Reimagining Functions as Value-Driven Teams
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Liberating Teams podcast. I'm Holly Breeding team psychology practitioner and org effectiveness consultant. Every week around here, we dismantle the outdated hierarchical leadership systems that keeps leaders like you stuck in the weeds and break down how to build a self-managed team that thrives without you at the center.
Because when your team has the clarity systems and ownership, they need to lead themselves. You finally get to lead strategically. It's time to liberate the way you lead.
Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast and the first one of the new year. Oh, y'all, I'm so excited about this topic. We are kicking things off with something that's a little bit outside the box. We're definitely going to push your thinking today in the best way. And what we're gonna be talking about is reimagining how we think about our functions.
[00:01:00] From these traditional, functional based teams that exist to oversee processes and initiatives and meet timelines and KPIs to these teams that exist to deliver value through a product or service.
As we start to see these shifts in the ways of working with the introduction of AI and everything going on in the environment, the constant change the complexity increasing, I really think we're going to start to see a shift in how we view functions. And this is going to impact everything about how you lead, how you think about your strategy.
How you think about developing your processes, the talent you're bringing in, how you're thinking about what to innovate on, what to prioritize improving on. This right here is going to provide so much clarity, so we have a ton to cover, so we're gonna jump right in and what. And we're gonna start [00:02:00] by talking about how we traditionally view functions today.
So traditionally, functions are viewed, you have your finance, your hr, your ops, your marketing, your revenue management, and for each one of these departments. What I see is a lot of leaders, they step into these roles and it's my job is to manage this function that I've been given.
And so what goes into managing a function? It's making sure that we have the processes in place, that everyone has our specific role that they're delivering on, that we have a set list of, initiatives or KPIs that we're delivering against. We're meeting our timelines. Our goal is typically, how do I improve how this function runs?
And this is our industrial era mindset creeping back in. So if we talk about it a lot here about the history of leadership and how we got here in the industrial era, the job of leaders was all [00:03:00] about, I have these machines. My job is to figure out the one best way to. Create, the widget, the fastest, the simplest, the cheapest.
And then I'm gonna disseminate it down to my people who are just going to do, and that's really how we view functions today, right? It's what is like the most efficient, the best way to execute on these processes, to make sure no one makes an error and we're just gonna go deliver. And then we keep on adding more initiatives, more things to deliver on, and we just run the machine.
And, some stakeholders, some higher up adds more requests and we're like, great, run it through the machine. Then we see this company over here doing this thing and we're like, we should be doing that. Run it through the machine. We really have this factory mindset, and you can tell, there's one way I can tell right off the bat if teams are operating from this and that is looking at their mission or their purpose [00:04:00] statement.
If it reads something like. We exist to X, Y, and Z and X, Y, and z is a list of, activities or, sub functions within this function. We're running off the factory mindset. It's something like we exist to provide financial analysis, planning, and forecasting to support business decisions.
Like we just took the different functions, teams or tasks that we do. And that's our whole purpose. That is that that factory mindset, we're all about executing process, delivering on deliverables. That's why a lot of the time our strategy is just a roadmap of internal initiatives. We gotta do all of these things, execute all these projects.
And it oftentimes, it's really focused about optimizing efficiency of the work. It's process improvement, it's adding new tools and now [00:05:00] this wasn't necessarily a bad approach in, the industrial era or even in what we call the information era the era previous to where we are right now, which is the intelligence era.
Because things at that time were relatively slow moving functions really did have very defined roles and things they were responsible for. It was possible to go out and find like the one best way, the benchmark, the rule for running finance and just copying and pasting and then, blindly delivering against the book. And you'll deliver value to your company. But we no longer live in that world now. We live in this fast pace, constantly changing.
Markets are shifting, tech is shifting, competition is shifting at an insane pace then we've ever seen before. And so now you're not going to see here's the one best way to [00:06:00] run finance. Because there's so many different moving parts in all of our different functions. We have different levels of AI adoption, and our markets are constantly changing where the way they do finance over there in the industry they're in is very different than where we are at. And so I, we're already seeing this, you guys have been experiencing this as you've, tried to adopt frameworks that worked really well over there.
But didn't produce the same results at your team. Or, when we bring in the consultants who have like that one standard way of doing things and they apply and your company completely falls apart, there are too many moving parts, too much complexity in our systems, in our functions now, for us to simply view it as that factory mindset, find the one best way to do it, apply it.
Blindly execute against it, and you'll create value because by the time somebody [00:07:00] figures out the best practice, the benchmark and disseminates that information it's already old news at this point because that's how fast changes happening in the world of work we live in today. And we can't ignore the impact of AI here as well.
We have CEOs under immense pressure from boards to start adopting and receiving the benefits of AI introduction. And so we're going to start to see a lot more scrutiny placed on our functions and, these traditional processes we've had in place. Asking questions like, are we getting the value we should be getting out of the effort we're putting in?
And we're really gonna start to see people hyper fixate on the value versus the cost or effort Index. Yeah, because what we've realized is a lot of functions over [00:08:00] time have built up, they just started tacking on processes and sign offs and, controls and different ways of doing things.
Until we've built these like behemoth monsters where you have to go through 17 steps just to do one little task, and the effort and cost doesn't align with the value created. And I think we've been able to get away with that up until this point. But now with this obsession with efficiency and how can we get more, faster, better for less, I think you're gonna see a scrutiny really start to rise up on the value that we're producing compared to the cost or effort to create that value.
So I think all of this is creating this perfect storm where we really need to start to shift how we're thinking about our function is we as leaders don't exist to manage this function. [00:09:00] Instead, we exist to create value to deliver some sort of product or service to a customer. In sense, we all become little mini.
Companies within a broader organization. So instead of asking, how do I run this function well, we're now asking what value does my function exist to deliver? And to whom? This is that product mindset. So let's get like specific, let's give some examples. So finance traditionally you're going to hear, a purpose statement, something like, we oversee.
Budgeting, reporting and, financial planning for the business. It's very task focused. Instead, we're going to identify who do we exist to serve. And I think this is where a lot of functions really struggle. 'cause they're like, oh, I don't have a customer. [00:10:00] It's easy for our front facing organizations, like customer service it's like we serve the end user, but for our teams like finance, hr, things like that, it's a little harder to see, but every single function exists to serve someone some one, or some group of individuals. And now as we get lower within the function, like finance, for example, if we're looking at, accounting versus fp and a, they might have slightly different customers, but overarching, our customer in finance is the other departments, and our job is to help them do their job better.
And a lot of people don't look at it that way. We think of our functions, like I mentioned before, that factory mindset is we exist to oversee these processes and almost like compliance functions. I see a lot of times, even if we don't outright say it, it's how we view it. Everyone needs to follow our perfectly [00:11:00] planned processes to a T.
Like that's our number one priority is almost like. Forcing compliance to our process. Instead of saying, we exist to provide value to these customers, and we should be focusing on their needs, what is going to best help them? So for finance, what their value statement should look like is something more along the lines of helping leaders know where to invest, spend, or cut so that teams can maximize return on capital.
So in this statement, we understand, okay, they're supporting, they exist to support departments. And their ultimate goal is to maximize the return on capital. And I think this is so important right here because another thing that I see in functions is that we get really obsessed with measuring all of these different metrics and KPIs and all the different things [00:12:00] you can measure about our function.
And we obsess over, audit compliance and report timeliness and budget accuracy, and it's like none of that matters. Is it important? Sure. But at the end of the day, if we exist to help support these departments in maximizing the return on their capital, 'cause that's the best way we can support our business.
Our broader business is if we helped every single department maximize their return on the capital so they're able to do their job better. Then really what matters is the percent of investment decisions that deliver the expected ROI or above, because at the end of the day budget accuracy, what outcome does that provide for the broader business?
What value does it provide You can be accurate with a budget and still create zero value for the broader organization, and there's a [00:13:00] lot. Of metrics that's the case. We're measuring things that you can make look good on paper, but they still don't create any tangible value for the broader business at the end of the day.
I think a great example is the next one. So hr, you think about HR and it's really about administering, people, policies and programs, things like that. Instead of being really clear on the value we provide to this organization, which is ensuring that the each department has the right people skills and retention to hit their strategic objectives.
And what I see, this is a space where we start to get really obsessed with compliance and programs. How can we make sure everyone follows our processes and like we dictate all these processes, here's the talent planning process.
Like here's how to set the smart goals and do all of these things. And we get so obsessed with the process that we're like, is this process. [00:14:00] Actually effective. We are so obsessed with every department adhering to this process when on the backend we all know that it is not hitting the goal of helping them develop the right people skills and retention to hit their strategic objectives.
But we could say, because we measured how many people, did the talent planning process or put in their smart goals and we're like, it was a 98% completion. Yay. We're doing great. And it's that doesn't matter. Like hooray, that everyone's following the process, but the process isn't producing any value.
Are you starting to see what I'm saying here with the difference between that factory mindset of run the process, manage the function? Execute the deliverables, the initiatives versus what is the tangible value we're creating for the business. And I think you could start to get in this thing. The, the, this process is [00:15:00] valuable, this is beneficial.
Like I picking on our HR folks a little bit I see this in training a lot is I tell this story about when I was working. With a customer service department who just had a massive amount of their leaders had left during the pandemic. And because of that, it was wreaking havoc on this customer service department because now you have a ton of new folks who have zero tenured leaders above them because all the leaders are new.
And what is that doing? It's dramatically decreasing the effectiveness of these customer service calls affecting our frontline customers, right? Our end users the people that help this business make money, the. And so we're working with them to say, okay, how do we quickly develop, these highly skilled leaders and build this knowledge that these [00:16:00] previously tenured leaders have as quick as possible?
And I'm like, okay, let's jump in and let's bring learning and development on board. And everyone like side eyes each other. I am like, okay, what? What's going on? What am I missing here? Oh we've talked to learning and development. They don't have time in their schedule to, to work on this project.
And y'all, that floors me. You are saying that a project that is so fundamental to this broader business, making money, like providing the best service to our customers as possible. We don't have time for that. And so when I go and I talk to that learning department, I'm like, Hey, I'm just curious.
What do you got on your strategy this year? What are you focusing on? And they're talking about all these programs and initiatives for like high performing talent and leaders and this and that. All of those are important. All of those provide some sort of value. But if our ultimate purpose, the [00:17:00] ultimate goal that we exist as a learning department is.
Making sure that businesses have the right people and the right talent to hit their strategic objectives. We are failing. We have Sure fancy programs and we're hitting all the benchmarks and people are talking about our learning and development programs out in the world and saying how we're the new benchmark and how fancy everything is that we're doing.
But yet we are fundamentally failing at producing our core value. Because we shouldn't be obsessing over training, completion rates or time to hire. Those are important things, but really our core performance metric should be the percent of teams who have the people and skills necessary to meet their strategic goals
if we're measuring our value to the business, that's what it would be.
And y'all, I [00:18:00] know that this is a tough love moment and this is in no way meant to take away from those amazing programs and, and then those initiatives and that the work that we have done as functions, that is important work. But as we see this shift with this obsession with AI and the balance between, you know, value, output, output for effort put in, and we see how fast this world is moving, how, how.
If the market around us is moving, customer demands are constantly moving. Competitors are constantly changing and, and our strategy, therefore as a business and how we make money, is constantly having to adapt and evolve well. The pressure and the demands on our functions are going to skyrocket. Because everyone needs everything 10 times faster and then the next day things have changed and they need these things asap.[00:19:00]
And so if we as, as leaders, as functions aren't incredibly clear on here is the value that we provide to the organization and we are obsessing over how we can do that better, faster, easier. Versus getting distracted by all of these other things we could be doing. That's going to be the difference to the teams that, that excel and thrive in this era, versus the ones who, who start to drown in the demand, the pressure, the constant change, the the waterfall of work coming their way.
It's easy to get caught up in managing the function, in executing the processes, in trying to implement the benchmarks instead of getting really, really focused in on who is our customer and what is the specific problem we solve for them and [00:20:00] hyper fixating on how well we did that versus did everyone adhere to these processes? Had we put more controls in place to make sure they do it? Did we meet these metrics or KPIs or did we deliver on these, 72 initiatives that we felt were important at the beginning of the year. And because I like to go on rants, this is why so many teams struggle to prioritize is because they're missing this when your job in, in your eyes is to manage a function. To, oversee all these processes and, and deliver all these initiatives and, and meet these timelines that's so arbitrary in that scenario.
Yes, everything's a priority. We exist to serve everyone, to make everyone happy, and so it's hard to say what should have your focus, what you should be doing, because your [00:21:00] sole goal is to manage this function well, whatever well is. And so it's very, very hard to figure out what's important, but when you have a very specific goal where you understand, here's who I exist deserve, here's the main problem I exist to solve for them, now things become so much clearer.
You can see what things are, a distraction. You can see, why that benchmark over there actually isn't something you need to be focusing on. Why you don't need to add that process or that deliverable because it's not critical to your mission. Why you don't need to obsess over adding this new fancy, high performer, program because that's not the priority right now.
It helps provide focus. On what matters most. So the thing that I love to do with my leaders is to [00:22:00] imagine that you are an external company, so just your function. So if your finance, if your marketing, if your hr, just think about your function and say you are an external agency and people come to you for your services or the product that you create.
And I love, love, love. Highly recommend to do this with your team and I want you to ask them, who is our customer?
Some functions look at you like What? We don't exist to serve anyone. That's because that old school way of thinking about our functions. We exist to manage processes. We exist to ensure compliance, but every single function, I promise you, serves a customer, whether that be internal or external to the organization I love to have them each write down their individual answer on sticky notes, and then we go ahead and we stick 'em all up on the board so you can see the differences in what people say. And we can have conversations around them. [00:23:00] Like I can tell you with my own function, so we were organizational effectiveness consultants, and so we went in and helped teams who were struggling.
To optimize how they were working. So process improvement, structural shifts, things like that. And we had this conversation and you know, half of us thought our customer was the employee. Because we were helping them solve problems to make their job easier. Half of us thought it was HR because a lot of the times it was the HR business partners of these different departments.
You brought in the requests and they were our main partner in delivering on these things, and half of us thought it was the, SVP of the department, the function. And we had a really good conversation around it. And while all of those people were, were crucial stakeholders that we wanted to make happy, at the end of the day, the person who would've been paying our bill, if we were external consultants, was that department [00:24:00] head.
It'd be coming out of their budget. So at the end of the day, they're our customer. They're the one we're providing the value to. Sure. We're also providing to hrps 'cause we're helping them solve a problem. Sure. We're also providing value to employees because we're, we're trying to make their job easier, but at the end of the day, it's that ultimately that department head that is our consumer.
And why this is so critical is because we lacked the focus about who our customer was. We were getting distracted. At the end of the day, our customer was the department head, and the biggest value we could provide that customer. And therefore the broader business was by helping create a structure and ways of working that allowed them to execute on their strategy.
Because that was their biggest problem, is they had this strategy but there was something about their structure, their ways of working, how their team was operating together, their [00:25:00] processes that was preventing them from executing on that.
And so if we were able to help every single department structure themselves and their ways of working in a way where they could easily execute on their strategy, imagine what that would do for the broader business. But because we weren't clear on our customer, we weren't clear on the number one problem they needed us to help them solve, we got distracted.
We started spending time on, initiative with HR business partners, and we developed a, a, a training for them and, improving their, knowledge of organizational effectiveness. Was that helpful? Was that important? Sure. Did it serve our ultimate purpose? No. We got distracted with how we were investing in ourselves and our own thought leadership.
We were working on tools and things that were interesting to our field that we were passionate about. [00:26:00] But was it the things that were the biggest issues preventing our departments from executing on their strategy? No, and it goes back to what we talked about before. If we aren't clear on exactly who we serve and the problem we solve for them in our little micro business.
Then it's incredibly easy to get distracted and pour ourselves into all of these different avenues. And are good things, and that's what makes them so dangerous is because they're important, but they're not critical. If we go back to that learning and development example, those high performing programs, were important and they did good work, but it was at the cost.
Of losing sight of something that was critical to the business. It's like if you put it into percentages, it's like we gained like a 2% improvement by, you know, uh, four functions in their ability to [00:27:00] meet their, their goals by doing these high performing programs. But one of our departments that is critical to our business, we decrease their ability to do their job massively. So it's like they're, they're good. At surface level valuable, but they distract us from our core mission, the core value we exist to serve.
So I want you to ask this question with your team. Who is your customer at the end of the day? Who would be the one hiring you? If you were an external agency or a firm or consultant, and then I want you to ask the question about what is the number one problem that they are coming to us to solve? And I'm gonna be real with y'all.
You're not gonna get this right on the first try. So the first time you have this conversation, everyone's gonna come up with a ton of different answers. And you're gonna group 'em together, kind of try and find themes, and then you're [00:28:00] gonna have a discussion around it. And a lot of teams really struggle with this because we've never thought of our function through the lens of a product or service organization who supports a customer.
And because of that, we've spent really little time getting to know our customer. We spent really little time truly sitting with them and understanding their biggest struggles, what they need most from us, what they're worried about, what keeps them up at night.
We spent very little time doing that.
So oftentimes when we think about this question, we very much do it through our lens. Or our specific teams within this function, and we, you list out, you know, tasks or, or, um, deliverables they want for us because that's that factory mindset, that functional mentality coming out versus thinking about it through the lens of a company. A department isn't going to hire [00:29:00] my financial firm just because I, develop budgets or develop reports. Those are tasks I perform, but why, what problem do I help them solve?
I picking on my own team for a minute. We went from, we deliver, org structure and process improvement to, we help leaders develop the structure and ways of working , to execute their strategy. I, so the value we created is improving their ability to execute on their strategy, and that's what we focused on.
That's our core metric. Is once we were done with this initiative, were they more or less efficient at executing their strategy? Because if they had hired us as an external consultant, that's what they would be wanting. That's what they would be paying us for.
And this should be the key thing you focus on in every part about how you run your function. [00:30:00] How many times do we develop strategies and we don't even think about our customer? We're, the finance department and we're sitting here thinking about what processes do we think we need to improve to make our function easier for us, or to follow best in class or to do this thing over here?
We don't even talk about the other departments. We don't take the time to sit with them and say, Hey, what do you have going on this year? What are your biggest stressors? What do you feel like your biggest opportunities are? What, what do you need more from us? What didn't go so well last year? What did you love the most?
And using that to guide what we need to focus on. Imagine if that learning and development team that we talked about earlier had to developed their strategy by talking to their customers first. Then they would've realized there was much bigger needs in the business than the programs and initiatives that they were working on.
That is a great example of why,, an area where we developed our [00:31:00] strategy by looking inwards instead of at the people that we serve. It should impact how you think about your work.
It is not about how we can develop this rigorous process that controls people into following it. It's not about us executing the PMP process perfectly. It's about the value it provides to our customers. It this should impact, what things you're looking at. Improving on within your function. I see a lot of times, innovation and, and improvements to our functions.
That's last on our list, right? Business as usual, BAU is what we focus on. Improvement. That's, that's something if we have time. Now, imagine you are an external agency or, firm, and that's your mindset. How quickly [00:32:00] would you go out of business? It would be a, blink of an eye because all around you, there's people who are learning how to solve that problem better, faster, easier.
And that's happening right now in organizations is we have, leaders , and teams who are like, why is it so easy for me to do these things outside of our company? But when I come into our company, working with your function is like going back to 1985. So, of course they're creating shadow functions.
Of course, they're turning to AI or doing it themselves because we've lost sight about the fact we exist to serve a problem, and it is our job to hyper fixate, to obsess over that problem and how we can do it better, faster, easier. No one cares about [00:33:00] rethinking that process over there, or creating fancier deliverables over here or developing that PowerPoint deck.
They care about this problem and how we can better serve it, because at the end of the day, that's what's going to create the most value to the organization.
So that's what I want you to think about. Who is your customer and what is the problem you exist to serve? And I want you to start to look at your strategy. I want you to start to look at your metrics that you are, look, , you're measuring your, your team against. I want you to start looking at that list of initiatives you have for this year and does that reflect it?
Okay, y'all, let's go do the work.
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