We were 24 months into a very difficult business unit turnaround and a lot of the hardest decisions were behind us. We had “right-sized” the group so that it was supportable by the existing business run rate. We had reviewed the customer base and focused on the subset where we could provide the most value.
Yet here we were, hopelessly deadlocked on product roadmap decisions. These were not small decisions…these were “left-right, you only get to choose once and you needed to stick with it for 36 months” kind of decisions.
Another example: I was working with a team in a services organization who was chartered with building out the back office for a fresh set of products and services. You’d think that this clean sheet would have provided an opportunity to simplify and update. Instead, the requirements called for the continued support of the legacy services and the more up-to-date, cloud-based services for the newer offerings. This pushed the group into two camps: one who wanted to “brick wall” the old services and clean sheet everything new. The second wanted to roll into a major effort to port over all the legacy work on day one.
Every day as we work in the real world, we are faced with these difficult trade-off choices.
What looks good on the vendor’s “slick sheet” turns out to be very challenging to implement in our environment.
Great subject matter experts disagree passionately and pushing harder just digs them in deeper. Teammates start to take sides, and pretty soon you, as team leader, are asked to make the call – and somehow you know that this all could have gone better.
What is the Impact?
When a cross-functional team is convened it means they have a very important task to complete that the existing organization is not up to efficiently fulfilling.
Yet, when teams get stuck, you incur losses of time, money and resources.
Time is the least replaceable asset we have. When we have an internal snag, the world continues to move forward: sales are made, the market is gained or lost and competition becomes more entrenched.
When the team is moving sideways it consumes money, as well. There are of course the direct costs of funding the team, but just as important is the economics of having your best team members not moving forward on other more direct benefit projects.
Lastly, is the consumption of resources. While the team is dithering the firm is running at below optimum, and by definition consuming more precious resources like labor, floor space, sales force effort, service technician time, etc.
So How do We Avoid This?
To get to the root of how to address these issues, let me offer a couple of quick tips and insights. The first is that in each of the above examples the team has pushed forward into a dilemma that its decision engine has not been built for. In other words, there is a need to create a true team decision structure that can address these hard issues, prior, or at least concurrent, with their appearance.
The second insight is that the answer to the dilemma is frequently in the team’s blind spot, which is outside its “natural” area of strength. This is most commonly reflected in a rush to fast compromise to “get back to our day jobs.” The truth is that done well, addressing these dilemmas will make everyone’s day job much more productive.
To avoid these issues, it is very important to do the first 10% of the team’s work in a way that builds strong, realistic context AND decision-making muscle. The challenge of doing this is that it’s very hard to keep a team from rushing to “solutioning” without an agreed-to approach that provides a structure and pathway to results.
In our work, I’ve developed a proprietary approach called STRIDE to set cross-functional teams up for success. I have written about STRIDE in several articles before (here, here and here), and will only provide a short intro here:
- ST is the strategic planning portion of the project and must be executed to develop a list of the known unknowns
- R stands for reality, and is the portion of the project where experimentation is done to determine the unknown unknowns
- I (integrate), D (deploy) and E (extend) are the phases where a project is installed into the production/execution environment
Most teams under emphasize the ST and R phases and over execute on the I, D and E portions. This leads to individuals pushing strong viewpoints, rather than collaborating on deeper undiscovered solutions. The benefits of doing the ST/R work well, is that the team’s solution will be more insightful than any individual solution – and with the bonus of being more “adoptable” and “owned” by the group.
What I have learned in working with dozens of teams on this is, that the reality phase (R) has a more crucial role in the execution of the project than most teams initially realize. By working through the choices as a team and designing experiments and performing them side by side, teammates develop shared commitment. This moves the team from a team in name only, where we argue about our preconceived viewpoints until we “win the team over,” to a truly co-created new way forward that takes into account the real complexity of the situation and our ability to fashion a new way – that none of us expected at the outset.
Getting the Equipping
Getting from an ad hoc, cross-functional team to a high-performing, decision-making unit is an achievable journey. The benefits of having strong coaching on this journey are two-fold: first, it’s faster, and that saves time money and resources as mentioned above. Secondly, the benefits are transportable and scalable – meaning that once you’ve built one team, they go back to their “day jobs” and build more effective teams there, as well.
If you’d like to know more about how to get started on this path, please reach out to me on my direct line (847-651-1014) or set up a 20-minute call using this link.
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