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A consistent observation of firms and organizations is a tendency to invest heavily in organizational-level capabilities and resources. Programs around functional leadership development, operational efficiency and process consistency have senior leader sponsors, standing budgets and metrics written into compensation plans.
There is always one nagging question: are those investments connected to performance?
Like an athlete that only trains indoors and signs up for a triathlon quickly learns, general fitness and specific capabilities are two different things. In fact, overtraining on strength without the corresponding flexibility work takes you the wrong way.
In honest moments of dialogue with key leaders, I hear a similar story about many firms: that the more they reinforce these organizational capabilities, through no fault of their own, they layer in momentum for their current approaches and performance levels.
When bright individuals return to their work groups after having had rich developmental experiences, the day-to-day grind powerfully channels them into perfecting the dominant process paths, and strongly resists their intention to change it up.
Yes, overtraining on individual skills can make your firm less adaptable.
Where Most Firms are Underinvesting
Here is the honest truth: the vehicle for value delivery is a well-designed, cross-functional team. When I ask leaders to outline what that looks like in their firm, I get very inconsistent answers. This has nothing to do with their leadership, but because the firm has overinvested in individual training and underinvested in equipping leaders to find, form and execute through teams.
Contrasting the Organization Level & X- Functional Team Level
| Organizational Level | X- Functional Team Level |
| Leadership bench strength | The right leader |
| Establish problem solving processes | Creating the right solution |
| Project portfolio creation | Activating the right project |
Where to Apply This Cross-Functional Approach
The biggest wins come from applying cross functionality to those areas of subconscious bias from legacy vision, process and solution successes of the past. A firm is an amalgamation of what it has learned, and without a periodic careful review, these dominant paths can remain hidden.
I have a vetted discovery process that is efficient, systematic and generates not just insights, but fresh context and vocabulary. Once teams are equipped with these tools, experience has shown that they continue to find, form and execute fresh and powerful insights, leading to cumulative returns on their investment.
If you’d like to get started yourself, I’ve written about that here, here and here.
What is Your Future? Will You Activate All the Value You’ve Paid For?
If you’ve read this far, you know implicitly that you are on one of three tracks. The first track is you’ve kept this material at arms length in an academic way, and you’re going to repeat what you’ve been doing. This will result in drift, and not get you closer to your goal. The second path is to take bits and pieces of this note and append them to what you already know, which will likely tweak your results, but not lead to the breakout that you were hoping for. Finally, you can hit the link below and start a journey that could geometrically improve your results.
Here’s the bottom line: you’ll never be closer to better results than you are right now. Keep in mind that with time, those three paths get increasingly more divergent – and a jump from one level to the next takes more and more energy and effort.
If you’d like to know more about the strategic assessment and the implementation framework, please select a time on the calendar with this link for a personalized 1:1 call with me.
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