At times in a career, one may end up working with a team of people who work at a different company or at least at a office distant to you - I’ll call it teaming.  When teaming, half the team has a very incomplete view of the day-to-day progress and challenges over areas in a program that are required for it’s success and vice-versa. The scenario happens often in the aerospace industry where the costs and risks of new development programs are too high for one company to shoulder alone - even for behemoths like GE, Lockheed or Boeing.  To make matters worse, aerospace companies usually team up with those who are typically major rivals.

I’ve been in teaming situations numerous times at both Honeywell and Rolls-Royce, working with other companies or different sites in the same company.  Every time in these situations, I’ve seen the same damaging behavior.  When information is short or when problems arise, the tendency is for your team to assume that the other half of the team is incompetent or disingenuous.  The problem with assuming this is that it in most cases these assumptions are false, and it has at least a couple of negative effects.  First, the false assumption can poison the teamwork and trust between the two teams.  Also, the assumption is a convenient excuse for your team to fall back on when things go wrong.

“Why are we behind?”,

“Why didn’t it work? “,

“Because their idiots, we told them this would happen.”

“They didn’t tell us ….”

If a narrative is created over time that the other half is dumb and harbors ill intentions, it’s too easy when things go wrong to peg the failures on them rather than taking a hard look at your own failures and mistakes and making corrections on your own side.  The reality in the aerospace business is that the talent level at the company level is pretty even.  These are all big companies that hire a lot of people with an often time random process for screening and hiring them.  They have very intelligent people in some areas and they have some anchors in others.  Even if the other side did let you down in one particular area, it is almost assured that your own team has a weak link that is hurting the larger team in another area.  If you are a leader in your half, you can’t let the perception of mistakes from the other side be used as an excuse for poor behavior, laxness or mistakes on your end.

Assumptions are made that the other half is incompetent or dishonest occur because you don’t know the details on how the other half of the team operates on a day to day basis.  The communication you have is enough for you to tell where they are struggling but not enough to give you the background on why.  With incomplete information, you must make some choices.  You can buy into the assumption that the other side is no good.  If this turns out to be true, your program was probably doomed from the start no matter if you believed them to be incompetent or not.  If you assume they were incompetent and they are not, then you have done your part to increase the chances of failure when you should have been working to improve your own teams performance and improve the communication with the other half to reveal the truth.  The choice to me is clear, I choose to assume positive intent unless I can confirm with facts that their is a problem on the other side that I cannot ignore.  There will be many who do not make this choice and the leaders job is to not let this choice stand.