Cross-Functional Teams and OJT

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for November, 2007

Could your organization benefit from increased cooperation and decreased misunderstanding and inefficiencies across departments? A key by-product of the TeamOJT process is naturally occurring cross-functional teams.

As teams conduct job task analyses and write training modules they end up bringing in people from other parts of the organization that are impacted by their processes and procedures. The teams quickly become cross-functional. All sorts of organizational issues are discussed and resolved - issues that only indirectly have to do with OJT. Groups talk to one another for the first time ever. Talk about a learning organization and a morale booster!

Wendell French and Cecil Bell in their book, "Organization Development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organization Improvement," say that team building problem-solving interventions are a cornerstone of Organization Development (OD) technology. They describe eight simple notions that underlie success in team building:

• Get the right people together for
• A large block of uninterrupted time
• To work on high-priority problems or opportunities that
• They have identified and that are worked on
• In ways that are structured to enhance the likelihood of
• Realistic solutions and action plans that are
• Implemented enthusiastically and
• Followed up to assess actual versus expected results.

They comment on the overall nature of team-building sessions as follows:

"We have come to believe strongly that initial improvement efforts should be task oriented rather than focused on interpersonal relations [team building]. It is usually safer, less resisted, and more appropriate in terms of the problems and opportunities identified by the client. We have tended not to focus on team building per se; rather, we find that it occurs as a natural by-product of learning to solve problems in a group setting. However, we don't avoid interpersonal or team ineffectiveness issues if they are getting in the way of effective and efficient problem solving."

The book's authors go on to say that,

"It appears that the act of building something together also builds a sense of cameraderie, cohesion, and esprit de corps. In our own consulting we have increasingly come to designate these sessions as 'team-building problem-solving workshops'--a clear signal to us and the client that both building a more effective team and solving priority problems constitute the business at hand."

TeamOJT embodies all eight ingredients mentioned by French and Bell. The "high-priority problem"or issue in this case is building a structured OJT program.

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