When You Need Agility, Deploy Focused Teams

Cross-functional teams are great but only if you enable them to succeed. Simple business practices and policies can increase speed, flexibility, and ultimately drive success.

Today’s post is by Amanda Setili, author of Fearless Growth (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

No doubt about it: we live in a rapidly changing world. Disruptive technologies, shifting customer behaviors and emerging business models are shaking up nearly every industry. If you are going to survive and succeed amidst this change, you need to move in a fast and adaptable way. Yes… even if you’re a huge global organization with many layers of leadership.

For seasoned executives, the knowledge that they must compete with young, energetic upstarts who can switch speed and direction on a dime can be scary. And with good reason: it’s often very difficult for established organizations to move quickly and behave in an entrepreneurial fashion.

Here are just a few examples of what may be slowing your company down:

1. The incentives you use to motivate your leaders may be misaligned with the direction you need to head. Mark, a leader in a financial services firm, found it hard to convince the firm’s salespeople to invest their time in growing sales of new products, because their commissions were much higher on existing products. Unfortunately, those existing products were fast becoming obsolete.

2. Your organizational structure may not match up with new priorities. Laura, business unit president at a software firm, sought to grow recurring revenues and reduce cost, by transitioning customers to software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Her business unit’s progress was very slow, however, because the professional services and customer support organizations were built to serve customers who were buying customized, on-premises solutions, not SaaS.

3. There may be a gap in your employees’ skills and knowledge, which impedes their success in pursuing new business goals. Jose’s objective was to develop a new product line to serve customers who were expanding their e-commerce capability, yet his employees were ill-prepared to serve this market.

However, none of these harsh realities can become excuses. We must respond quickly, intelligently, and with courage when we face obstacles like these. One of best solutions is to create cross-functional teams and assign them to pursue particular growth opportunities.

Isio Nelson, senior vice president of emerging and differentiated services at Equifax, said it this way: “You need to act quickly when you spot a new opportunity. You want to get a minimum viable product into the hands of your target customer, so that the customer can help you to innovate effectively… In a big company, however, it can be difficult to move as fast as you would like, because you have to coordinate across multiple organizational units. What we’ve found works well is to create a small, focused, cross-functional team.”

When you create a small, focused team, you want to provide access to all the great things your company can provide – things such as customer relationships, company assets, funding, distribution channels, and the like – but you also want to protect them from having to ask permission too often. You need to protect the team from some of the big-company activities and policies that might slow them down.

Granting “special privileges” to these teams can accelerate their learning and progress, and enable fearless growth. Here are some approaches that I have seen work well:

• Faster processes for approving expenditures, and leniency on investment approval hurdles
• Freedom to focus on “learning objectives” and other non-financial metrics, as opposed to strict financial targets
• Explicit “permission to fail” on experiments or initiatives
• Flexibility on legal requirements. For example, instead of having an iron-clad contract with customers, a simple handshake agreement might suffice, so the two companies can quickly try new things, collaborating together to learn.
• Permission to not attend quarterly business reviews, weekly staff meetings, routine training classes, or other events that are not directly aligned with the team’s mission
• Permission to bypass internal processes that slow down action and learning
• Access to outside experts
• Lenient travel budgets
• Greater latitude to hire (or terminate) team members
• Different rules for how the team interacts with customers. For example, permission to call on existing accounts without having to ask the account manager’s permission.
• Leeway to use marketing materials that are not fully buttoned up and formalized
• Time to explore industries, companies, technologies, and ideas that are not directly related to your business (seeing how things are done in a completely different industry does wonders for creative thinking).

Implementing even just a few of these measures will vastly improve your team’s speed and agility. They’ll have more freedom to pursue your strategic goals. They’ll feel motivated and empowered, which means they’ll take faster action, and you’ll improve retention. And, by working with others outside their function, team members gain new skills and perspectives. Innovation will flourish.

Perhaps most important, they’ll build networks across your company, and with business partners, suppliers and customers outside your company. These networks mean that your team will know who to call – and who collaborate with – down the road, when they encounter a new opportunity or challenge. You’ll be able to pursue your goals more successfully, no matter what the future brings.

– Amanda Setili is president of strategy consulting firm Setili & Associates. She’s an internationally acclaimed expert on strategic agility®. She is the author of Fearless Growth: The New Rules to Stay Competitive, Foster Innovation, and Dominate Your Markets (CLICK HERE to get your copy). To learn more, please visit www.setiliconsulting.com. Click here for more ideas for how your team generate practical growth ideas, and pursue them quickly and effectively.

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!