Crossfunctional team
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A cross-functional team brings together people from different departments to work toward a common goal. It includes members from finance, marketing, operations, human resources, and various levels of the organization. To form an effective cross-functional team, the objectives must be set, the right members selected based on their roles, resources allocated, working methods established, leadership adopted, and communication promoted. Cross-functional teams are beneficial as they provide less siloed, more informed perspectives that consider a greater range of user needs than traditional departmental structures.
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Crossfunctional team
- 1. Cross Functional Team Your company information
- 2. Index • Introduction • Basic Principles of Crossfunctional Team • Need for Crossfunctional Teams • Formation of Crossfunctional Team • Effects of Crossfunctional Team • Strength & Weaknesses of Crossfunctional Team
- 3. Introduction A cross-functional team is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. • People from finance, marketing, operations, and human resources departments. • Employees from all levels of an organization. • May also Include people from outside an organization (in particular, from suppliers, key customers, or consultants).
- 4. Formation of Crossfunctional Team 1. Set Objectives 2. Define Roles and Select the Right Team Members 3. Consider Resources and Logistics 4. Establish Ways of Working 5. Adopt the Right Leadership Style 6. Negotiate and Communicate
- 5. Effects of Crossfunctional Team • Less unidirectional • Greater scope of information • Greater depth of information • Greater range of users • Less goal dominated
Editor's Notes
- 1. Set ObjectivesBegin by setting a goal for your team. What are its objectives, and why has it been set up?Create a Team Charter to clarify these objectives and identify the resources that the team can call upon. Get these objectives agreed with senior managers in the organization, and by the managers of the departments affected by your new team.2. Define Roles and Select the Right Team MembersOnce you have an idea of what you want to achieve with your team, you can identify the roles that you need to fill, and the types of people you want in those roles. (Bear in mind, however, that you may need to select your team based on who's available at the time.)When defining roles, remember to think about more than just the technical expertise each person should have. For example, will they need good communications skills, or good decision making skills? Or, will they need to be able to work to tight deadlines?Once you have team members on board, work through the Team Charter with them to make sure that you're all working to achieve the same objectives. Update your Team Charter if necessary.It's also important to give people the opportunity to talk through how they see things. Be really clear about what you can decide as a team, and what has already been agreed by more senior people.Tip 1:Don't be tempted to take "the easy option" when it comes to team selection – use the best people available, even if they don't necessarily agree with your views or your ways of working.Tip 2:Team members will likely go through several predictable stages, as they move from being strangers to forming an effective team. Read our article on Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing for more on this.Tip 3:Although having shared goals and objectives will help motivate people, you'll likely need to motivate them in other ways too, especially if they were reluctant to join the team. Our article on Motivating Your Team looks at how you can motivate people effectively.3. Consider Resources and LogisticsIt seems obvious, but new teams need access to all normal, basic resources, and it's worth making sure you've thought about everything that you need to organize.For instance:Do you need dedicated team space?Does the team need a budget against which team members book time or other costs?Do team members have access to all of the hardware and software needed to do the job?Do you need to set up a shared area for storing files and documents?If possible, make sure that everything is in place before your people start working together.4. Establish Ways of WorkingWith a new team, you can't make any assumptions about the processes that the team will use to meet its objectives. Instead, you need guidelines in place that explain how the team will work together.Here are some areas to consider:How acceptable is it to be late to meetings? Do these always start on time, or do you wait for latecomers? How are meetings structured? Is an agenda sent out in advance of the meeting, and, if so, how far in advance will it be sent?Are team members copied into all email correspondence? Or only into correspondence about certain things?Are team members expected to be "always available" or is it accepted that people will have times when they can't be contacted?Who is involved in making decisions, and how are they made? Who is told about these decisions?Once you've agreed how your people will work together, add this to your Team Charter.5. Adopt the Right Leadership StyleOverall authority for your cross-functional team will probably lie with senior managers, sponsors, or a steering group. However, the team will likely be expected to make day-to-day decisions without their input, so you (or someone on the team) will need to lead the team towards its objectives.As the team's leader, you'll probably be "leading equals," as you won't have direct authority over many of your team members. So, you'll need to use a more persuasiveleadership style, rather than a controlling approach, to help them set their priorities. Often, this involves functioning as a coach, helping people make their own decisions and solve their own problems, rather than as a traditional manager who issues orders and distributes tasks.With this in mind, try to involve everyone in making decisions – our article onOrganizing Team Decision-Making shows you how to do this.Also, establish your credentials early on, so that you can gain respect from your team.6. Negotiate and CommunicateNaturally, there will be times where team members have priorities that conflict with their day-to-day roles, and you may sometimes need to seek advice from your sponsor or steering group to take things forward.However, you can often avoid issues by first negotiating a solution that works well for everyone. (Tools such as the Influence Model and Win-Win Negotiation will help you do this.)It's also important that you communicate effectively with everyone affected by your cross-functional team, including your people's day-to-day managers – stakeholder analysis will help you identify who these key people are.
- Effects The growth of self-directed cross-functional teams has influenced decision-making processes and organizational structures. Although management theory likes to propound that every type of organizational structure needs to make strategic, tactical, and operational decisions, new procedures have started to emerge that work best with teams. [2]Less unidirectionalUp until recently, decision making flowed in one direction. Overall corporate-level objectives drove strategic business unit (SBU) objectives, and these in turn, drove functional level objectives. Today, organizations have flatter structures, companies diversify less, and functional departments have started to become less well-defined. The rise of self-directed teams reflects these trends. Intra-team dynamics tend to become multi-directional rather than hierarchical. Interactive processes encourage consensus within teams. Also the directives given to the team tend to become more general and less prescribed.Greater scope of informationCross-functional teams require a wide range of information to reach their decisions. They need to draw on information from all parts of an organization’s information base. This includes information from all functional departments. System integration becomes important because it makes all information accessible through a single interface.Greater depth of informationCross-functional teams require information from all levels of management. The teams may have their origins in the perceived need to make primarily strategic decisions, tactical decisions, or operational decisions, but they will require all three types of information. Almost all self-directed teams will need information traditionally used in strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. For example, new product development traditionally ranks as a tactical procedure. It gets strategic direction from top management, and uses operational departments like engineering and marketing to perform its task. But a new product development team would consist of people from the operational departments and often someone from top management.In many cases, the team would make unstructured strategic decisions—such as what markets to compete in, what new production technologies to invest in, and what return on investment to require; tactical decisions like whether to build a prototype, whether to concept-test, whether to test-market, and how much to produce; and structured operational decisions like production scheduling, inventory purchases, and media flightings. In other cases, the team would confine itself to tactical and operational decisions. In either case it would need information associated with all three levels.Greater range of usersCross-functional teams consist of people from different parts of an organization. Information must be made understandable to all users. Not only engineers use technical data, and not only accountants use financial data, and not only human resources personnel use HR data. Modern organizations lack middle managers to combine, sort, and prioritize the data. Technical, financial, marketing, and all other types of information must come in a form that all members of a cross-functional team can understand. This involves reducing the amount of specialized jargon, sorting information based on importance, hiding complex statistical procedures from the users, giving interpretations of results, and providing clear explanations of difficult. Data visualization systems can present complex results in an intuitive manner. Less goal dominatedSince the publication of Peter Drucker’s views on Management by objectives, business decision making has become more goal-oriented. Managers have come to view decision-making generally, and strategic thinking in particular, as a multi-stage process that starts with an assessment of the current situation, defining objectives, then determining how to reach these objectives. Management by objectives took this basic scheme and applied it to virtually all significant decisions.Today many firms have started to opt for a less structured, more interactive approach. One way of implementing this involves using self-directed cross-functional teams. Proponents hope that these teams will develop strategies that will re-define industries and create new “best practice”.[citation needed] They think that incremental improvements do not suffice.[citation needed]Cross-functional teams, using unstructured techniques and searching for revolutionary competitive advantages, allegedly require information systems featuring increased interactivity, more flexibility, and the capability of dealing with fuzzy logic.[citation needed] Artificial intelligence may one day be useful in this aspect.