Case Study · Leadership Culture
Enhancing X-functional collaboration & breaking silos
How to align leadership team members on process optimization across departments?
Context
Collaboration frictions were affecting the business unit.
The business unit experienced frictions in the collaboration between departments.
Challenges with operating in a matrix setup as well as a lack of open communication led to increasing employee dissatisfaction.
Audience: 14 team members
Location: Graz, Austria
Timing: April 2023
Facilitation setup: one facilitator
The Challenge
Leadership team alignment on process optimization across departments.
The following workshop goals were aligned:
- Understand needs and expectations from all divisions.
- Identify crucial behaviour changes.
- Define a joint team vision, which would be activated by all leaders.
Workshop Process
From best-in-class collaboration to personal commitments.
On the first day, the team focused on a common understanding of the ideal collaboration and analyzed current barriers and suboptimal behaviours. Building on the robust dialogue from the first day, the second day was dedicated to a joint team vision and personal commitments.
01
Best-in-class collaboration
The team created an aligned view of how the ideal collaboration across departments should look.
02
Key barriers
Key barriers that were holding the team back from the ideal state were identified and concrete behaviours to let go of were agreed.
03
Vision & commitment
In a co-creation process, a joint team vision for the leadership team was developed and all participants committed to a specific action to bring the new team vision to life in their departments.
Key Output
Aligned team vision. Clear change behaviours.
The workshop created a shared vision and clarity on what to avoid in a high-performing team culture.
Aligned team vision
A common understanding of the ideal future collaboration model was created based on a set of shared values and behaviours.
Clarity on distractions
The team gained clarity about distractions and misbehaviours to avoid in a well-functioning collaboration across departments.
From Workshop to Execution
Every leader defined personal ownership for the next 100 days.
Every leadership team member defined and shared a personal commitment for the activation of the shared team vision in the next 100 days.
All team members worked on a change plan for their division with proposals shared two weeks after the workshop. Individual department plans were reinforced with healthy peer feedback. All employees were informed and onboarded onto the journey in a town hall setting and updated quarterly on progress.
Impact
The team built a stronger foundation for joint problem-solving.
Organizational understanding
Through active listening to department-specific challenges, a deeper level of organizational understanding was created and opportunities for joining forces to find solutions were identified.
Psychological safety
The open dialogue and vulnerability shown by team members over the 1.5-day workshop increased psychological safety and led to higher trust and stronger bonds between team members.
Joint problem-solving
The aligned team vision and change behaviours built a strong foundation for joint problem-solving practices across departments, driven by all leadership team members.
Let’s connect
Need to break silos across departments?
A leadership culture workshop can help leadership teams surface departmental needs, align behaviour changes and activate a shared team vision across the organization.