I spent most of my day listening to several team members discuss projects and their details.  Some of these details are obstacles.  Some are growing pains and others are just challenges not yet met, but visible on the horizon.

This project discussion just happened to be the final perspective I had yet to hear from a team consisting of four functional aspects of the business.

My revelation from hearing these perspectives?  Each functional group is working to contribute to the project as peers inside the organization.  The leader of each team is leading their group to meet the challenges they face.  They are leading inside the fray.  The challenges come at them fast.  They are trying just to keep up with their aspects of the project.  However, when cross functional decisions are required, the team struggles.  Since each is battling inside the fray, tensions are high at the moment, and the challenges plentiful inside each particular group, making cross functional collaboration difficult.  Each has enough to worry about making it too difficult to think beyond the moment.

A leader above the fray is needed.  Someone who can see the connections between the groups.  Someone who can prioritize moves and think about how a move in one area may affect that of another.  Someone to bring some calm to the situation by making strategic, decisive moves.  Questions bring tension while decisions can often bring relief.  Decisions can at least bring movement when impasse has been reached.

This post is not a judgment between leading in the fray or above the fray.  Both are needed.  Strategic decisions are critically important, but useless without tactical support to carry them out.  It is about what happens when only tactical decisions are being made.  The tactical decision makers come up with tactical solutions.  Things like processes, logical arguments, suggestions, data and feedback are thrown back and forth across the conference table at the problems.  These are all useful tools when used in strategic concert.

Chess is a game, when played well, is the beautiful collaboration of a set of pieces with unique roles, gift, abilities and limitations, coming together for the attainment of a specific goal.  Unfortunately this is not the situation I have been hearing about recently.  The lack of strategic cohesion has left the team as a disjointed collection of parts.

And its my fault.  I have assembled an outstanding tactical team without establishing a strategic authority to balance it out.  I guess in this case, the next move of bringing in some strategy, is mine.