Innovation, competitiveness, and performance in today’s organizations rely more and more on agile cross functional teams. However, when you think about a high performing team often you will think about a group of people who know each other well and have worked together for a long time. It’s logical for us to assume that the longer a team is together the better results they will deliver. But recent research shows that this is not necessarily true.
Many enterprises strive to rapidly respond to changing market needs by relying on temporary or quick-forming cross-functional project teams within their functionally aligned organization. However, most of them still struggle to overcome the tensions that emerge at the interface of cross-functional temporary teams and permanent functional organization. At this event we look into how to make it work.
The agile organization depends on making temporary cross functional project teams work
Research into the inner workings of teams suggests that the best teams might be temporary, with employees forming around a project and then going their separate ways to work on new projects or in their functional team. Even with this knowledge many organizations are still not working with temporary teams, and many of the ones that do, have not “cracked the code” on how to get them working properly.
The agile organization depends on making temporary cross functional teams work and at this event we look into how to make it happen. We are joined by Saeedeh Kristensen, who is currently working on her PhD (co-funded by Innovation Fund Denmark and Milestone Systems) which focuses on cross-functional teams as temporary organizations.
Saeedeh is doing her PhD at Milestone Systems as the host company, so at this meeting you will both hear about her research within this area but also how Milestone is using these findings to put together cross functional teams.
More specifically, we will dive deeper into these main challenges and how to overcome them:
- How to reintegrate employees back to their functional team.
- How leadership works in cross-functional temporary teams and what leadership behaviors can best affect the performance of these teams.
- Concrete examples on how Milestone Systems are putting together cross functional teams that chase strategic opportunities (presented by Jesper Sylvest Sørensen, VP Organisation Development)
Jesper Sylvest Sørensen, VP Organisation Development at Milestone Systems
Saeedeh Shafiee Kristensen, Industrial PhD at Milestone Systems/Aarhus University
Saeedeh is an Industrial PhD Student at the Management Department of Aarhus BSS. She has been doing research on organizational agility and HRM in the context of temporary organizing at Milestone Systems as the host company since 2018 while doing her master’s in management of Technology at DTU. In her research, she is exploring shared leadership in cross-functional project teams and knowledge exchange in this organizational context as well. In addition to publishing papers, she is developing tools and frameworks which support people and organizations in their journey toward agility and ambidexterity.