Do you ever feel that colleagues may be intrusive in the discharge of your role and function in the organisation? Do you ever feel that they may be “overstepping their boundaries” and should “back off” so that you can discharge your function properly?

In an organisation, professionals are engaged as in-house “experts” in their industry and would generally be the first point of call for input or advice in that regard. It would not be an unreasonable assumption to suggest that the organisation has confidence that the professional can deliver within their mandate.

There is also an expectation that the professional employee will be a team player and use their expertise to contribute to achievement of organizational goals, while maintaining the required level of independence of judgement in their contributions as expected by the industry they belong to. It is at this point that encounters related to boundaries arise.

Between different professions, there may be varying perspectives of a single set of facts or issues and the tendency to want to prevail with a certain position can present itself rather strongly sometimes. I am sure that colleagues have found themselves saying “at law” or “according to the accounting standards”  to explain their submissions and justify why their position should prevail.

I have endeavored to find middle ground during these experiences and would like to share that what has helped me is to remind myself about my role and ask myself whether I have discharged it or not. During team work, it is important that team members acknowledge and respect each other as players in their own right and that diversity among a team is a powerful enabler to organizational performance.

Where professionals in an organisation differ in opinion on a matter as they discharge their respective functions, there must be a mechanism of resolving the differences in the interest of arriving at a position of the organisation in the matter. For example, legal practitioners are trained to render reasoned opinions on matters and understand that the opinions they render contain advice that can be taken or disagreed with. This realisation is both sobering and assuring in the sense that whatever the response to the advice, the function would have been sufficiently exercised.

In my humble view, an organisation is better placed to have an escalation mechanism and process with options for mediated sessions, second opinions, executive decisions and so on, as the case may be. This way, struggles between different professionals in the organisation are amenable to a resolution process and the risk of purely academic  discussions at the expense of progress in the organisation is mitigated or better still, avoided.

On the flip side, it is also worth noting that each profession has certain ethical and practice standards that guide its members on how to conduct themselves in certain situations. For example, lawyers are permitted to decline to act in a matter where they had rendered an opinion that was not accepted and has become contentious to the extent that the organisation has to defend its contrary opinion. It would be a good case for the organisation to outsource representation in such a matter.

Thank you!