Functional Team
Alignment
Functional Team Alignment
People often associate the “functional team” with a business itself. This is because most companies operate under a functional organizational structure, where leadership oversees different functional departments, each with their own specialization.
But each department is made up of its own functional team operating the same way, with a manager overseeing the team’s internal operations, and reporting back to leadership.
Functional Team Characteristics
This is the most common hierarchical structure of a team for several reasons:
- Communication flows smoothly because functional teams are organized around a specialization or common skills
- Operations run like a well-oiled machine. Problem solving, project management, and even onboarding of new hires all become easier (for example, a senior developer can bring a new hire up to speed more quickly than an HR manager can)
- When teams understand their goals, workflows are smoother, and there’s clarity around outcomes
But we’ve all worked in departments that were misaligned, confused, and even toxic (or heard horror stories about them). Which makes the alignment of a functional team crucial to business success—especially for bigger companies.
Functional Team Alignment: Vision
Functional teams are ahead of the game because they’re already organized around a shared specialization (you’re aligned with your team members if you work in sales based on what you already know about sales). But as we know, that’s not always enough, or toxic workplaces and communication breakdowns wouldn’t exist. A vision for what success looks like may not always be clear unless it’s clearly stated. To strengthen team alignment in this area:
- Your leadership team must have a clearly defined and well-communicated vision
- Leaders of each department should be clear of the company vision and how to communicate it to their team
- Each department should have it’s own shared vision for what success looks like
Employees who feel they are part of a team are almost 3X more likely to be fully engaged, highly resilient, and to report a strong sense of belonging to their organization. And remember that motivation and performance are directly linked to a sense of trust and purpose.
Here are some tools for aligning your functional team with a shared vision for its department:
- Vivid Vision – You can create a version of a Vivid Vision document specifically for your team based on our process here.
- Google re:Work’s 2-Day Vision Guide – Google has an 8-hour process for managers who want to co-facilitate their department vision with their team.
- Rally Around Shared Goals – Michelle Tait, the CMO who was tasked with integrating two teams after Intuit acquired Mailchimp, used the slogan “Beat Our Best” to inspire them to define marketing goals (and asked two simple questions: “What must we do to truly serve the needs of our customers and fuel growth?” and “How might we #BeatOurBest?”)
- Use Wins As Reinforcement – Shared joy or happiness reinforces human bonds. Celebrating wins together as a team, no matter how small, helps keep the team motivated, but as Google suggests in their guide to team effectiveness, they’re also opportunities to showcase how the wins contribute to the team’s broader vision.
- Show Real-World Impact – Google also suggests leaders make time to reflect on how incremental accomplishments are impacting the organization and the world, while also fostering psychological safety.
- The Vision/Traction Organizer™ – For those that follow an EOS model, The VTO™ is another option.
Functional Team Alignment: Talent
Attracting, developing, and retaining the right people will help increase efficiency, but values and culture-fit play a crucial role in team alignment. When Conscious Copy & Co. asked business leaders what the purpose of clarifying the company’s Vivid Vision was:
- 44% of the businesses we asked shared they would use their Vivid Vision as a recruiting tool to attract the right team members.
And this 15-year study which analyzed over 4,200 surveys given to organizations all over the world revealed that the first condition for a high-performance team’s success was a “compelling direction.”
In other words, a clear vision.
Decades of research shows, that to strengthen this area of The Alignment Triad, and organization’s team should:
- Start with a culture of shared values, which should be part of the recruiting process
- Embrace diversity as a way to strengthen culture and boost performance
- Be developed and invested in by leadership
- Implement strong reinforcements to retain their talent
- Empower department heads to lead rather than manage
Since functional teams are the norm, there’s already a ton of great information out there about recruiting, developing, and retaining talent. Here are a few great places to start.
Recruiting Talent
- Be Strategic – Great recruiting requires strategic thinking like any other part of an organization, and aligning talent starts with making alignment a priority.
- Hire For Purpose – Of course, a company will have had to define that purpose first.
- Share Your Vision Upfront – Share the company Vivid Vision within the job description. This is an excellent way to stand out against the competition in the recruiting process.
- Identify The Right “Who’s” – EOS’s People Analyzer strategically narrows down “who’s right for what” in an organization.
- Observe – Check out this guide The New York Times put together for managers looking to hire.
Developing Talent
- Walk The Talk – Management must embody the culture and values they wish their teams to adopt.
- Invest In Development– Most team members will stick around if the company invests in them.
- Know How To Spot & Develop Talent – Identify future leaders by rethinking how you measure behavior.
- Help People Thrive – Most companies wish to increase employee engagement, but Microsoft takes a different approach.
- Use Your Vivid Vision – The vision you have for your team and company is your north star. You can use it to help develop your team members by referencing it, and asking where they see themselves fitting into the bigger picture.
Functional Team Alignment: Structure
We covered the organizational structure of functional teams and organizations in the Types of Teams section under fundamentals. How a team is organized will depend on several factors, mainly size. What’s most important are the operational structures used to:
- Make decisions
- Solve problems
- Communicate
Organizational Structure Of A Functional Team
The two most common organizational structures are the mechanistic top-down structure and the organic structure.
For now it’s safe to say that most functional structures are top down, which brings us to the strategic operational design of the team.
Effective Structure Strategies For Team Alignment (From The Experts):
- Structure Should Serve Your Purpose – Create a purpose-driven team, to stimulate engagement and performance. The roles and functions of of your team should clearly complement its aspirational mission.
- Visualize Where You Fit – 63% of employees who could see the value their roles played were more productive. Allow team members to see where they fit within the organization’s future.
- Clear Organizational Structure Enhances Performance – This should be obvious, but the more organized your structure, the more productive the team.
Functional Team Decision Making Process
How your team makes decisions will affect overall team alignment, and their ability to solve problems. This study showed that high-performance teams followed the same set of principles when it came to making decisions:
Some decisions matter more than others.
The decisions that are crucial to building value in the business are the ones that matter most. Some of them will be the big strategic decisions, but just as important are the critical operating decisions that drive the business day to day and are vital to effective execution.
Action is the goal.
Good decision making doesn’t end with a decision; it ends with implementation. The objective shouldn’t be consensus, which often becomes an obstacle to action, but buy in.
Ambiguity is the enemy.
Clear accountability is essential: Who contributes input, who makes the decision, and who carries it out? Without clarity, gridlock and delay are the most likely outcomes. Clarity doesn’t necessarily mean concentrating authority in a few people; it means defining who has responsibility to make decisions, who has input, and who is charged with putting them into action.
Speed and adaptability are crucial.
A company that makes good decisions quickly has a higher metabolism, which allows it to act on opportunities and overcome obstacles. The best decision makers create an environment where people can come together quickly and efficiently to make the most important decisions.
Decision roles trump the organizational chart.
No decision-making structure will be perfect for every decision. The key is to involve the right people at the right level in the right part of the organization at the right time.
A well-aligned organization reinforces roles.
Clear decision roles are critical, but they are not enough. If an organization does not reinforce the right approach to decision making through its measures and incentives, information flows, and culture, the behavior won’t become routine.
Practicing beats preaching.
Involve the people who will live with the new decision roles in designing them. The very process of thinking about new decision behaviors motivates people to adopt them.
Other Effective Strategies For Functional Team Decision Making
- Involve The Right People At The Right Level, At The Right Time – Small to midsize organizations and teams often face the problem of having only one or a handful of decision makers, who quickly become bottlenecks. Larger organizations face a similar problem -all their decision making powers flow to mid-level management, which stresses out the managers and leaves leadership unclear. Clarify who has the say-so at each level.
- Develop A Decision Profile – Outline what critical success factors determine whether your decision leads to the desired outcome. Include metrics, and a way to gauge the probability for each option.
- Try the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) – One of the most popular EOS meeting tools is called the Issues Solving Track™, where you go through an IDS process: identify the problem, discuss it, and solve. Sounds simple, because it is. Read more about it in their eBook, “Decide!”
- Strategize Based On Your Organizational Type – Different businesses have different purposes and culture. Use a decision making process that’s tailored to your purpose to align everyone needed to make decisions.
Functional Team Communication
The most important predictor of a team’s success is its communication patterns. There is a direct correlation between how an organization communicates and its performance.
80% of businesses stated that their goal was to use their Vivid Vision as a communication tool. And in this article from 2012, called The New Science of Building Great Teams, the researchers uncovered that successful teams share communication characteristics:
- Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
- Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
- Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader.
- Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.
- Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.
- The data also establish another surprising fact: Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect. The best way to build a great team is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.
The data also establish another surprising fact: Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect. The best way to build a great team is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.
Effective Strategies To Strengthen Team Communication
- Make Communication Part Of The Culture – Create a culture where communication is prioritized, even when it’s difficult to do so, and especially during times of crisis.
- Solve Problems Efficiently – Help your team collaboratively discover efficient ways to solve problems. When the procedure has been designed together, communication while solving challenging problems improves.
- Communicate Authentically – Choose the best way to communicate authentically depending on your situation. Negative emotions can be authentic, but communicating them requires self-awareness and skill.
- Define Your Communication – Whichever strategy or business methodology you implement in your organization, clearly define its functions.
- Alignment Meetings – Re-energize your team by carving out time to reflect back on your vision and goals. Or, you can build alignment into your daily, weekly, or monthly meetings. You can also dedicate part of your EOS agenda to realignment—whatever makes sense for your team.
