Happy New Year, and welcome to the first edition of The Pulse in 2025! 🎉
Between finalizing the year’s operating plan and strategy, offsites, and kickoffs, this is an incredibly busy time for most organizations. Today we are going to get tactical, and I believe this edition will resonate with many of you during this season.
With that, welcome to the 37th edition of The Pulse, your bi-weekly newsletter delivering insights for Strategy Leaders.
In this edition:
- 💪 3 Ways to Build Commitments Across Teams that Break Down Silos
- 📚 Guide to Building a Successful Operating Rhythm for 2025 (a download)
💪 3 Ways to Build Commitments Across Teams that Break Down Silos
One of the most common challenges facing organizations is the ability to collaborate and gain agreement on critical Objectives that are dependent upon multiple teams.
It’s one thing to discuss the importance of an Objective during a leadership offsite—whether it’s building a new product feature, orchestrating a well-thought-out project plan, or entering a new market. But the real work begins when you bring together all the required teams committed to making that objective a success.
In fact, one of the main reasons companies reach out to Elate and choose to leverage our platform often stems from one of these four challenges:
- We missed a revenue/fundraising target because of a delay in work our team was reliant upon.
- Our teams don’t have visibility into what other teams are working on or when their work is being completed.
- We don’t clearly communicate to other teams when priorities shift, and there is a growing sense of frustration and whiplash.
- Our IT/technology team is swamped, and we are creating a backlog of work without any sense of what drives outcomes vs what work is just a fire that can wait. (Sorry IT folks 😎)
As long as businesses employ people, these challenges will always arise.
However, they don’t have to be overwhelming or crippling to your organization’s ability to reach your shared vision.
In fact, acknowledging that these will likely always be challenges will help your team rally around the question, ‘So what can we do about it?’
So today, I want to share three ways your organization can empower teams to collaborate more effectively and work more seamlessly in prioritizing the Objectives that matter most. ✅
Let's jump in.
1) Contextualize a Shared Vision with Themes
First and foremost, if your Strategic Plan lives in the mind of your CEO or Leadership team, you can expect that employees are going to be disconnected from that vision.
There are countless articles and studies on the importance of overcommunicating any message you want to resonate and stick with employees.
And I can’t think of anything more important to overly communicate than your organization’s vision and strategy. 🔮
So where can your employees go to remind themselves of the vision? And more importantly, understand how their work is connected to that vision?
If your assumption is that ‘they just know’ or if it lives in a static spreadsheet that gets updated once a quarter (at best), then you will miss the mark. ❌
The Vision for your organization should be a living and breathing part of your culture, and it should also be contextualized in a way that allows employees to understand how they play a role in bringing that vision to life.
This is why setting Themes is so important.
Think of Themes—or Pillars, as some organizations call them—as the anchors of your Operating Plan. The non-negotiables that all parts of your Strategic Plan point towards.
Whether in good times or bad, the vision is the guiding light for why folks are investing their time and efforts into building something special.
However, Themes allow teams to understand how to support one another.
If your IT team or Product team understands the importance of reaching a revenue threshold, releasing a new product, or even reaching a compliance standard, then that will be what they prioritize.
We recommend three to five Themes as a best practice, because setting too many will diminish the value of these areas of focus. Themes often span an entire year, but for some organizations, they may extend across multiple years.
Again, when we are in the midst of turbulence or a season of prosperity, Themes help bring us back to the non-negotiables and anchors in which all of our Objectives should align towards.
2) Prioritization and Commitments
When organizations set Objectives, two things are often missing:
- Prioritization
- Shared Commitments
At Elate, we allow for every Objective to have a prioritization measured by Value and Effort. Not only does this help the owner of an Objective develop the habit of saying ‘not now’ to certain Objectives, but it also helps other teams prioritize cross-departmental collaboration.
If teams understand that there is a shared way for valuing the impact of a given Objective, then it allows them to align and prioritize Objectives appropriately.
Further, it creates a healthy way to establish shared commitments.
For example, we frequently see scenarios where a deliverable is critical to achieving a revenue target. Yet, leaders often assume that other teams inherently understand the importance of that deliverable—without ever communicating its significance or collaborating on the requirements.
Fast forward to the end of the quarter (or year), and the misalignment yields disastrous or at least disappointing results.
Shared Commitments can be created across teams and attached to Objectives, not as the outcomes to be realized, but the tactical work to be done that is in support of that Objective.
Again, this is where a shared view of the Strategic Plan is imperative. If prioritization or this tactical work is being tracked solely in the tools of those individual team members, then we are at the mercy of reactive updates or meetings.
Establish a way to set clear prioritization and track these commitments across the organization.
3) Proactive Reporting to Drive Action
Shifting from reactively reporting on static updates to proactively driving insights has long been a pillar of a great Strategic Plan.
This is particularly true when managing cross-departmental objectives.
While some organizations lean on strong Project Management teams to help manually drive the adherence and delivery of these projects, oftentimes these individuals are at the mercy of other individuals to capture these updates.
For so many organizations, there are countless hours spent sitting in meetings, sifting through updates, and digging through data in tools, trying to piece together what is going on with a specific Objective.
Even in the best of organizations, this process of reactive reporting will create blind spots and limit the ability to adjust goals when an Objective that is dependent on other work falls behind. ⚠️
The ability to create proactive reporting that has visibility into Objectives, Tactics, and shared work across teams will ensure you can appropriately measure outcomes that align with the work being done across teams.
More importantly, it allows blockers or commitments delivered ahead of schedule to also surface to Leadership in an automated way that drives a bias to action.
Far too often, we shadow Leadership meetings where it’s purely a roll call of Objective Status without any context or supporting views into the dependencies and commitments for a given Objective.
Why does this happen? Because pulling together updates without a single source of truth is tedious—if not impossible. 😰
A proactive reporting structure can transform these meetings from reactive updates into action-driven conversations. And if #3 resonates with you, check out our Advanced Reporting feature.
Supporting Your Teams to Support Your Strategy
Ultimately, one of the biggest reasons why teams struggle to work cross functionally is a lack of support and structure from the organization to do so.
Whether a lack of visibility into the organization strategy and priorities, or a lack of proactivity in removing blockers, employees are often following the path of least resistance and aligning their work with what they have line of sight into.
As we head into 2025, let’s seize the opportunity to tear down those silos and create a culture that shifts your strategy from transactional tasks to purposeful, shared work across teams.
Thanks all for today, have a great rest of your week.
-Brooks
