A Secret Few Organizations Know About.

You know it when you see it.?A cross-functional team is made up of participants from a variety of business functions.?The cross-functional teams afflict group-think, boost productivity, furthers innovation, promotes collaboration, enhances accountability, and facilitates speed.?

Yet most cross-functional teams I have observed blunder.

They may have been doing well from the perspectives of their organizations.?They may have been getting a lot of results. But no matter how well they’ve done, they have not done well enough.

It’s like they have built a hi-tech but put a Model T engine in it.

Yet they are not even aware they are screwing up.

They don’t have a clue as to the secret of cross-functional teams.

That’s because the team members have a fundamental misunderstanding of what their roles on the team are.?They believe that to be good team participants, they must be good team players.?Clearly, teamwork is necessary for the success of cross-functional teams — but it is not sufficient.

?In fact, it is not even the most important thing that participants should do. Participants on these teams should be more than simply good team players. They should be good team leaders.

Now I’m not just talking about one person leading a team and the rest being followers.?That is the common perception of the way teams operate.?But that perception is wrong.?

Cross-functional teams fail not because of lack of teamwork but lack of leadership.

Put another way: Teams operate most efficiently and effectively when every team participant takes leadership in their team role.

Here is an example from my experience, an example that provides a template for whatever cross-functional team challenge you face.

I worked with a world manufacturer of computer devices put together a cross-functional team to develop a new product. The company was a market leader in a particular industry niche, but its rate of growth was slowing, and its market share was beginning to erode.?The new product was to spearhead a family of new products that would help them regain lost share.?The team consisted of designers, manufacturers, marketing, sales and financial participants.???

Immediately, the financial participants stumbled.

They viewed their role on the team as traffic cops, stopping, diverting or releasing the flow of capital.?And because of this view, they began to impede the team’s ability to develop a new product that was responsive to customer needs.?

Don’t get me wrong: Their playing the role of financial traffic cops was important for the team’s success.?After all, the team had to use resources efficiently.?But being traffic cops exclusively, they often promoted resource-productivity at the expense of product-development, thus limiting the team’s effectiveness.

To be truly effective contributors to the team, they had to change their view of their roles.?They had to see themselves not just as financial traffic cops but as financial leaders.?

This change in viewpoint, this change from “doing” the tasks of traffic cops to leading the accomplishment of those tasks, was not simply a fine distinction in definition, but a trigger for results-producing action.

The financial team members took leadership action predicated on their convincing the members of the other functions not simply to use their financial model but to be the “cause leaders” of that model.?They measured their leadership effectiveness by how well their cause leaders led to achieve results.????

For instance, instead of telling the manufacturing participants that they had to cut their new-product manufacturing costs, the financial participants gave them financial tools to better measure the costs of compressing the manufacturing cycle times of the new product.?Without the manufacturing participants using such financial tools, the cross functional team could not achieve a key goal: to not just produce a new product but to produce a new product that could be manufactured quickly and inexpensively.?

Instead of telling salespeople that they had limited resources to that, they helped them consult with their customers financial people for the best cost benefits.?

Instead of telling designers that they could only do this, they helped them get a financial model for predesign and design, part consolidation and part elimination.?for manufacturing that could be used for other products.

Their most powerful leadership actions were to remove the obstacles, provide accelerators, and provide tools/resources.

A final tip: Beware, when you are a member of a cross functional team, of the Committee Syndrome.?The most serious danger that faces every cross-functional team: lies in the danger of its becoming a committee.?

Know the difference between a committee and a team.?A committee usually analyzes and reports on a particular matter.?A team on the other hand is supposed to take action to get results.?And the difference between committees and teams is leadership.

The worse thing that can happen to the participants of a team is to believe they are acting as a team when in fact they are acting as a committee.

The secret is out. Make leadership a defining feature of cross-functional activities and their results-production will be boosted to much higher levels of effectiveness.?

Copyright ? The Filson Leadership Group, Inc.

The author of some 40 books, Brent Filson’s latest two leadership books are: “The Leadership Talk: 7 Days to Motivating People to Achieve Exceptional Results” and “107 Ways to Achieve Great Leadership Talks.” He is the founder of The Filson Leadership Group, Inc., which for 40 years has helped thousands of leaders of all ranks and functions in top companies worldwide achieve sustained increases in hard, measured results. He has published some 200 articles on leadership. His mission is to have leaders replace their traditional presentations with his specially developed, motivating process, The Leadership Talk. www.brentfilson.com and theleadershiptalk.com.

Besides having lectured about the Leadership Talk at MIT Sloan School of Management, Columbia University, Wake Forest, Villanova, Williams, Middlebury, Filson brought the Leadership Talk to leaders in these organizations: Abbott, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, Armstrong World Industries, AT&T, BASF, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Betz Laboratories, Bose, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Campbell Sales, Canadian Government, CNA, DuPont, Eaton Corporation, Exelon, First Energy, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, GTE, Hartford Steam Boiler, Hershey Foods, Houghton Mifflin, IBM, Meals-on-Wheels, Merck, Miller Brewing Company, NASA, PaineWebber, Polaroid, Price Waterhouse, Roadway Express, Sears Roebuck, Spalding International, Southern Company, The United Nations, Unilever, UPS, Union Carbide, United Dominion Industries, U.S. Steel, Vermont State Police, Warner Lambert — and more