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“If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” – Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt In a highly-competitive business environment, organizations that foster a culture of collaboration enjoy a distinct advantage over their more siloed counterparts. Collaboration gives companies the opportunity to leverage collective...
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“If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.” – Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt
In a highly-competitive business environment, organizations that foster a culture of collaboration enjoy a distinct advantage over their more siloed counterparts. Collaboration gives companies the opportunity to leverage collective expertise and knowledge (so they can know what they know, to paraphrase Platt) to achieve enhanced results. One of the most powerful tools to this end is a multidisciplinary task force.
What are Multidisciplinary Task Forces?
Multidisciplinary task forces of high-potential employees focus on a particular challenge, problem, or opportunity that the organization is facing. Essentially, the process involves bringing together smart, motivated people who have unique ways of viewing the situation. Each brings her or his particular talents, experience, and expertise to bear.
On such a team, a leader might gather idea generators, who can engage in breakthrough thinking; “shapers,” who can put those ideas into workable plans or strategies; “resourcers,” who use their contacts and experience to ensure the team has the resources it needs to implement solutions, and organizers and finishers, who handle the nuts-and-bolts: the doing.
The most significant advantage of a multidisciplinary team is their diversity. Conversely, it becomes a significant disadvantage when a team is stocked exclusively with, for instance, creative people. In this type of environment, no one takes minutes or handles the technical details that will ultimately translate idea into reality. There’s typically no follow-through; and they often lack the discipline to accomplish tasks.
So while “multidisciplinary” does refer to business functions (e.g. human resources, IT, operations, and finance) it also refers to a multitude of personal styles and perspectives. Isn’t This a Committee?
Multidisciplinary task forces and committees share some of the same qualities; however, they differ in significant ways. A committee, for instance, tends to be “standing.” The only reason for it to cease to exist is if its champion or the organization’s leader decides to dismantle it. A task force, on the other hand, has a single objective: after it fulfils the job at hand, it dissolves.
Task forces are typically smaller than committees: they tend to work best when they comprise five to nine individuals. When it grows larger, it increases the likelihood that the group will splinter into different factions and interests.
Why Use Multidisciplinary Task Forces?
These teams engage the best and brightest employees in real challenges facing the organization, which encourages them to think more strategically. Members start performing at a higher level, generating more—and different—ideas that can be applied to the issue at hand.
This translates into real results. In 2000, for instance, Procter & Gamble faced a threat to its survival: despite heavy R&D spending, share price dropped precipitously. Productivity and innovation plateaued.
The mandate for incoming CEO AG Lafley was to turn this around. One of the initiatives brought to fruition under Lafley’s leadership was “Clay Street.” Designed to boost innovation, a cross-functional team gathered at this offsite location and spent 10 to 12 weeks reinventing one of P&G’s brands (Herbal Essences). By leveraging the collective knowledge of the team, P&G boosted the shampoo’s index (measure of sales growth relative to last year’s) from 76 to 124.
Team members were encouraged to “bring their whole selves to the problem solving process, not just their functional expertise.” Through a culture that supported collaboration, Lafley increased productivity by 60%, doubled the innovation success rate, and reduced the cost of innovation. Multidisciplinary teams were critical in reviving P&G’s innovative spirit—and profitability as an organization.
The challenges and opportunities that face organizations today require innovative thinking and problem solving. Multidisciplinary task forces that cross functions, personal styles, and perspectives can be a powerful solution for meeting the needs of an ever-changing business landscape.
Bob McCulloch is a recognized authority in providing strategic guidance and executive coaching for tomorrow’s top business leaders. Employing a question-based approach and with over 40 years’ experience, he is able to build strong, trust-based relationships with senior-level executives who are looking to move the needle in their careers from good to great.
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Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” The goal of group or team facilitation is to get to the point where your team is working together towards a common purpose. Once everyone has “bought in” to that purpose it becomes an...
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Henry Ford said, “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” The goal of group or team facilitation is to get to the point where your team is working together towards a common purpose. Once everyone has “bought in” to that purpose it becomes an intent worth realizing on both individual and collective levels. Effective team facilitation can mean the difference between working at cross-purposes and contributing to the success of an organization.
What does effective group facilitation look like?
- Clear description of Future Intent
Starting the group facilitation process with a clear and shared understanding of what is the desired outcome is critical for success. The group facilitator will start with the session’s executive sponsor, asking questions like: What are you wanting to accomplish through this facilitated session? What outcomes do you expect to achieve? What challenges are you facing? What have you tried in the past? What does success look like to you?
Then, the facilitator will interview all – or at least key – participants, depending on the size of the group, asking similar questions: What challenges are you facing in meeting objectives you’re accountable for? What is your take on a particular issue? Where do you want to be at the end of this session?
Armed with these inputs, and a clear vision of where the group needs to go, the facilitator will then fashion a customized session designed to reach these goals.
- Do-able Agenda Design
An experienced facilitator knows the importance of a thoughtful, well-planned agenda. Participants are coming to facilitated sessions with individual positions, preferences and perceived risks. Starting out the session by driving straight towards your ultimate goal – “We’re here today to understand why operations and client services are not working together effectively” – forces people to defend their positions. It creates an Us vs. Them mentality that hinders group work and collaboration before it can even begin.
Instead, an effective facilitation should begin with exercises and messaging that elicits honesty from participants without the need to defend their positions. It is therefore useful for the first 20% of the session to be focused on building agreement and shared understanding among the parties through a series of thoughtful, powerful, and more open-ended questions.
- Leveraging the Power of Questions
As always, questions are a crucial component of this group work. What are the compelling opportunities you face as a team or organization? What are the threats? Drill down. Questions beget questions, and they lead to creativity, innovation, solutions, and commitment.
- Authentic Participation
Each individual on your team may participate in a different way. There are those who want to get their thoughts in order before they share; others feed off dialogue and the exchange of ideas; still others just start talking and let their brains catch up to their mouths after. All three ways are valid ways of contributing; what your facilitator needs to do is ensure that each is able to voice his/her opinion and contribute to the process.
Effective group facilitation depends on the ability of the facilitator to elicit responses, opinions, preferences, and answers from team members. Once this happens, they will soon find that collectively they are more than able to find the solutions they need.
Bob McCulloch is a recognized authority in providing strategic guidance and executive coaching for tomorrow’s top business leaders. Employing a question-based approach and with over 40 years’ experience, he is able to build strong, trust-based relationships with senior-level executives who are looking to move the needle in their careers from good to great.
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Author and former BBC executive Anthony Jay writes, “[A]ll of us know in our hearts that the ideal individual for a given job cannot be found. He cannot be found because he cannot exist.” No one person has every competency, perspective, and style required for the successful completion of complex...
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Author and former BBC executive Anthony Jay writes, “[A]ll of us know in our hearts that the ideal individual for a given job cannot be found. He cannot be found because he cannot exist.” No one person has every competency, perspective, and style required for the successful completion of complex challenges. Ideal teams, though, can be created by assembling people with diverse styles and perspectives.
8 Roles that Contribute to Team Success
In an article published in 1992, Jay describes eight roles that, when working together, are capable of yielding exceptional results. These roles were formulated by UK-based Dr. Meredith Belbin and include (reframed for the North American marketplace):
- Facilitator. While she or he may not be the “leader” in title, she is often the leader in practice. She coordinates the efforts of the group, keeping its objectives in mind and leveraging the strengths of the members to achieve them.
- Shaper. This individual gives shape to the team’s efforts and is driven by results.
- Originator. As the “idea person,” the Originator is a rich source of breakthrough thinking and fresh suggestions.
- Evaluator. This person evaluates, or criticizes, the ideas of the Originator. He or she is likely the most objective person on the team, unmoved by excitement or enthusiasm.
- Organizer. Every team benefits from an Organizer, who translates ideas into manageable tasks.
- Resourcer. This individual leverages connections and contacts outside the group and brings back ideas, suggestions, and information.
- Nurturer. Aware of the emotional undercurrents and the needs of individuals, this member tends to worry about the welfare of others and works to create harmony and balance.
- Finisher. Urgency drives this person, prompting him or her to check every detail, meet deadlines consistently and obsessively, and keep others on track.
Each of these roles complements the others. For instance, an Originator does little good unless there is an Evaluator to question the viability of the ideas. Organizers can turn plans into action items, but teams cannot complete them without the help of the Resourcer, and so on.
Likewise, the “weaknesses” of each can be counterbalanced: a finisher, for instance, has little patience for casual, happy-go-lucky teammates, but the Nurturer can help smooth the waters.
In my experience, teams or task forces that have all eight styles represented outperform those that have three or less. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need all eight members for every team. People typically have two styles that they prefer to use; four or five people—carefully chosen—can usually cover all eight styles.
How Does Having Fewer Styles on the Team Impact Collaboration?
Multidisciplinary task forces that do not include all eight roles can still collaborate. They typically will not achieve as positive a result as those task forces that include all eight roles.
Let’s say a team was comprised of Originators. There are five people around the table, and they’re coming up with brilliant ideas. The difficulty is that Originators don’t typically listen to anyone else. This can lead to a lack of testing, relevancy, and development of ideas. They’re so tied up in their own thinking that they cannot collaborate effectively or meet their objective. In other words, while they may have an idea with the potential to become a solution, they lack the wherewithal to translate it into workable steps, implementation, and follow-through.
Divergent and Convergent Thinking
Another way to think about it: Every team needs divergent thinkers (generating new ideas and building on existing ideas, diverging from conventional thought) and convergent thinkers (reaching conclusions, and making choices).
If you have divergent thought without convergent thought, you simply have ideas that don’t go anywhere (like the team of Originators mentioned above). If you have convergent thought without divergent thought, you will not have original thinking, debate, or dialogue.
When team members have similar styles, there is bound to be some blockage in the collaboration process. A healthy mix of divergent and convergent thinking, of thinkers and doers, is necessary for a fully functional, effective multidisciplinary task force.
Increasingly, collaboration is necessary to unlock innovation and achieve more complex objectives. When a team comes together with all eight styles, it has the means to create original ideas, and then test, develop, and implement them to further the goals of their organizations. “Ideal” individuals for a given job may not exist; but when those individuals come together as a team, they can achieve exceptional results.
Bob McCulloch is a recognized authority in providing strategic guidance and executive coaching for tomorrow’s top business leaders. Employing a question-based approach and with over 40 years’ experience, he is able to build strong, trust-based relationships with senior-level executives who are looking to move the needle in their careers from good to great.
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Strategic thinking not only requires the ability to anticipate or project one, three, or five years into the future; it requires the ability to look at a business unit, division, or company as a whole. Viewing the organization as a network of interdependencies, each of which relies on the others,...
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Strategic thinking not only requires the ability to anticipate or project one, three, or five years into the future; it requires the ability to look at a business unit, division, or company as a whole. Viewing the organization as a network of interdependencies, each of which relies on the others, emphasizes the need for collaboration at all levels.
A Collaboration Case Study
I once worked with a client who was the head of the credit function at a small bank that specialized in small business credit. Their process included three major activities: soliciting applications, adjudicating applications, and, if accepted, funding the loans.
This bank was small enough that the money on deposit was not sufficient to support a large portfolio of loans. The client determined that his bank was particularly good at adjudication, however; it was able to identify and quantify risks associated with loans quickly and well.
While the bank didn’t want to take on every loan, those businesses applying still needed that funding—and there were still institutions that would accept the risk. The client asked, “What if we join forces with those other institutions? We’ll take all the applications we can get, adjudicate them, and then decide where to place them. Either we can take it on, or we pass it to another organization that is willing to accept riskier loans at a correspondingly higher interest rate. In that case, we’ll earn revenue for doing the adjudication.”
Of course, to do this, the bank would have to change its processes for soliciting and adjudicating loans, as well as the processes for placing the loan.
This individual was thinking strategically, and now he had to bring the rest of his team on board. He gathered the executives of the different loan functions and asked them, “How do we make this work?”
In this case, collaboration occurred after the high-level strategic thought was put in front of the team. Those people had to determine what the changes would mean for their specific parts of the business, as well as the bank as a whole. All three functions (soliciting, adjudication, funding) had to be in balance or it wouldn’t work.
The collaborative process allowed the executives to see clearly and understand the interdependencies at a strategic level. They had to realize that, no, they were not independent functions; rather they were interconnected components that needed each other. There is, after all, very little for adjudicators to do if no one is soliciting any loans. Nor is there any need to solicit loans if no one is available to fund them.
Collaboration identifies all of the interdependencies that will make the strategy work—or not work. It can be quite useful for organizations to have a third party lead teams through the strategic development process, clarify interdependencies, and ensure collaboration leads to positive results.
When planning strategy, while it is essential to ask, “Where do we want our company to be?” it is equally important to identify all the interconnected parts that have to work together to get it there and make sure they’re moving in the same direction.
Bob McCulloch is a recognized authority in providing strategic guidance and executive coaching for tomorrow’s top business leaders. Employing a question-based approach and with over 40 years’ experience, he is able to build strong, trust-based relationships with senior-level executives who are looking to move the needle in their careers from good to great.
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Strategic thinking and operational thinking may seem like two separate planes of existence. In reality, though, they are more like two sides of the same coin. As leaders, we like to think of strategic thinking as the overarching thought process that guides an organization in its key decisions and general...
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Strategic thinking and operational thinking may seem like two separate planes of existence. In reality, though, they are more like two sides of the same coin.
As leaders, we like to think of strategic thinking as the overarching thought process that guides an organization in its key decisions and general corporate direction, while operational thinking focuses on the tasks that are completed at “ground level.” And it’s those tasks completed day-to-day that ensure strategic goals are being met. In order to function effectively, organizations need both kinds of thinking
Most leaders would agree that without strategic thinking, there would be no basis on which to guide operations. But you can make the opposite case just as convincingly: without operational thinking, there would be no way to put those innovative strategies into action. And there is a time for both kinds of thinking.
Strategic thinking focuses on the “whys” and “whats” of your organization:
- Why are we in business?
- What is it that we really want to be doing?
- Why is it important?
- To be successful, what do we need to start—or stop—doing? …and what could we do more—or less—of?
What do all of these questions have in common? They are all part of the conceptual and often longer term thinking process. We engage in strategic thinking when we want to focus on the future, but most of the work done in any organization happens in the present. That confirms why most jobs require operational thinking which is firmly grounded in the present. When we’re busy coping with the urgencies of the moment, we feel we can’t afford to think strategically. We need to concentrate on the “hows” instead of the “whats” and “whys”:
- Doing things right as distinct from doing the right things.
- Focusing on the means as distinct from ends.
- Driving the vehicle as distinct from drawing the map.
It’s no accident that most organizations ask their employees to devote most of their time to operational thinking. Operational thinking drives productivity. It’s also the “validator” for effective strategy. You might even go so far as to say that without operational thinking, there would be no strategy. At the same time, without strategy, there would be nothing to guide operational thinking.
But because leaders are responsible for both the present and the future of the organization, both kinds of thinking are integral parts of their job description.
The difference between leadership positions and non-leadership positions is that as an employee, your longest unsupervised task might last about 90 days, whereas leaders may work unsupervised on tasks with yearlong or multi-year horizons where day-to-day details are rarely a factor.
Both kinds of thinking are integral to an organization’s success; they are not mutually inclusive. Each type of thinking needs to happen regularly: team strategic thinking needs to happen at regularly scheduled intervals, for example. Following this strategic thinking, formal reviews and adjustments (where needed) must be undertaken and, finally, tactical and operational business decisions must be continually assessed against the stated strategic direction.
Strategy is crafted with going concerns in mind. As such, the first phase in strategic thinking could be considered to be one where the leadership “steps back to move forward.” This means that the team may assess the current situation, determine what is working or is not working, and then devise a strategy to improve metrics across the board. The lines between operational thinking and strategic thinking are thus blurred, with each interacting and interweaving with the other to encourage the most optimal results.
By balancing both kinds of thinking—each in its due time—leaders can move from idea to action and chart a course from the present to the future, then improvise along the way using the strategy as a decision-making filter, as obstacles and surprises present themselves.
Bob McCulloch is a recognized authority in providing strategic guidance and executive coaching for tomorrow’s top business leaders. Employing a question-based approach and with over 40 years’ experience, he is able to build strong, trust-based relationships with senior-level executives who are looking to move the needle in their careers from good to great.
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