{"id":1056,"date":"2020-04-01T08:31:25","date_gmt":"2020-04-01T08:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1056"},"modified":"2020-04-04T06:12:28","modified_gmt":"2020-04-04T06:12:28","slug":"focus-on-outcomes-for-cross-functional-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/04\/01\/focus-on-outcomes-for-cross-functional-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"Focus on outcomes for cross-functional teams"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by Maike und Bj\u00f6rn Br\u00f6skamp from Pixabay\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With the vast majority of white-collar staff in companies currently working from home, the normal ways of managing people are disrupted quite fundamentally. Working closely with people in such a way that you can tell them what to do is much more difficult when you\u2019re not physically in the same place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, many organizations rely on meetings to align and \ncoordinate work that crosses team and function boundaries. Because \nvirtually all meetings take place online, their effectiveness is even \nlower than usual. I\u2019ve already talked to people who are literally stuck \nbehind their computers for back-to-back online meetings for ten hours in\n a row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than complaining about the situation and the inefficiency of \nworking in this way, I\u2019d like to outline an alternative approach: move \nto cross-functional teams that get tangible, quantitative outcomes as \ntheir target and that are otherwise left to their own devices on how to \naccomplish these outcomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although it\u2019s obvious that in almost all contexts, this is a better approach, few, especially traditional, companies are adopting it. The reasons are many, but some of the primary ones include: a lack of clear quantitative goals for most individuals and teams \u2013 in last week\u2019s post<\/a>, I wrote about the reasons for this; a need for control by management, as in my experience, especially in more traditional companies, the culture tends to lean towards hierarchy; the Taylorian mindset of dividing every end-to-end task into multiple slices and giving each slice to a department, function or team and assuming a waterfall-style handover process; the belief that most work is repetitive and can be optimized by asking individuals and teams to specialize on their narrow slice of the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These reasons may have been justifiable at some point in the past, \nbut this is most certainly no longer the case. All work that\u2019s \nrepetitive these days is automated and if it isn\u2019t, you better automate \nit soon. This means that the only work left for humans is the work that \nwe\u2019re best at: complex, unique tasks that require creativity and a \nvariety of skills to resolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cross-functional teams are uniquely suited for taking on this type of\n work. By establishing the team around the skills expected to be \nrequired for the task, people with different skills can together work on\n addressing the challenge. As coordination cost within teams is orders \nof magnitude lower than coordination across teams, functions and \ndepartments, the efficiency of work is much higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second aspect of the approach is that rather than telling teams \nwhat to do and how to work, they receive tangible outcome targets. It\u2019s \nthen up to them to figure out how to achieve these targets. This may \nrequire experimentation with customers and products, prototyping, and so\n on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we describe in our work on value modeling, the outcome targets \nshould be part of a hierarchical value model that links the top-level \nKPIs for the business with the mid-level and team-level targets. So, all\n teams have targets on which to focus but also guardrail metrics that \nthey\u2019re not allowed to affect negatively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With most of the people in industry working from home, perhaps the time has come to reinvent your organization along these principles and instead of suffering through the disruption, you can use it to lift your organization to the next level. Focus on setting outcome targets, not on telling people how to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>) or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the vast majority of white-collar staff in companies currently working from home, the normal ways of managing people are disrupted quite fundamentally. Working closely with people in such a way that you can tell them what to do is much more difficult when you\u2019re not physically in the same place. Similarly, many organizations rely … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,8,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1056"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1061,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1056\/revisions\/1061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}