One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams

So Gorham and Evans decided to use specially selected liaisons from across the company’s functional teams to populate the content of MICs and be physically emplaced within different product groups in the company. The first “tranche” of liaisons was handpicked by March and VK, with the input of the various product group leaders, such as Ege and Van

the only thing necessary for organizations to fail is for informed and empowered individuals to neglect their expanded responsibilities.

On the ground, our teams were seeing what appeared to be isolated problems in our external environment but were actually individual nodes of the same complex, interconnected problem set—that of extremist networks scattered across our various realms of operation. Much as any large organization’s frontline elements are biased to see their part of the

How could various parts of your organization benefit from having liaison relationships that interconnect their traditional verticals or geographic boundaries? What partner relationships does your organization depend on that might benefit from a similar model? What process would you implement to select these individuals, and how would your organizat

It was a good feeling for briefers to be referred to by name, and it sent a clear message to participants that individuals mattered in our organization.

The Task Force’s take on this model was, instead, a technologically enabled, contextualization-centered forum, designed for teams to discuss the independent actions they’d taken since the last forum. It represented an opportunity to exchange newly discovered, and often imperfectly formed, insights with the larger group. Its goal was collective lear

as Albert Einstein noted toward the end of his decently fruitful career, “a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”

We talked about results not only for the operation’s sake but to tell the story of how a given action had enhanced or harmed relationships across the organization, or deepened credibility with key stakeholders. We were asked hard questions by our leadership not so they could demonstrate power but so they could give us room to be honest and vulnerab

“similar things and similar people are grouped together, so one particular intelligence discipline will be off in its own room, and another will be another room.” Literally breaking down physical barriers between these differently specialized teams created space to foster boundary spanners.

the intentional creation of personal relationships among members of the bureaucratically unrelated but functionally interdependent teams allowed us to break down the walls of silos.