Cross-Team Alignment

Coordinating the Efforts
of Multiple Employee Teams

While more and more businesses are realizing the benefits of forming crossfunctional employee teams, few companies have an effective process for coordinating the efforts of multiple teams—so that the result is a cohesive enterprise-wide strategy, instead of a series of disjointed change initiatives.

Managing and coordinating the efforts of multiple employee teams is a responsibility that is typically assigned to senior executives within the business. Yet these top managers often have other priorities and duties that preclude them from focusing enough attention on this critical task.

By helping its clients to form coordination teams and manage many crossfunctional team efforts simultaneously, GMT has facilitated the development of highly strategic plans that have improved clients' competitive positions and financial performance dramatically—by transforming disparate team efforts into highly cohesive business strategies.

Making the Most of Teams
The Coordination Team: Delivering Cohesive Results
Placing Team Efforts in a Larger Perspective
The Collective Effect: Strategic Growth

Making the Most of Teams

Given the difficulty of forming multiple crossfunctional teams—and then monitoring and managing these teams' progress—GMT has created a unique process that helps clients to answer such questions as:

	Are all our teams working with the same internal performance and external market data?
	Do teams understand the relationship between our top-level strategy and their charter?
	Do our teams share their plans and results?
	Are any teams working at cross-purposes—or fighting for resources?
	Do the efforts of all our teams reflect a unified enterprise-wide strategy?

The Coordination Team: Delivering
Cohesive Results

GMT helps clients to form a coordination team—composed of key team leaders—that oversees and orchestrates the work of all crossfunctional teams throughout the business.

The coordination team is charged with collecting and managing input from every team, providing a unique perspective on:

	Conflict resolution across different teams
	Crossfunctional representation among all teams
	Resource requirements and conflicts that may slow progress
	Synergy among the initiatives of all teams
	Expected outcome of all team initiatives, including bottom-line results

By helping all teams to quantify their plans in a consistent manner, the coordination team ensures that they are working toward sound performance targets. The coordination team also assesses the data and assumptions guiding each team—and makes sure that all teams are working with the same information.

Placing Team Efforts in a Larger Perspective

The greatest value provided by the coordination team lies in aligning the work of all teams, knitting these separate improvement efforts together to create a unified strategic plan. The coordination team ensures that the work of every team is directly linked to the company's most critical strategic imperatives—and that the work of all teams supports a shared set of priorities and objectives.

For instance, if a basic challenge is to achieve operational excellence, there may be teams that are obviously supporting this goal by determining activity-based costs, minimizing inventory, or eliminating redundant facilities. While other teams may be primarily supporting other strategic objectives, their work must still be consistent with the goals and initiatives of operational excellence.

The Collective Effect: Strategic Growth

Based on their interactions with individual teams—and their enterprise-wide perspective—the ultimate job of the coordination team is to work with senior executives to create and implement a strategic plan that links the financial and performance improvements of all teams.