P&G CEO, Jon Moeller said it best when asked: What’s next in a transformation for P&G?
“We have to organize against outcomes, not tasks,” he said. “Heavily siloed functional organizations are an economic dinosaur. They’re expensive, slow, and make decision making inefficient because each person only sees a small sliver of the business.”
Nearly every industry is filled with companies heading for extinction. If your organization operates with prehistoric ways of working together, you are likely experiencing a steady state of inertia despite the energy you’re exerting. It may be tempting to check out (many do).
But that’s not how you respond to challenges.
You may not be a CEO who can make changes in the next board meeting, yet you can still advance the modernization of your company from the inside out.
As we’ve equipped and certified Connectors in creating seamless organizations, three disciplines have proven crucial for success:
1. Practice creating daily deep alignment horizontally. Relying merely on shared goals as a glue to bind business units, functions or departments together is like using adhesive, cellophane tape to hold two race cars together. It’s not even a good show.
Deep alignment means you’ve established relational capital between high-integrity individuals operating in different parts of the business. This value isn’t created by socializing. It requires a process where colleagues commit and measure their effectiveness at delivering not just a shared goal, but a human imperative as well.
2. Establish a shared reality. If your organization is a dinosaur, there may be leaders at the top who are baffled by the fact the company’s expensive ERP, CRM or digital transformation is not delivering transformative outcomes.
That’s because data isn’t knowledge. Data only creates value when those using the information create shared meaning from it. You can develop a shared reality by prioritizing frequent, open forums for rich debate and problem solving.
3. Empower decision making at the edge of the enterprise. New information (read: data proliferation) is now generated at speed and volumes current org structures can’t manage. Therefore, if a project team has a problem on the floor and they send their issue up to their boss for answers the company is headed for extinction: By the time the boss confers with their peers and sends a solution down to the floor, the old problem has already been replaced by a new one.
By demonstrating the first two disciplines – creating deep alignment and a shared reality – you can then empower those closest to the problem to solve the issue soon after discovering it.
Cross-functional teamwork is a dynamic of the past, being replaced by thriving, seamless organizations. Are you making history?
