The beauty – and the great challenge – of team coaching is that axiomatically one cannot dissect the team in order to coach the “elements” individually.  The team is an organism that must be coached as such.  This doesn’t mean that individual behaviors and needs cannot be addressed.  Rather, it means that much of the necessary coaching occurs within the team and during team interactions.  Unfortunately, to date, very few organizations have been willing to devote the time and resources to this form of coaching.  There is a strong tendency to view this approach as complicated and expensive.  The reality can be very different, and those organizations that have made the commitment to true team coaching have reported transformations in cohesiveness and alignment, motivation, productivity, resilience, innovation, and flexibility.  Team coaching is very much a new frontier in coaching.  That said, its power is such that it is truly an idea whose time has come.