BACKGROUND

“…while there will always be a need for division of labor and departmental expertise, leadership team members must see their goals as collective and shared when it comes to managing the top priorities of the greater organization.” - Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

In my experience, the best teams – the ones that achieve the most challenging goals and perform at the highest levels – often have a common understanding for how “the job” gets done. The “job” could be cross-functional, like designing, planning, building, launching, marketing, and selling products.

I have seen exceptionally talented people with strong abilities encounter ideas from other exceptionally talented people with strong abilities. Each have a vision for how a certain business problem, or process, or project could be delivered. And usually, everyone is right from the perspective from which they view the challenge.

A breakdown occurs when the different people have different expectations of how work will be done, who is accountable for different aspects, what the steps need to be taken to get the job done, and the timing of actions. And that essentially means there is no common playbook by which the team is operating from.

Enter inefficiencies, frustration, division, and the absolute worst symptom of a poorly run team: mistrust. I think Patrick Lencioni got it right when he identified the core behavioral principals that great teams have (and poor teams lack), with “trust” being the foundation of everything.

I believe leaders have a core accountability to build a common understanding for how their teams will operate with their counterpart teams to achieve shared objectives. Not only does it increase the organization’s chance of realizing success, but it creates a healthy culture.

At Talend, we had several new leaders and many other leaders that had been with the company awhile. All the leaders were strong, capable, and well-intentioned. But the sum of the parts was not greater than the whole at that point. We needed to find a way to improve our pipeline to support our Sales organization.

Working with our Chief Marketing Officer at the time, the Chief Revenue Officer, and the VP of Sales Strategy, we decided to hold a cross-functional offsite with representation from all the teams involved in the GTM process, from Product to Marketing to Revenue to Customer Success and Professional Services.

Our objective was to identify, categorize, and prioritize our collective GTM concerns. The offsite was planned with exhaustive detail, and it was designed so that all attendees were active participants as opposed to observers.

To drive the active participation, I created several exercises that consisted of a few hours over two days. One exercise was designed to collect and document feedback on GTM concerns from each participant. As some key leaders were unable to attend the offsite, we created a virtual experience that everyone would use to capture, and then prioritize, our biggest challenges. This exercise had multiple steps that started with individual work, then evolved into group work.

The following day, we held other exercises. These exercises were designed to make the insights gained from the previous day actionable and define together how this one team – the GTM team – must work together.

Together, we prioritized the most important problems we needed to solve to improve our pipeline and revenue outcomes. We also agreed on the three least important problems – which meant that we all understood that our limited focus and resources would be applied on the biggest problems first.

Coming into this offsite, the leaders were positive and well-intentioned. Leaving the offsite, they were aligned, focused, energized, enthusiastic, and there was a new sense of trust across the team. Plus, it showed up in the results as we operated even more efficiently together and we started to see improvements in pipeline results.

As Patrick Lencioni also stated in The Advantage, “Teamwork is not a virtue. It is a choice – and a strategic one.”