How To Build Cross Functional Team Success

I am often asked how to set up squads, tribes, SWARMs or SWAT teams. All of these have slightly different meaning, especially based on the discipline these leaders come from.

CPOs, CMOs, COOs and founders know the importance of units like this, however:

• It is a lot of hard work

• Has a lot of heavy lifting

• It is politically charged
  and

• This new way(s) of working is surprising to many, a dedicated workstream usually takes 6 to 12 months. Buy-in and selling of this is critical (be prepared to be bored of repeating yourself over and over again).

Communication, Leadership, Embracing Nuances & Ownership Is Key

Many struggle to understand the complexities and nuances of setting up this new working style, alongside reshaping and redesigning the organisation to support this operational style. This goes against how many mature companies are and has been set up and challenges leaders to take a leap of faith they do not know how to lead. Startups and scaleups are more used to this way of working but as they grow

Informing teams, their team managers and leads they have to change the way they work and come together is not enough and hand-holding is required - more hand-holding than most are prepared for.

For more insight: It took me 6 months to prep and plan for an internal shift within a mature organisation, 9 months in another role and 6+ months in a more recent C-suite role.

Units +

Below is a presentation I put together in 2022. Having helped a couple more organisations set up effective cross-function working groups, I thought I would share the deck below and revisit it while adding a few more lessons below.

The 8 Additional Cross-Functional Lessons

1. Cross-functional work only works with designated leaders, it cannot be a flat organisation or multiple leads as everyone is programmed to have a leader to go or (unfortunately) to blame when things go not so well

2. The underlying company culture & historical events have to be taken into consideration and it will take several months to undo old ways of working and uncover historical issues, every company has these but (a BIG BUT) many people and orgs will hide these well and then new disagreements/combative behaviour will bring up battle scars and historical battles between cross-functional teams and you will have to unpick and reconnect people together

3. Planning is critical saying Yes and No is vitally important and having a plan to work towards is critical - using a Growth Requirement Document will greatly help on most occassions;

   1. Taking in Product (feature) requests

   2. Adding in how Marketing can help promotion or need to add paid ads/CRM and budget request

   3. And who else has to be involved (think data science, design etc) will be essential (email me if you would like a version of my GRD)

4. Experts will struggle to adapt especially when they feel like they have to explain any performance issues or historical requests that never made the cut and likely won’t be easy to fit into request backlogs

5. Smart discipline experts struggle & struggle most when they need to work collectively when they haven’t needed to before and many experts require a phased plan (to be co-created with them) to adapt to these changes. If you have external agencies they will need to brought online the journey

6. Teams and often leaders on the outside won’t care for a while or until a win can be celebrated -

7. The organisation has to be brought into this and reminded frequently, as much as weekly by the leadership team and there has to be one lead who will nurture the right behaviours

8. You often will need A leader who will call out good and bad behaviours and connect the department C-Suite to these behaviours

Good luck if you are going to DIY - If you need any help with this, happily drop me an email or hit the button below.

Prefer Short-form? Here are 10 slides breaking down how to be succesful with cross-functional teams

Scroll down to see the 10x slides

Below is a testimonial from my recent Interim CGO work where I facilitated a new cross-functional working shift for marketplace TrustedHouseSitters: