Disagreement at work

[IceniSky]

I work in a department that is undergoing change. I manage a technical team, and have done for several years. I have a regional counterpart who joined a year ago, is male and does the same thing.

This person has never wanted to work together, every effort I made to collaborate was ignored, to the point that no email or messages were returned. After a while i just got on with what I needed to do.

Department has been reorged and now they wish to divide our teams into technical and reporting. Male colleague has made a play for the technical, which would leave my team as reporting.

I proposed we keep regional split and both teams absorb new responsibilities regionally to maintain happy staff and meet objectives.

When ever I put my view point across, which disagrees with his, he uses it as a reason why he needs to control the technical side, to stop all the arguing and bickering. I'm mearly disagreeing and offering an alternative.

I feel the new management are buying his reasoning. I have no idea how to tackle this.

Any idea tomorrow? The discussions continue tomorrow.

Can you make your case water tight: financial impact, best practice examples, anything like that and ask your colleague to do the same?

As an outsider it seems to make sense to split into technical and reporting rather than duplicating the same structures regionally. Why does your idea make more sense?

We have specialised technical skills on both teams. Firstly, you will be deskilling. Secondly, regional is different countries. You would have one country fixing issues within another country. Time zones, lack of face to face, maybe difficulty needed to deploy stuff if staff in different country.

There you go

Just keep it completely factual and don’t get flustered.

Can you play a resilience card? That by duplicating skills & knowledge in each team then the business doesn't get shafted if someone suddenly quits or in hospital or cyber-attack / electricity outage hits one team, but the other one can keep things ticking over.

More reasons -
Succession planning
Cover for absence
Continuity for customers
Account teams means the customer journey is followed through
Progression for staff
Opportunities for cross team mentoring and training support

Some questions to help you with your potential argumentation.
What is it about the technical team that makes it more appealing?
What strengths do you have that would make you an ideal candidate for that team ahead of reporting?
Would your corporate image be better if you had more women visibly in STEM roles, encouraging the next generation etc? (I would personally avoid this one for as ling as possible but if you would both do an equally good job and you definitely want the technical role then be selfish & use every advantage)

So thinking of this as an example. Say we both have coders or developers on our team. One half gets to stay as coders and developers, the other half turns into 'our developers deployed xyz over this half year' . This is a massive difference in role.