Shifting organisational paradigms

Organisations are changing, switching to an increasingly collaborate context. The development has been, in part, exacerbated by the growing technological and increasingly digitised nature of the workplace. The 21st century is continually challenging organisations to adopt and promote a new set of principles, attitudes, and values that embrace collaboration, de-centralised decision making, and teamwork. This shift in mindset can be represented quite nicely by the Manifesto for 21st Century Management (Challapilla, 2015), I believe, since it resonates quite well with all the recent collaborative statistics published in recent months:

Developing resonant relationships instead of perpetuating dissonant relationships
Inspiring, exciting, and motivating people instead of judging, evaluating, assessing them
Inviting people toward a vision instead of focusing on their task completion
Enabling self-organization instead of exerting centralized control
Cultivating intrinsic motivation instead of exploiting extrinsic motivation
Embracing and exploiting diversity instead of seeking conformance

This transformation in values, principles, and attitudes has resulted in organisations being technically forced to advance in ways that, in some cases, aren’t fully adapted, or ready for. Nevertheless, these 21st century management principles and values have pushed modern organisations to adapt a different set of goals, in order to cultivate a variety of technical, emotional, and professional competencies such as:

• critical thinking & problem-solving
• creativity & innovation
• communication
• collaboration
• flexibility & adaptability
• initiative & self-direction
• social & cross-cultural interaction
• productivity & accountability
• leadership & responsibility (source).

These 21st century skills reflect the targets of current organisational transformation goals, these “soft” skills are essential for the success of any organisation and are the building blocks for organisational resilience. Employee surveys reflect the same. The following 2020 trends of employee collaboration illustrate the direction of organisational development and focus:

1. 70% of employees said digital technology improved their collaboration (Source: ArubaNetworks).
2. Online collaboration tools and digital workplaces facilitate increased productivity by up to 30%, digital collaboration statistics reveal (Source: McKinsey).
3. 83% of employees rely on using technology for collaboration (Source: Alfresco).
4. Fully operational communication systems assist in holding on to top talents in companies by up to 450% (Source: Room to Escape).
5. According to virtual team collaboration statistics, remote working can save employers as much as $11,000 per year (Source: Global Workplace Analytics).
6. Happy workers can increase their productivity by up to 20% more than unhappy workers (Source: Social Market Foundation).
7. Collaboration is in the top four important skills for employees’ future success (Source: Emergenetics).
8. Extremely connected teams demonstrate a 21% increase in profitability (Source: Gallup).
9. Employees now spend about 50% more time engaged in collaborative work (Source: Harvard Business Review).
10. Roughly 75% of employees regard collaboration and teamwork as important (Source: Queens University of Charlotte).
11. Over half of employees say a strong sense of community kept them at a company longer than what was in their best interests (Source:Gusto).
12. Employees who acted collaboratively stuck at their tasks 64% longer than their solitary peers, whilst also reporting higher engagement levels, lower fatigue levels and higher success rates (Source: forbes.com).
13. Knowledge workers spend an average of 14% of their workweek in communicating and collaborating internally (Source: hubbion.com)
14. Workplace collaboration can increase successful innovation by 15% (Source: PGI.com)

A resonating element that can be traced along these trends is clear: teamwork and collaboration are essential for the success of any organisation.

I’ll be exploring this in more detail, specifically concerning highly effective teams.

Teams

Teams are an essential staple of any organisation. Teams are responsible for the greatest achievements any organisation has ever produced. The trend towards teams has been growing for centuries now, and in the most recent decade the preference organisations have had for team development has skyrocketed. This is due, in part, to the resilience, cross-functional and innovative capabilities of teams.

Successful teamwork relies heavily on the synergies forged by individuals with one another in order to create an environment where their purpose-driven contributions, service, and ideas are not only nurtured, but also promoted, in a positive constructive way. Team members prefer constructive collaboration over personal, ego-driven goals.

There are different kinds of teams which have served organisations for a long time. It began, in the past, with the adoption of functional teams and some have now shifted to new organisational forms called cross-functional teams.

Functional teams

In the past, teams were treated in functional groups administered in a highly hierarchical way. There were team leaders, line managers, project managers, and various people in middle-management responsible for issuing tasks, overseeing progress, documenting results, and coordinating individual units. These teams were controlled closely by functional managers and their internal line managers to focus solely on the functions that these employees were hired to do. These were functiona silos. All the eggs were in the same basket, and the company thought these people would be employed forever. They were kept busy 8.5+ hours a day for the benefit of the organisation, and the members of functional teams were "compartmentalized operating units isolated from their environment” (Motiwalla & Thompson, 2009).

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The graphic above is a great example of what functionally-driven organisations look like. This organisational diagram on the right is a magnification of a much larger organisational construct. This is likely a structure found at the 3rd layer, if not the 4th in a huge organisation. There are also medium-sized organisations that have this similar organisational hierarchy. It is called a "matrix organisational structure" for the fact that the functions move top-down and from left-to-right. Each row is controlled and administered by a middle-manager, they may be: line managers, functional managers, team leaders, etc... and each have a set of employees below them. They typically have the role title "Head of _______". Information is delivered top-down, and the lower you are in the hierarchy the harder it is to be heard.

Decoding the functional setup

What's most interesting is a familiar position I once held in such matrix organisations, the project manager. There was a line manager for project managers, there are always line managers in matrix organisations. We were administered as functional teams lead by the line manager. Line managers were given targets and goals by their line managers and so the pressure went down on the employees. Employees are busy fulfilling the goals of the functional manager, since they were hired for this purpose they were treated as functional silos. Each employee was already tasked by their functional manager to do the jobs they were hired to do, and that became the only thing these employees really cared about until the project manager came.

The project manager has a pseudo project, something very important for the executive manager and to their line manager (project management office, PMO). The PMO instructs the project managers that they need to finish project A, B, C, D, and E and the PMO assigns these projects to the various project managers that are available. The project manager works up a waterfall procedure whereby certain activities will be done at a certain time, and produces considerable upfront planning to be able to organise the activities of employees in each corresponding functional hierarchy. The project manager deduces that in order to get Project A complete, the project manager must seek the support of Employee A, Z, F, G and P, and these employees may be dispersed along different functional managers. Yet employees A, Z, F, G and P are working 100% already for Functional Manager A, Z, F, G and P. How is the project manager going to get Project A completed? The project manager must coordinate with Functional Managers A, Z, F, G and P to determine what resources could be had from the respective employees needed for Project A. There will be a negotiation and favours, and suddenly employees A, Z, F, G and P are reassigned to work on Project A while at the same time working 100% on the work for their functional managers. Some will argue that the employee capacity is adjusted to suit the needs of Project A, but the reality is that it is not true. I have experienced this myself.

Suddenly employees A, Z, F, G and P are "working together", but they don't know anything about what the other is doing, only that the Project Manager wants each of them to fulfil a specific task. The very tired employees must serve their respective functional managers who have their own agenda and their own needs to pursue. No one knows what the true status of Project A is, only that there are delays because employees A, Z, F, G and P are too busy to do anything for Project A.

I challenge you to go to an employee and ask them if they could lend you 2 hours in the week to do what you desperately need done. Do you know what they'll tell you? Speak with my functional manager, or "the boss". The boss asks you why you need this employee, clearly this employee has much more important things to do. Functional manager B doesn't see that Project A has any value for the company, only the company sees that, and maybe the project manager too.

I'll tell you what will happen, you won't get 5 minutes from this employee.

Surprise, surprise, nothing ever gets done in this kind of environment.

Functional teams were designed to fulfil a specific purpose. This compartmentalisation was better for the company because line management could easily administer these functional silos--all they had to care about was their own functional responsibilities, functional silos were easily monitored. Functional silosnever needed to care about the business itself, or what other functional silos were working on. Time and time again functional silos inevitably develop an unhealthy inward focus.

Cost of functional silos

Functional silos compete with one another for the share of the budget, often functional silos are driven by their own agendas in pursuit of their own objectives that may or may not be linked to the corporate agenda. This unhealthy competition makes it difficult to see the value other functional silos are delivering. This inward focus develops highly specialised talent that is driven on sustaining itself. Often these people in these functional silos become knowledge silos. These know-how silos make it increasingly difficult for organisations to achieve their flexibility and speed. These know-how silos often take the organisation "hostage", these people stay in the organisation for years and literally refuse to disperse their knowledge and adapt to new ways of working. The organisation can't do anything about it. This is exactly what is happening with ZHAW (Zurich Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaft), and for the past 15 years.

Weihrich & Koontz (2005) provide a considerable review of the disadvantages of the functional organisation:

• De-emphasises overall company objectives;
• Overspecialises and narrows viewpoints of key personnel;
• Reduces coordination between functions;
• Responsibility for profits is at the top only;
• Slow adaptation to changes in the environment; and
• Limits development of general managers.

The hierarchical nature of the organisation makes it difficult to identify responsibility and accountability, because those are typically differed to the "boss". The "boss" makes all the decisions and functional teams are expected to follow it. The bureaucratic bottlenecks complicated information delivery, priority assignments, priority ranking, accountability, role definitions, and coordination.

The antithesis of functional teams? cross-functional teams.

Cross-functional teams

Cross-functional teams have emerged as a remedy to the previously dysfunctional constructs most commonly associated with functional teams. Cross-functional teams contain members of various divisions/departments who work together in a concerted effort to synthesise a product, or service for use by a customer. There are several reasons why this is preferred by an increasing number of organisations who have dependent processes. In doing so, they:

1. Reduction in handoff: people take less time passing work over to one another, they don't have to go so far
2. Reduction in silos: team members work together and exchange knowledge regularly thereby reducing silos. Teams members develop a multitude of skills and have an awareness of the entire development of that product/service
3. A unified process: team members work together in a simplified process that best enables them to deliver the product/service
4. A common understanding: team members talk to one another on a regular basis and speak with a common understanding about their objectives and how they will get there.
5. Reduction in lead time: thanks to their agile methodology, cross-functional teams are able to synthesise the best of their collaboration for the purpose delivering sooner to their customers, thereby focusing strongly on lead time (as shown in the graphic below).

Not all cross-functional teams fulfill this promise. Cross-functional teams need to be sufficiently embedded in a system that nurtures them. Many of these cross-functional teams are managed inefficiently and ineffectively producing considerable waste and damage to the internal ways of the company itself. Functional teams who were in the past are presently thrown into a group with others who they never met, and whose work they don't understand, are expected to miraculously collaborate with one another.

Dysfunctional cross-functional teams

At the ZHAW (Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften) in the IT department, I had the displeasure of working with a team who had a member that consistently complained, daily in fact, that they had to listen to the work of his colleagues who he had no interest in hearing. This functional silo of 10 years complained because he was thrown into a team he didn't want to be in, and scrum masters have been quickly hired to try to "fix" things in that dysfunctional team. They were, in effect, forced to work together. There was never true collaboration in that team, and there never will be. This is a hard truth to admit, but this is exactly the kind of "cross-functional" team that will inevitably draw blood in an organisation that is already a staple of dysfunction.

At the ZHAW, 10 teams were constructed in this way and very few talented agilists were available to resolve the internal disputes, competing agendas, and alignment problems that existed throughout the entire supply chain of information. They adopted a flawed scaled agile framework called SAFe, considered one of the most heavy non-agile frameworks in existence. With no experience in SAFe, and poor outside intervention, ZHAW was destined to fail and is presently on the fast track to organisational failure. There is considerable evidence that forcing collaboration will only result in a reduction of morale, amplify divisiveness, and increase cynicism of the organisation's leadership and between participants of the system.

Characteristics of functional cross-functional teams

Tarricone & Luca (2002) provided an extensive literature review as far back as 1970 in an attempt to distill the common attributes of effective teams. In doing so, Tarricone & Luca (2002) collected the following attributes essential to effective teams: 


1. Commitment to team success and shared goals
2. Interdependence
3. Interpersonal Skills
4. Open Communication and positive feedback
5. Appropriate team composition
6. Commitment to team processes, leadership & accountability

Tarricone & Luca (2002) prepared a marvellous table in their foundational article, it is surprising what they have uncovered. Let's take a closer look at the details, published here directly from their epic study.