đ§ Dojo Compass
Module: Leadership, People and Organizational Excellence
Focus Area: Organizational Design and Governance
Key Issue
Northstar Solutions was a growing B2B technology company selling a sophisticated industrial monitoring platform to manufacturing companies. Its sales team had strong relationships with potential customers and a healthy pipeline. Yet, despite significant commercial interest, the companyâs sales cycle was becoming progressively slower.
The problem was not a lack of leads, poor sales execution, or an uncompetitive product. Instead, a barrier had developed between the commercial and technical sides of the organization.
Salespeople increasingly found themselves unable to answer technical questions raised by customers. The engineering team, meanwhile, was frustrated by what it viewed as poorly qualified requests, unrealistic customer expectations, and repeated interruptions from the sales department. Requests for technical support were routed formally through departmental managers, creating delays and encouraging both sides to protect their own time and priorities.
Northstar had an organizational chart. What it lacked was an effective network connecting the people who actually needed to work together.
Facts
The company employed approximately 180 people. Sales and marketing reported to the Chief Commercial Officer, while engineering, product development, and implementation reported to the Chief Technology Officer.
On paper, the structure was clear. In practice, it created friction.
A salesperson who needed clarification regarding a product capability was expected to raise the question with their sales manager. The manager would determine whether the question justified escalation to the technical department. A technical manager would then assign the request to an engineer or product specialist.
This process was designed to protect technical employees from constant interruptions. However, it had several unintended consequences.
First, simple questions often took days to answer. By the time the salesperson returned to the customer, momentum had been lost.
Second, technical specialists rarely interacted directly with customers or commercial staff. As a result, they had limited understanding of recurring customer concerns, competitive objections, or the commercial importance of particular opportunities.
Third, salespeople gradually developed informal workarounds. Those who had previously worked with individual engineers began contacting them directly through messaging platforms. These informal relationships were often highly effectiveâbut they were unevenly distributed.
Some salespeople had strong personal networks within the technical department. Others had almost none.
The result was an invisible two-tier system. A salesperson with the right relationships could obtain rapid answers and technical assistance. A salesperson without those relationships was forced to rely on the formal hierarchy.
Ironically, the most productive part of the company was often the informal network that management had never intentionally designed.
Solution
Northstar’s leadership concluded that the answer was neither to eliminate departmental structures nor to encourage uncontrolled interruptions between teams. Instead, the company needed to deliberately improve the network connecting its technical and non-technical employees.
The first step was to map the most common points of interaction between sales, product, engineering, and implementation. Management identified recurring questions, frequent deal bottlenecks, and individuals who were already acting as informal bridges between departments.
The company then created several structured networking mechanisms.
A weekly 30-minute technical-commercial session brought salespeople and technical specialists together to discuss current opportunities, recurring customer questions, and product limitations. Participation rotated so that knowledge did not become concentrated in a small number of relationships.
Northstar also established âtechnical championsâ within the engineering and product teams. These individuals were given explicit responsibilityâand allocated timeâto act as connection points with commercial colleagues. Importantly, this role was recognized as part of their job rather than treated as an informal favor.
Finally, the company created short-term cross-functional deal teams for strategically important opportunities. Instead of routing every interaction through multiple layers of management, a salesperson, product specialist, and technical representative could communicate directly while working within clear boundaries.
The objective was not to replace the organizational chart. It was to supplement the hierarchy with a more effective working network.
Key Takeaways
Northstarâs experience demonstrates several important lessons about in-firm networking.
First, organizational charts do not describe how work actually gets done. Formal reporting lines establish authority and accountability, but value creation frequently depends on informal relationships that cross departmental boundaries.
Second, informal networks can create both value and inequality. Strong personal connections can accelerate decision-making and problem solving. However, when access depends entirely on individual relationships, some employees gain advantages that others do not.
Third, networking should be designed, not merely tolerated. Management should identify where collaboration creates value and establish mechanisms that make useful connections easier to form and maintain.
Finally, the goal is not unlimited connectivity. Too much networking can create constant interruptions, duplicated work, and unclear accountability. The objective is to build the right connections between the right people at the right time.
For Northstar, improving collaboration did not require a major restructuring. It required recognizing that the company operated through two systems simultaneously: the formal hierarchy shown on the organizational chart and the informal network through which information, knowledge, and problem-solving capacity actually flowed.
Once management began treating that second system as something that could be understood and intentionally improved, the technical barrier between departments began to weakenâand the companyâs ability to convert commercial opportunities improved with it.
Case Study Note
The case studies published by Business Warriorâs Dojo are intended primarily as tools for learning, discussion, and analysis.
They may be based on real business situations, publicly available case studies, professional experiences, or entirely hypothetical scenarios. In some cases, names and identifying details have been changed to preserve confidentiality. In others, facts, circumstances, timelines, or outcomes may have been substantially modified, combined, or simplified to better illustrate particular business issues or support discussion. Some case studies are entirely fictional and have been developed solely for educational purposes.
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