Latest / UNLEASHED By LoyaltyOps / Why Most Cross-Functional Teams Fall Short
Transcript
- Mickey Anderson: Working across functions is a skill a leadership team builds with practice. And structured time on a real objective. Picture this. We've got marketing, sales, and customer success at a growing organization. Marketing has their plan and numbers built around lead volume, sales around close rate, and success around retention. Now, three plans, three sets of numbers, and these three leaders did not sit down to build their plans together, even though they are all interdependent. That is a common scene across so many organizations. And it highlights a key problem we see time and time again: a lack of cross-functional collaboration, which ultimately means plans and numbers are built in silos and don't necessarily work together to achieve business objectives. That's what we're going to talking about today. We've all been there at end of month where all of a sudden the plan no longer makes sense or there's friction coming from other departments and their competing priorities. Everyone finds out about each other's plans and what's going on too late to make any measurable impact when we look at these leaders independently, they're all doing a good job, running their functions well. The problem comes from an organizational standpoint of how each of these come together to achieve business outcomes and move us all in the same direction instead of causing friction between functions. by the end of this episode, you'll know what has to be in place for your leaders to plan and solve problems together and how to build that skill before the stakes are real. So let's go back to our marketing customer success and sales example. Marketing knows which messages and channels are bringing customers in before they speak to anyone. Sales knows what was promised to close a deal, what objections are coming up, and what kind of customers are buying quickly and which ones are stalling. Customer success knows what the customer actually experiences after they buy and what they needed that wasn't promised, or what was promised that wasn't delivered, and when customers start to leave. When those plans are built separately, each one improves its own numbers. Marketing will bring in more leads, including leads that maybe aren't a good fit. Sales will come up with some sort of promise that. Delivery doesn't necessarily keep and customer success inherits this gap and spends its time managing expectations it didn't set. each of these functions can hit their targets, but that doesn't necessarily mean the company is going to hit its growth plan. So let's talk about what happens when we bring these three leaders together to build their plans together. Better ideas. We get more of the problem visible because the options coming to the table are coming from different pictures with different perspectives. We get better plans because assumptions are tested by the people who actually hold the information. Sales can tell marketing which leads actually close, and customer success can tell sales which promises are not being delivered. We get better solutions because handoffs are designed together before anything breaks. And you end up with better execution because the people who are delivering the plan are building it together so they understand the intent behind it and they own it. This affects planning and strategy just as much as it does problems. Look, many annual and quarterly plans are built inside each function and then put together at the end, or from a leadership team at the top with zero context from anyone actually doing the work. The plans look good on paper, but they cause friction against each function and those competing priorities along the way. Let's talk about some evidence on this. Benham Tabrizi Published a study in a Harvard Business Review of ninety-five teams in twenty five leading companies. Nearly seventy-five percent of cross functional teams were dysfunctional. They failed on at least three of five criteria. one, meeting a planned budget. Two, staying on schedule. Three, adhering to specifications. Four, meeting customer expectations, and five, maintaining alignment with the company's corporate goals. The same research found that projects with strong governance support, meaning a senior cross-functional group or A single executive champion behind them had a 76% success rate. So that first number, the 75% of cross-functional teams being dysfunctional, tells us where the problem is. The second number, that 76% success rate with a champion or a cross-functional team, tells us where the solution lies. Working cross-functionally doesn't happen on its own. Leaders have to make time for it and they have to run it well. What has to be in place to create strong cross-functional collaboration across an organization? There are three key conditions we're going to walk through. The first is context shared in advance. Leaders can't think well when a problem is thrown in front of them with competing priorities and opinions all shared at the same time. When the context arrives in the meeting, most of the meeting becomes dedicated to the briefing and not the problem solving. And then thinking gets rushed and postponed decision making happens. If you can send a short brief ahead of time so everyone has context in advance and they can digest it and reflect upon it before showing up, leaders will think better, come up with better solutions, and it will often bring out quieter voices in the room. Now, a good brief has six components. I'll walk through each of them. The first is the objective or the problem. What are we solving or planning for and why does it matter now? The second is what's been tried. Could be earlier attempts and what worked or what didn't. Three, what each team is doing about it now so that everyone can see all of the pieces on the table and what's underway, including work that overlaps. The fourth is resources available, budget, people, time, tools. The fifth, resources not available, the constraints stated clearly. And then the final piece, the sixth, are the assumptions we're working with, what we believe to be true and haven't tested. the second condition to great cross-functional collaboration is room to disagree respectfully. And this one can be challenging. constructive objection or playing devil's advocate belongs in the room as long as it's done with respect. Disagreement is where better ideas come from. And it's really important that you agree on the ground rules of disagreement in advance. this can look like a list of things that you agree on at the beginning of the meeting, like challenging the plan and leaving the person out of it. An objection that comes with a reason or an alternative. Anyone can name an assumption and ask whether it's been tested. The most senior person in the room speaks last, so their view doesn't set the direction of the meeting before anyone else has spoken. Or one person owns the decision at the end after everyone has had their say. there's really strong evidence to support playing devil's advocate, but there are some nuance to it. So Charla Nemeth and her colleagues compared an assigned devil's advocate against genuine dissent. Paraphrased, the research shows that when someone was assigned to play devil's advocate, people tended to generate thoughts that confirmed their original position. Whereas when the dissent was authentic, People thought more broadly and came up with new ideas on both sides of the issue. In Nemeth's own summary, the devil's advocate produced cognitive bolstering, while authentic descent. led to more divergent thinking. So assigning a devil's advocate can be a good way to start, especially if the team isn't well practiced in disagreement. But what you're really building towards is a room where people say what they think for real. And the ground rules are what make that possible. Amy Edmondson Did a study of 51 work teams who defined team psychological safety as a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Teams with that belief showed more learning behavior, and learning behavior was linked to team performance. So respectful disagreement and psychological safety go together. People raise objections when they believe it's safe to. Here's a simple way to invite objections. It's called the premortem Gary Klein's premortem asks a team to imagine the plan that's already failed and write down why. Klein cites research showing that imagining an event has already happened increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. It gives permission to object because Task is to object. Now condition three. Time box and small breakouts. In one large open group discussion, only one person can talk at a time, and other people end up waiting, losing their ideas, or deciding not to speak up at all. Time boxing keeps a session moving and stops one topic or one voice from taking all the time. Smaller breakouts give everyone more airtime. And mix the functions. The evidence behind this is strong. Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe found that people working on their own, then pooling their ideas, produced nearly twice as many different ideas as the same number of people brainstorming together. Most of the loss came from what they called production blocking, where people have to wait their turn to speak. What you can do in practice is give everyone three to five minutes to silently write first. Then move into groups of two or three mixed across functions with 15 to 20 minutes on one question. Each group reports back and the whole team decides. Having a facilitator keep time and a scribe capture decisions, owners, and next steps is crucial here. Look, leaders get good at working across functions the way they get good at anything, with practice. So build practice rounds before the stakes are real. Leaders are typically promoted for running their function well. working through a problem with peers from other functions, sharing context, disagreeing well, and staying inside a time box is a totally different skill, and very few leaders have been taught it. The first session of this is usually quite awkward, and that's a normal part of learning, and it's not a sign that the approach doesn't work. I recommend running three to five practice rounds of this. Round one is a practice problem. You come in with a simulated problem or a past one where the outcome's already known, keep it to 45 minutes and focus on how the team works together. Round two and three could be a small problem with very low risk, something that lives across functions, but there's not a lot of weight to it. So the team can really focus on working well together and not too much on the risk of the outcome. And then round four and five, start working through real objectives. a planning or a strategy objective that matters to the business. The key here is to debrief after every round. A debrief culture is incredibly important when there's collaboration taking place because learnings often get lost through the cracks. So the after action review is built perfectly for this. the US Army introduced the After Action Review back in the mid-1970s, and they were originally designed to capture lessons from simulated battles at its national training center. That's the same idea as a practice round followed by a debrief. And you want to ask four key questions in your debrief. What did we set out to do? What actually happened? Why did it happen? And what are we going to do next time? Let's talk through a couple common mistakes and challenges that might show up. The first is arriving cold. If everyone comes in without having contacts shared in advance, you spend the first 20 minutes explaining the problem and it becomes a real waste of everyone's time. So send the six part brief forty eight hours in advance and save yourself the trouble. The second is drifting into status updates. And this is super common because each leader wants to report on their function. And it's a great ego boost and dopamine hit when we do so. But what that does is ends up wasting time and nothing important gets worked on. So instead, open with one question that the group is there to answer and try and focus on that as much as possible. the third is when one voice fills the room. Typically it's the most senior person or the loudest function that sets direction early and holds the reins. What we want to do here instead is use that silent writing, breakouts and time boxes, and have the senior leader speak last to avoid shifting direction and falling into groupthink. Another really common one is where disagreement goes personal or goes quiet. People will defend their function to the death or they'll say nothing and raise it later in private. Agreeing on the ground rules in advance really helps here. You want to use a premortem to make objecting part of the task and keep everyone committed to those ground rules, reinforcing them along the way. Probably the most common problem we see is trying to squeeze too much in one session. Five problems on the agenda and none of them get finished. What we want is one problem or one objective for each session. Keep it tight and focused, and you will see a massive improvement in the ability to actually get stuff done. Leaving without an owner is also really common. You'll have a great discussion, but nothing actually changes. And that's not the point of this. Before anyone leaves, name one owner for each next step with a date. The last common issue we see is judging it after one round. So the first session is messy and the team decides this doesn't work. That's a huge waste of everyone's time, and frankly, it takes practice to get really good at this. So commit to three to five rounds and debrief after each one. not only will you build better working relationships, you'll share context and learn how to work together effectively over time. Here's a simple way to get started this week. Pick one objective or one problem that crosses two or more functions and book a 60-minute slot with those leaders. Could be marketing, sales, and customer success or finance and operations. Those are typically a great place to start. Then write out a one-page brief with those six parts and send it out 48 hours in advance of the session. And make sure that everyone understands it is a requirement to read it before showing up. You'll know it worked because people will arrive with questions about the brief and objections in the room about the plan and not each other or what we're doing here. Back to the most important thing: Working across functions is a skill, and your leaders build it with practice and structured time on real objectives. If that sounds like your organization, book a call at loyaltyoffs.com/slash book. LoyaltyOps is a leadership development firm that gets every leader aligned on your objectives and leading to the same standards, so performance improves across your organization. Now, listeners, be sure to subscribe and like this episode so you don't miss future episodes. Thanks for listening.