Driving Change Through "Advocate" Teams

The Power of Crossfunctional
Decision Making

In many organizations, top-level strategies are created with limited input from those who have the best understanding of customers, suppliers, work processes, cost structures, competitors, and other critical issues.

If a company's strategic planning process doesn't reflect the contributions and buy-in of functional managers—and others in the business who must enact change on a daily basis—the result will be a plan that fails to achieve broad commitment and lasting change.

With years of experience in team facilitation and strategic plan development, GMT has created a process that leverages the power of crossfunctional "advocate" teams to drive growth.

These teams—which are supported in their work by both senior executives and lower-level employees—identify the most critical issues facing the organization and develop the strategies and implementation plans to address them.

A Team-Based Approach to Critical Issues
Creating Ownership and Momentum
The Importance of Multiple Perspectives
Comprehensive Solutions—Leading to Rapid Results

A Team-Based Approach to Critical Issues

GMT's advocate team process helps businesses of all types to create solutions to challenges such as:

	Do we truly understand—and respond to—the needs of customers and end users?
	What new or emerging channels should we participate in?
	Can we improve our speed to market?
	Do our product and service offerings reflect the high standards of our brand name?
	Are our facilities and processes cost-effective?

Creating Ownership and Momentum

Depending on the unique challenges facing the business, the work of individual advocate teams is centered on addressing a specific challenge such as:

	Exploring product or market innovations
	Penetrating new distribution channels
	Accelerating product development
	Improving sales effectiveness
	Reconfiguring the supply chain

As they work to address these issues and explore strategic options, advocate team members are empowered to create sub-teams, which may include dozens of additional employees who can help the team to identify opportunities, gather information, and overcome obstacles.

This process ensures that these employees feel a powerful sense of ownership and commitment, because they are involved in defining broad strategies and specific change initiatives.

The Importance of Multiple Perspectives

GMT's advocate team process also helps to ensure that strategic solutions reflect a high degree of innovation and creativity—made possible by incorporating the perspectives of employees who represent various functions and levels of responsibility.

While a traditional attempt to improve product development might only include engineering and marketing managers, GMT's approach leverages a much greater variety of perspectives.

An advocate team addressing product development might include sales and marketing managers who understand customer needs, operations managers who know manufacturing capabilities, and logistics experts who distribute products. The team also would consider the needs of end users and suppliers.

In addition, a broad range of perspectives can help in looking beyond "business as usual" and creating far-reaching change. While a traditional customer service team might ask "How can we improve our current processes for responding to customer inquiries?" an advocate team would ask "What are the root causes of customer inquiries—and how can we eliminate them?"

Comprehensive Solutions—Leading to
Rapid Results

While a typical strategic planning effort might only address the two to four most pressing business challenges, GMT's advocate team process enables the enterprise to attack many issues simultaneously. And, because top executives empower many advocate teams to work in concert, strategic solutions are more comprehensive.

GMT's advocate team process allows clients to see results quickly, as individual teams simultaneously make decisions and enact changes. While the senior team monitors these broad-reaching change initiatives, executives are not the only people responsible for creating and implementing strategies—nor the only people who feel ownership and involvement in the strategic planning process.