Working Collaboratively With Your Cross-Functional Project Team: The Goal-Setting Process
Working Collaboratively With Your Cross-Functional Project Team: The Goal-Setting Process
Leading a crossfunctional team can present different challenges than leading one in your department possibly requiring different qualities in the team leader. Team leaders need the ability and willingness to lead to develop and communicate an agreedupon vision among colleagues you probably do not know and who may have radically different viewpoints and the patience to lead by building consensus. Developing a “poker face” also helped me out of some tight spots.
Would I find all of these qualities in myself? Could I use them effectively in order to help my team accomplish the objective before us? I found out when I was given the opportunity to lead a crossfunctional team at a major insurance company in New York.
I led a crossfunctional project team whose responsibility it was to review enrollment applications for the company’s deferred annuitybased Section 403b retirement plans and to make sure that they continued to meet our customers’ expectations and all New York State Insurance Department regulatory requirements.
Our goal was to reduce what had been a fourpage form to a single signup page with an accompanying page for instructions. The primary purpose was to accommodate a new electronic documentimaging system the company had installed but there were also obvious customer service benefits to shortening and simplifying the applications.
We succeeded well beyond our expectations in creating onepage easytouse annuity enrollment applications that customers liked and that met all applicable state regulatory standards. Service quality studies showed that customer satisfaction with the new enrollment applications was well over 90 percent.
My team included 22 colleagues from six departments most of whom I did not know or had never met. There were staff members representing an IT area that was the primary client at least two legal and compliance areas an administrative area that had an important liaison role with the state’s insurance regulators plus a graphic design representative who developed mockups of the enrollment forms throughout the project team’s discussions.
Forming a crossdivisional team for this project kept the process more horizontally focused. A key advantage of a crossdivisional team is that it allows changes in products and processes to be made by employees who know the most about them. Finding this range of expertise means cutting across divisional lines. We pooled the knowledge of employees from many different areas of the company and obtained a more comprehensive solution than any single vertical department or division could have achieved.
Team Leader’s Role
The team leader’s role is crucial and must be clearly defined. You are in charge of all team meetings and discussions and you decide when to delegate discussion of technical matters to any experts on the team. Your job includes at least the following responsibilities before team meetings begin:
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If possible become the subject matter expert or primary source of information;
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Suggest possible team members if given input by senior managers;
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Ensure that all team members understand the project’s goals and objectives;
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Develop your meeting schedule;
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Create meeting agendas provide accurate minutes of each meeting;
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Discourage “back channels” of communication;
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Represent the team at all meetings with senior managers.
Because the leader’s role is so important to the success of the team you should not be neutral or a nonparticipating member during the group’s discussions and development of the finished product. In fact expressing your preferences may provide the group with a rough idea of solutions that you would favor. But don’t push it: team members will decide whether they agree with you as discussions proceed. And be careful about how you express yourself.
Adopting the role of consensus builder and facilitator of the group process may be the toughest part of the team leader’s job. However you will find that it is the best strategy for reaching an outcome that all team members can support. If you are too assertive team members might interpret this as your attempt to impose a solution which could create resistance within the team. If you are not assertive enough it may appear that the team lacks direction which could set off a contest for dominance within the group. You’ll be walking that proverbial “fine line” between the two. but it goes with the job.
About the writer: Michael Bauch is a New York Citybased freelance financial writer. He writes extensively about investments legal issues and business matters.
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