Welcome back to our course on strategic innovation.

What we're going to do here is proceed directly from the prior video.

I promised we'd go into depth on how Cross-Functional Product Teams,

she also referred to as Heavyweight Teams,

how this can be deployed effectively.

And well, to do this,

we're going to discuss some of the distinctive features of these teams and

distinctive differences in how they

work and that end up being critical to their performance.

So to start, let's just pull back into mind

the key features of these Cross-Functional Heavyweight Teams.

As we can see on the diagram here,

we have a Heavyweight Project Manager,

senior person in the organization,

considerable clout and influence.

We have core team members who are dedicated to the project,

co-located, working as a team rather than in their functions.

The team takes full ownership of bringing the product or service from concept to market.

And the team is accountable to senior management in general,

rather than to individual functional managers.

So I'll talk more in this video about what it takes for each of

these key features to support high performance by the team.

The overarching message is going to be that these teams are very different,

they require a big change in how you think about their workings and the comparison point.

What we're going to compare them to,

is two functional teams.

Even if those teams have a project,

even if a team has a project manager,

that's doing some coordination work.

As we discussed last time with the example the Lightweight Team,

these are going to look very different.

And what I want to do first is to give you an idea of what

some of those differences are and then we'll move on to implications for the team leader,

senior sponsorship, and the team members themselves.

So what we have is a chart that

highlights key areas of difference between the Cross-Functional Team,

the Heavyweight Team, and a Functional team.

And it starts by identifying what the charter is,

what is the team's supposed to do.

So with the Cross-Functional or Heavyweight Team,

this is a broad dynamic charter.

The team is responsible for the product, like I just mentioned.

With a Functional Team,

we've got a narrow charter.

Just do a good job in the engineering,

do a good job on the marketing, et cetera.

So the implication then is that project ownership is quite different,

project ownership in the heavyweight team model is within

the team whereas project level ownership in

a Functional Team world is diffused across the different functions

because each of those functions is going to have

its own shot and its own team at the project, over time.

So where is the expertise that the team is going to use to achieve its charter,

to be successful in bringing things home?

Well, with the Heavyweight Team,

the expertise is primarily within the team,

and the team is co-located.

The function supply expertise and resources,

but the team itself is where a great deal of that happens.

Quite a contrast of the Functional Team where because we have staff,

because we have multiple functions,

each function provides its own experts to the project.

So the key implication there is that integration.

If you go all the way back to

the beginning of the discussion of teams and product development,

the underlying challenge, one of the key underlying challenges is how

do we bring information in different areas together effectively?

And with the Heavyweight Cross-Functional Team,

that's happening interactively in parallel within the team,

because the resources are put within a team,

whereas with Functional Teams,

we're moving from engineering to manufacturing to marketing,

it's sequential across the functions and senior managers play a big role in integration.

Again, come down one level,

think about what the team's charter is and now the implications for success.

Cross-Functional Team, Heavyweight Team,

we're talking about product success as our criteria,

Functional Team best practices used,

so very different criteria for success.

And this has implications for how the core members need to think.

In the Cross-Functional Heavyweight Team,

they need to think like general managers.

They're responsible for product success.

Their team is responsible,

so each one of them needs to think to a certain degree like a general manager,

they need to have a team hat they can put on.

Whereas in a Functional Team,

you can be comfortable in a much more narrow role doing your job as a functional expert.

Finally, accountability.

You put all these things together,

one of the things you noticed is this team is doing a lot more than the Functional Teams

were and it's accountable to senior management accordingly.

Senior management is empowering it rather than

each functional team that works through it

sequentially being accountable to a functional boss as they go through.

So the point is that we have a number of differences.

You can see a picture that these teams are going to need to work quite differently.

So the first thing I want to talk about as

an implication of those differences that I just

went through is what

the implication is for the capabilities that you need in a team leader.

Now, it's going to be pretty clear this is a very demanding leadership role,

and in fact to call the leader

a Heavyweight Project Manager to my mind really underplays what that leader is doing.

And this is really more I think

of something that looks like a senior leadership position.

And in fact, the experience of companies that use Cross-Functional Teams like these,

is that finding enough of these leaders is

a challenging task and that developing them becomes a strategic priority.

So what does it take, specifically?

Well, first, the leader is the ultimate owner of the project,

the team leader has to be the ultimate owner of this project,

and that means they have to be the concept champion,

the product champion, whatever you call it,

who advocates for this project up the organization to senior management,

down and across the organization through the different functions and so on.

And as part of that role,

they have to be the guardian of the projects integrity when

choices are made in different functions and levels of the organization.

So you can imagine there's a lot of communication,

there's a lot of conflict resolution.

This leader needs to be strong in those areas,

and of course that's what you want in a team leader in

any case but this is one where it's absolutely necessary.

And also the idea of a champion, a guardian,

implies a very high-level of commitment,

requires credibility within the organization and the courage of one's convictions.

So this idea that the leaders,

the ultimate owner of the project,

is the first capability that the leaders are going to need to be able to handle.

The leader also is going to need to be comfortable in various functional areas,

we have a Cross-Functional Team and so the leader

particularly needs to be capable of speaking the language of the various functions.

Now, maybe they're not going to be fluent in each one,

but they need to be functional in multiple languages.

Now, typically, a great deal the work is in the various engineering sub functions,

so we need the project leader to be able to lead this work

directly and that augurs towards someone

with an engineering background and that's often what you see.

But as importantly, the leader has to be able to take a market and customer perspective.

They have to have a first hand connection here,

where they're actually going and talking with customers or potential customers,

seeing the market firsthand so that the leader can communicate

this information to the team directly and with conviction.

The engineering and manufacturing and operations side needs that perspective.

And so the second capability we want to think about is

somebody who's got a broad capability across functional areas.

Finally, we need to have an active leader.

These projects are complex, demanding,

they stress the organization because we've got

the project organization overlaid across the functional areas,

there's a very high level of information flow and uncertainty.

So you're looking for a leader who's going to be able to be out of the office,

face-to-face with key participants and constituents,

communicating, identifying, or resolving conflicts, and so on.

This is more of a style that seems to be effective in this role,

staying in your office and planning is not what this is about.

So, clearly, we're looking at

a challenging set of roles for the team leader but the payoff is high.

And again, organizations that use this approach suggest that

recruiting and developing managers with this potential is a very high payoff undertaking.

Okay. So, we can move on from

the team leader to the interface with the executive leadership of the unit,

and this is also very different.

We've already talked about how

the cross-functional team is responsible to the executive team kind of as a whole,

rather than through each of the functional vice-presidents or managers.

And so what we see here is that much of the accountability for

product success is delegated to

the team rather than to senior managers, where typically it is.

What we need by implication,

and is a robust integration mechanism to connect the levels,

so that senior management can guide the team and empower it.

The approach that we see used here is one of executive sponsorship.

We have firms assigning an executive,

who is going to sponsor the team,

vice-president of engineering or marketing [inaudible] there's

a lot to the word sponsorship, right?

It suggests that the senior sponsor is going to coach and mentor the team and its leader.

They're going to help them, right?

But there's more to it than that,

and that's why the role is really a critical and demanding one, right?

The senior sponsor also becomes the channel through which

the executive team communicates with the heavyweight team.

It is not a situation where you want

every vice- president in the division communicating individually with the team.

This is likely to lead to mixed signals and complexity.

And avoiding these is the whole reason the heavyweight team was formed.

Remember, we've got a situation where we want to make sure that the demands of

your established mainstream products and services are not competing away resources,

time, and support from the innovation effort.

So, what we're doing is, we're taking that senior sponsor,

and we're making them the interface where they are both

an advocate and a liaison to the heavyweight team.

One of the critical things that the executive sponsor does

is clarify the governance process that's actually going on here.

That is they clarify the areas where the team is empowered to make

its own decisions as opposed to areas where

executive leadership will be very concerned and want to be involved.

For instance, executive leadership is typically going to be concerned and

keep relatively close control in areas like resource commitments,

incentives, pricing, and they're also going to want to

maintain visibility of milestone achievement and schedule slips, right?

Clarity in these areas helps the team move forward in a way that it

avoids violation of expectations and maintains confidence of executive leadership.

Now, if you're really making connections between the videos,

you will see a high-degree of affinity with this point,

and the idea that in the ambidextrous organization,

the independent innovative organization

needs to have a clear sense of what it can and can't do.

Okay. So, this issue of governance is one that is critical across innovation efforts.

But again, what we see here is a quite different way of

relating to the executive team rather than relating to each functional manager.

We've got a sponsor.

This allows us to empower the team,

reduces the likelihood of debilitating conflict and

variable support from executives in different functional areas,

but still provides the accountability and control that the executive team needs.

Now, last point is about team member roles or responsibilities.

The key here, right?

If we think about the core team members,

we've got typically one of these in each of the functions.

They're responsible for their functional areas on the team,

but they're also responsible.

There is an AND.

They're responsible for the functional areas

and the performance of the project as a whole.

And the AND is very important here, right?

Most team members will not have had much experience with the idea that they're

responsible for a project whose scope goes across functional areas.

In essence, they're required to take on an executive view,

a view that says that the right decision is the one that's the good for

the project as a whole rather than my function.

And the experience of firms as the team members vary

sharply in their comfort with the idea of putting on this kind of team hat.

And so a couple implications there is

that coaching and development of team members who are

joining the core team in a heavyweight methodology is really critical.

And also it becomes a nice way of seeing which team. All right then.

Let's finish up with some takeaways about cross-functional and heavyweight teams.

So, the reason we're discussing these in

the first place is they have some key advantages in terms of ownership and commitment,

and cross-functional project problem solving.

These teams can work very effectively,

and they get these advantages and still remain within the mainstream organization.

Integrating them back into the functional structure when the project is

complete is much easier than it is if you have an entirely separate organization.

And that speaks to where this approach should be used.

It can be well suited to products and

services that require new technologies or access new markets,

but still fit within a business unit strategic frame,

and so are likely to gain support within the leadership group.

And it's complimentary then to

the separate organizations that you might build if an innovation is going to be

disruptive or unlikely to gain such support as we saw

in the ambidextrous organization discussion.

So, the key thing to remember is that

this additional tool is not simply a matter of assigning some people to a specific place,

and giving them a leader, they require a change in mindset.

And the team leadership role is demanding one

particularly because the leader needs to translate across functions,

and be the product champion.

And the core members have to be able to take on a team role,

put on that team had versus a functional hat that they're used to.

And we need executive sponsorship rather than

management where the sponsor advocates for the team,

but also provides a vehicle for

the executive leadership to guide and hold the team accountable.

Focus on using "Heavyweight" Product Development Teams

Strategic Innovation: Managing Innovation Initiatives

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