Co-ordinating your Team

Spent some time travelling this week and had the joy of observing a number of teams in action. These teams all belong to a large organization with great leaders who had their teams working against tight schedules. Each team leader had a good grip on where all their members were, the projects they were working on and when the next milestones were due.

I was lucky enough to spend time with each leader as they talked about their teams. They both had a vision for what was considered a good outcome for their own group and each had a great understanding of their team member's strengths and weaknesses.

I then moved on with each team leader and probed them about how the teams worked together. Here we detected some differences, each team leader had a different set of priorities. This showed up when it came to the sharing of resources across the two groups. The two groups often shared specialists between the various projects. When we discussed this in more depth I got the impression they both shared resources when it suited them.

Later with the two leaders I popped the question, do you sit down and plan the priorities of the projects across both your teams. Do you throw the priority setting up the food chain when clashes are obvious?

As a leader who needs to work across groups do you make part of your planning a section on co-ordination between the other teams you interface too. By doing this you'll keep a lot more people informed about your team and how your resources can and are shared to meet the companies goals.