How to Design a Team to Deliver
Powerful Capabilities
Does
the way your company manages its strategy influence the effectiveness of your
teams? And does the way you manage teams affect your strategy? We believe the
answer to both questions is yes, and in a new research study under way now,
we’re testing that hypothesis.
You
can see the evidence in companies with strategic coherence. These are companies
with a distinctive identity. The few capabilities that make them unique all fit
together, supporting a value proposition that few other companies can match.
They choose to go in directions only where their capabilities give them a right
to win. Great companies need great capabilities. And inside every company that
does things exceptionally well are teams of people working across functional
boundaries, year after year, doing things together they couldn’t do alone.
Apple, for instance, has long been known for
its product development teams, which bring together people from a variety of disciplines,
including engineering, design, and marketing. CEMEX, the Mexico-based cement company, uses its sophisticated
knowledge management systems to bring far-flung people into continual contact
with each other, to talk about capabilities at a global scale. Inditex
and Haier are both known for connecting clerks in their
retail stores with engineers in R&D and operations experts on the factory
floor to customize their offerings to the changing needs and interests of their
customers.
Capabilities
like these, strong enough to set your company apart from the competition, have
to be cross-functional. They have to assemble specialists in diverse fields —
such as information technology, finance, learning and development, design, and
marketing — to create offerings that deliver spectacular value to their chosen
customers. They have to do this time and time again, not just for a one-time
success. They have to instill these cross-functional capabilities deep into the
enterprise, which is difficult and time-consuming. Apple’s facility with
compelling product design, Starbucks’ ability to create high-quality retail
experiences, CEMEX’s global operational skill, and Inditex’s rapid-response
manufacturing capability were all hard-won and took years to build, refine, and
bring to scale. If these skills were easy, they wouldn’t be distinctive,
because every company in the industry would have them.
What kinds of teams can develop capabilities
like these? Our colleague Jon Katzenbach says they have to be “real teams”: defined as
having the following three characteristics: “First, all members of a real team
have an [equally high] level of emotional commitment to the team’s purpose and
goals. Second, the leadership role shifts easily among the members based on the
skills and experience they have and the challenges of the moment, rather than
on any hierarchical positions. Third, the team members hold one another
accountable for the quality of their collective work. Members of real teams
subordinate their formal affiliations, personal prejudices, and loyalties to
the team’s purpose and goals. These practices together give real teams both the
capability and the accountability they need to accomplish their tasks.”
Sound
familiar? These may indeed be the kind of characteristics that make it possible
to develop a powerful, distinctive, cross-functional capability. And working on
distinctive capabilities seems to engender qualities like emotional commitment
and mutual accountability. They come naturally when you and your colleagues
routinely execute at a very high level. It helps that, on most good cross-functional
teams, the members know exactly how their work contributes to the company’s
success. In that context, narrow functional priorities are less important.
There’s no need to keep up with the standard practices of your competitors if
they are irrelevant to your strategy.
Notice
one quality Katzenbach did not include in his description of real teams:
internal competition. In many companies, there is an ongoing debate about the
role internal competition plays in the organization’s effectiveness. Some argue
that it drives innovation, accountability, and personal ambition: Pit your
people against one another, the thinking goes, and the winners will push
themselves harder. But others find that internal competition discourages
meaningful collaboration and increases employee dissatisfaction.
We
believe internal competition makes it harder to develop cross-functional
capabilities. Resources are scarce in almost every company, but the real
competition is outside your firm, and you need everyone pulling together, regardless
of functional boundaries. You can’t afford to split your IT, procurement, or
training competency among two or more internal rivals.
Instead of internal
competition, focus on developing real teams, dedicated to building distinctive
capabilities and bringing them to scale. Though your team members come from
different specializations, they will work easily and closely together if they
are achieving a single powerful purpose. That’s why you need to articulate a
clear understanding of your company’s right to win and the role each team plays
in ensuring that success. When people see how their efforts make a difference,
they create the kind of cross-functional teams that work.
Paul
Leinwand
http://www.strategy-business.com/blog/How-to-Design-a-Team-to-Deliver-Powerful-Capabilities?gko=46831&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20160519&utm_campaign=fixed
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