Functional Team
Alignment

Functional Team Alignment

People often associate the “functional team” with a business itself. This is because most companies operate under a functional organizational structure, where leadership oversees different functional departments, each with their own specialization.

But each department is made up of its own functional team operating the same way, with a manager overseeing the team’s internal operations, and reporting back to leadership.

Functional Team Characteristics

This is the most common hierarchical structure of a team for several reasons:

  • Communication flows smoothly because functional teams are organized around a specialization or common skills
  • Operations run like a well-oiled machine. Problem solving, project management, and even onboarding of new hires all become easier (for example, a senior developer can bring a new hire up to speed more quickly than an HR manager can)
  • When teams understand their goals, workflows are smoother, and there’s clarity around outcomes

But we’ve all worked in departments that were misaligned, confused, and even toxic (or heard horror stories about them). Which makes the alignment of a functional team crucial to business success—especially for bigger companies.

Functional Team Alignment: Vision

Functional teams are ahead of the game because they’re already organized around a shared specialization (you’re aligned with your team members if you work in sales based on what you already know about sales). But as we know, that’s not always enough, or toxic workplaces and communication breakdowns wouldn’t exist. A vision for what success looks like may not always be clear unless it’s clearly stated. To strengthen team alignment in this area:

  • Your leadership team must have a clearly defined and well-communicated vision
  • Leaders of each department should be clear of the company vision and how to communicate it to their team
  • Each department should have it’s own shared vision for what success looks like

Employees who feel they are part of a team are almost 3X more likely to be fully engaged, highly resilient, and to report a strong sense of belonging to their organization. And remember that motivation and performance are directly linked to a sense of trust and purpose.

Here are some tools for aligning your functional team with a shared vision for its department:

Functional Team Alignment: Talent

Attracting, developing, and retaining the right people will help increase efficiency, but values and culture-fit play a crucial role in team alignment. When Conscious Copy & Co. asked business leaders what the purpose of clarifying the company’s Vivid Vision was:

  •  44% of the businesses we asked shared they would use their Vivid Vision as a recruiting tool to attract the right team members.
SOURCE: Conscious Copy

And this 15-year study which analyzed over 4,200 surveys given to organizations all over the world revealed that the first condition for a high-performance team’s success was a “compelling direction.”

In other words, a clear vision.

Decades of research shows, that to strengthen this area of The Alignment Triad, and organization’s team should:

Since functional teams are the norm, there’s already a ton of great information out there about recruiting, developing, and retaining talent. Here are a few great places to start.

Recruiting Talent

Developing Talent

Functional Team Alignment: Structure

We covered the organizational structure of functional teams and organizations in the Types of Teams section under fundamentals. How a team is organized will depend on several factors, mainly size. What’s most important are the operational structures used to:

  • Make decisions
  • Solve problems
  • Communicate

Organizational Structure Of A Functional Team

The two most common organizational structures are the mechanistic top-down structure and the organic structure.

HubSpot has a great resource that delves much deeper into the different types of structures if you want to learn more. 

For now it’s safe to say that most functional structures are top down, which brings us to the strategic operational design of the team.

Effective Structure Strategies For Team Alignment (From The Experts):

Functional Team Decision Making Process

How your team makes decisions will affect overall team alignment, and their ability to solve problems. This study showed that high-performance teams followed the same set of principles when it came to making decisions:

Some decisions matter more than others.

The decisions that are crucial to building value in the business are the ones that matter most. Some of them will be the big strategic decisions, but just as important are the critical operating decisions that drive the business day to day and are vital to effective execution.

Action is the goal.

Good decision making doesn’t end with a decision; it ends with implementation. The objective shouldn’t be consensus, which often becomes an obstacle to action, but buy in.

Ambiguity is the enemy.

Clear accountability is essential: Who contributes input, who makes the decision, and who carries it out? Without clarity, gridlock and delay are the most likely outcomes. Clarity doesn’t necessarily mean concentrating authority in a few people; it means defining who has responsibility to make decisions, who has input, and who is charged with putting them into action.

Speed and adaptability are crucial.

A company that makes good decisions quickly has a higher metabolism, which allows it to act on opportunities and overcome obstacles. The best decision makers create an environment where people can come together quickly and efficiently to make the most important decisions.

Decision roles trump the organizational chart.

No decision-making structure will be perfect for every decision. The key is to involve the right people at the right level in the right part of the organization at the right time.

A well-aligned organization reinforces roles.

Clear decision roles are critical, but they are not enough. If an organization does not reinforce the right approach to decision making through its measures and incentives, information flows, and culture, the behavior won’t become routine.

Practicing beats preaching.

Involve the people who will live with the new decision roles in designing them. The very process of thinking about new decision behaviors motivates people to adopt them.

Other Effective Strategies For Functional Team Decision Making

Functional Team Communication

The most important predictor of a team’s success is its communication patterns. There is a direct correlation between how an organization communicates and its performance.

80% of businesses stated that their goal was to use their Vivid Vision as a communication tool. And in this article from 2012, called The New Science of Building Great Teams, the researchers uncovered that successful teams share communication characteristics:

  • Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
  • Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
  • Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader.
  • Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.
  • Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.
  • The data also establish another surprising fact: Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect. The best way to build a great team is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.

The data also establish another surprising fact: Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect. The best way to build a great team is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.

Effective Strategies To Strengthen Team Communication