With both cross-functional teams and individual employees, employers must look beyond teamwork and get to partnership.While teams focus on accomplishing tasks, partners must be committed to each other’s success. That difference alone can set your business apart in the marketplace and mean the difference between thriving and surviving.
In North America—and indeed in much of the industrialized world—business has been managed through compartmentalizing work by function. While this approach may have created some efficiencies when organizations were self-sufficient, the information age has made this practice obsolete. Businesses are recognizing that it is through cross-functional processes that customers get satisfied. If one function fails to live up to the customer’s expectations, the whole organization looks bad. Ultimately, the entire organization pays the price for less-than-ideal customer service.
For example, consider a client of mine: Qwest Wireless. Within the business, two departments—Sales Development and Order Fulfillment—were competing with each other to handle a piece of the process. Sales Development was responsible for ordering customer equipment based on customer requirements, industry trends, sales forecasts, and the capabilities of manufacturing vendors. Order Fulfillment managed equipment inventory and shipped customer equipment from a warehouse once an order was received. The crux of the conflict was this: Who reordered equipment when inventory was low? While this may seem a simple inventory management issue, it was much more complex because of the product’s nature. Wireless telephone handsets are a rapidly evolving product that is updated three or four times a year. Although the handset design itself may change only periodically, the software that runs the features is updated many times during the same period. Consequently, a new handset today can be rendered obsolete tomorrow by updated software.