Empowering Agile Customer Teams
My client was a 350 person global marking consultancy, with a Client Service Team of 80 people, tasked with serving and growing clients. The largest of these teams was a multi-million dollar account with c30 people working across it.
This client team were struggling to deliver projects efficiently, with deadlines promised before key delivery teams had been fully informed.
They were buried under layers of management bureaucracy, which made them slow to react to shifting client needs, with unclear decision making processes and duplicate roles.
Feedback from clients was that the team were too slow, not-client centric enough and perceived as expensive.
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They needed help to become a fast-moving, cross-functional team, deliver more effectively for their client and win a high value contract renewal.
Desired Outcomes
The Client team is perceived as a true partner to their valued client.
They are seen as collaborative with other teams, acting as ‘one cross functional team’ to deliver profitably.
The team fosters leadership at every level, members of the team take collective accountability for performance.
The team identifies ‘tensions’ and takes the initiative
to resolve them.
Improve feedback from client and renewal of the contract (2 year renewal cycle).
Approach
Form the cross functional client team
Formed the agency’s first true cross-functional client team, with representatives from creative, strategy, client service, data and technology. The client team carries joint responsibility for client success and project profitability, with roles clearly defined.
1
Embed new ways of working – principles and practices
Introduced a self-management toolkit, featuring retros, team charters, action meetings, experiments working in the open. Trained the team to identify tensions and set up experiments to resolve them. Use retros to capture feedback and optimise performance.
2
Leadership and team coaching
Coached the team fortnightly for 12 weeks to embed new ways of working. Coached some leaders 1-2-1 to help them share the new tools and learn how to lead in a team with collective responsibility, sharing power and holding others accountable.
3
Engaging in deeper customer dialogue
Set up new regular Retros with their customer to capture their feedback, identify tension areas and demonstrate progress in resolving them.
4
Programme Highlights
Ran retros with the client, an agency first, where we engaged the client more deeply on the areas that weren’t working and what we were going to do about it. The client reported it was ‘one of the best meetings they had been in with this team’.
Agile squad structure brought new voices into the team and removed key operational blockers that were causing profitability issues.
Carried out some deep role work, including running a pilot for an entirely new type of strategy role on the account that hadn’t been previously identified.
Coaching embedded the learning and surfaced a few important leaders who took large developmental leaps forward in their leadership capabilities.
The team learned to do all this themselves, with no senior management input.
