3 Best Practices to Achieving Cross-Functional Alignment (Part 1)
New Year, New Opportunities
The start of a new year provides a time to reflect, plan, and re-energize. For many of us, this means the creation of New Year’s resolutions and personal goal-setting exercises. For businesses, it typically means gathering the entire organization to celebrate the past year’s wins and preview how the company plans to achieve its upcoming annual goals.
The new year — and the energy that comes with it — is a catalyst for creating excitement and alignment within an organization. Yet, like many well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions, the energy and alignment generated at annual company kick-offs often begins to fizzle as soon as people fall into their daily routines.
This is why it’s critical for organizations, teams, and individuals to purposefully focus on building and maintaining cross-functional alignment throughout the year, not just during kick-off season. Kick-off meetings and planning sessions can be excellent motivators to get various teams on the same page. However, without intentionally honing this collaboration throughout the year, organizations and teams put their lofty annual goals at serious risk.
As your team takes advantage of this ‘new year energy,’ here is the first of three best practices you can use to help your organizations build long-lasting cross-functional alignment and sustain that unity throughout the year.
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Pre-Planning: Learn from the Previous Year, Together to Achieve Cross-Functional Alignment
When reflecting on the previous year (or quarter), seek cross-functional feedback and facilitate retrospective workshops that include key stakeholders from teams across the business. Use these feedback mechanisms to better understand what processes, activities, and projects positively impacted the business — and what initiatives were ineffective, inefficient, or simply failed to meet expectations.
Identifying the positive outcomes from the previous year enables the business to continue capitalizing on those initiatives, or even increase investment in those areas. Alternatively, understanding where there are perceived gaps across the business allows the appropriate teams to incorporate those insights into annual planning.
For example, when evaluating the previous year’s successes, determine which product launches were most effective and why. Going through this process alongside cross-functional stakeholders, such as sales and product, provides a well-rounded perspective to ensure that best practices are maintained and launch pitfalls are avoided. (Bonus: do this exercise after each launch instead of annually to accelerate improvements.)
Taking this time to reflect on the year’s successes and shortcomings also extends to customer health. The beginning of the fiscal year is an excellent time for cross-functional teams to conduct a deep dive into a small subset of health and at-risk customers to learn what made them successful and what put them at risk. This type of review will most likely yield action items for several groups throughout the organization and conducting it together ensures the teams can work together to ensure any systemic issues are addressed.
Get Expert Assistance in Aligning Your Teams
Carema Consulting partners with B2B SaaS businesses across a variety of markets to help them not only align their teams around key revenue-centric goals but also to maximize the performance of teams such as customer success and product marketing. If you’ve been struggling to get your team on the same page, we’re here to help. Connect with us today.
Read to put the feedback gained into action? Read part two here on planning.
