December 12, 2024 • 17 mins
Watch and/or listen to "Eliminate "Collaboration Drag" to Drive Growth" with my guest is Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, Senior Director at Gartner.
- Learn about the concept of 'collaboration drag,' and its impact on organizations as revealed through Gartner's extensive research.
- Discover practical solutions like RACIs and DACIs to clearly define roles, responsibilities, and workflows to combat inefficiencies.
- Understand the tangible effects of high collaboration drag, including reduced revenue potential and increased employee burnout and turnover.
- Gain insights into the role of AI in managing collaboration drag and why effective workflow processes and talent development are crucial for success. Promised Resources: Gartner's CMO Guide to Successful Cross-Functional Collaboration Heinz Marketing's CMO Guide to Marketing Orchestration
Watch the video here and read the full transcription on the Heinz Marketing blog.
Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing. If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:15):
All right, Welcome everybody to anotherepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
So excited to have youall here joining us.
I am really, reallyexcited about this episode.
I'm excited about all the episodeswe do, but this topic and our
guest today, I'm just so excitedto get into this conversation.
If you're listening, watching,subscribing on demand.
Thank you so much for continuing todownload and listen and watch every
(00:35):
episode of Sales Pipeline Radio isavailable at salespipelineradio.com
Super excited to have joining us todayfrom Gartner, Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.
Kristina, welcome.
Thank you.
What a warm welcome.
Thanks so much for having me today.
Oh my God.
I've been looking, I seriouslybeen looking forward to this.
Cause I geek out on something andI think you geek out on as well.
And so we're going to talktoday about collaboration drag.
(00:58):
We've been working with clients alot on what we call go to market
orchestration, just helping tocoordinate better how the work gets done.
And one day I get an email from Gartnersaying here's the three priorities
for CMOs for 2024, and one of themis eliminating collaboration drag.
And it was the first time I'dreally seen someone name the
problem and quantify the problem.
(01:18):
So maybe start from there, theorigins of this research and how
and where you found this problem.
Yeah.
This research is 18 months ortwo years or more in the making.
And I remember when it started.
We've run a study every year,asking chief marketing officers
and other executives what they'reworking on for the year ahead.
(01:40):
What are their challenges?
What are their priorities?
What do they think is it going to get inthe way of achieving those priorities?
We started to hear from chiefmarketing officers, primarily, that
they were struggling with doingmore and more cross functional work.
And we brought it to a meeting.
We had a multi client meetingand we opened it up to the group.
We said, is this true?
How are you feeling about this?
What does it look like for you?
(02:01):
And we got this emphaticround of head nods and some
collective pain in the rooms.
We said, okay, let's go out andtake a look at what this is.
So we ran a survey.
We studied over 600 marketersand over 300 marketing leaders.
So a mix of executives and marketeersor marketing practitioners.
And we interviewed abunch of them as well.
(02:24):
So we did surveys, we did interviews,we did qual, we did quant.
We were asking people, What is crossfunctional work like at your organization?
Describe it to us.
Tell us what it's like.
And what we heard back was this thingthat we've named collaboration drag,
which means there are too many meetings.
There are too many processes.
There is too much feedback.
(02:45):
There are too many stakeholders, andit takes too long to get their buy in.
And it's unclear how decisionsshould be made or where
decision accountability lies.
And something like 84 percent ofthe enterprises that we surveyed
and interviewed said that they hadhigh rates of collaboration drag.
So it was, nigh universal people justsaying this sucks at our organization.
(03:08):
These things are really hard.
Yeah, when you describe the problem andwhere that comes from, so many people
are like, Oh my gosh, I feel that.
And oh my gosh, Iassumed it was just here.
And I think, what I've noticedis that the company's doing go to
market the best sometimes experiencethis the worst because go to
market motions today are complex.
You got long buying cycles, yougot bigger buying committees.
(03:32):
There's more coordinated effortsacross marketing channels that needs
to happen, let alone coordinatingefforts across go to market teams.
So if you're just still just flingingout emails and just doing random acts of
marketing, you may not feel this as well.
But if you're trying to do modern go tomarket sales and marketing right, I think
you're more likely to have this problem.
Have you found that as well?
Yeah, we've certainly heard marketing andsales and all kinds of other executives
(03:56):
saying, I really thought it was just me.
It's almost a relief to hearthat this happens to everybody.
I had one chief marketingofficer tell me that she thinks
her team has meetings FOMO.
Far from trying to encourage peopleto collaborate, she was like, I
wish they would collaborate less.
Everybody just wants to be so involved.
And it comes from this great place.
(04:18):
And really what you describe,we understand that buying
journeys are complex and goto market motions are complex.
And in a lot of organizations, a lotof commercial organizations, I think
have really bought into the idea thatin order to go to market successfully,
we need great internal alignment.
We need marketing and sales and maybeservice to be working in lockstep.
And we want to have A RevenueCouncil, a Lead Council.
(04:41):
We want to do better ABM.
And we understand that all ofthose things require partnership.
Earlier we were talking aboutorganizations buying a tool like an
Asana and saying, Oh, that'll fix it.
We've got it.
I think to that point, one of the thingswe discovered is that, It's not enough
to set a mandate for collaboration.
It's not enough to buy a tool.
It is not enough to get moremeetings on the calendar.
(05:04):
It's maybe not even enough to be morerigorous about who's in those meetings.
If you are not also paying such stringent,rigorous, disciplined attention to things
like workflows, operations, processes,handoffs, even talent development.
A lot of the stuff that is maybea little less sexy than buying a
(05:25):
technology solution collaborationdrag is gonna run rampant.
It is.
Oh man, talking to today on Sales PipelineRadio with Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.
She's a Senior Director at Gartnerand authored research about a year
ago around collaboration drag.
You mentioned this concept of meetingFOMO, which I think is super interesting.
And I think in some cases, whetherit's meeting FOMO or I wasn't on the
(05:48):
email thread or it's something's inSlack and everyone has to chime in...
There's a lot of different ways togo about fighting collaboration drag.
One of the most important tools I'veseen is RACI which is an acronym
and it stands for Responsible,Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
And it's a really powerful way ofdesignating who needs to chime in on
what, and who needs to be involvedwhere, so that across a complex
(06:10):
project, the right people are in theroom on the thread at the right time.
Can you talk a little bit about yourexperience with, RACI, DACI, I know
there's lots of different formats aroundthat, but like, why that's so valuable?
Yeah, RACIs and DACIs.
So DACIs, for those who mightbe unfamiliar because I feel
it's a bit of a newer acronym,it's a decision making chart.
So who is the Decider and who isAccountable and Contributing and Informed.
(06:35):
They're terrific tools for combattingcollaboration drag because they help
to define handoffs and they helptell people when they need to lean
in and when they need to lean back.
I have seen marketing teams use theseand sales teams use these really
effectively in partnerships with oneanother across, for example, a go to
market process to be able to identifythe places where the marketing team is
(07:00):
going to take more responsibility andthen also identify the places where
that marketing team is going to stepback and hand some of those activities
off to sales and let sales lean in.
I've also seen things like RACIS andDACIs work really well for orchestrating
global to regional handoffs.
So what kinds of things do we want aglobal team to take responsibility for?
(07:22):
And where do we want the regional teamto be able to have autonomy and agency
and be able to leverage their expertise?
The pivot point there, the thing thatmakes it work is that it is as much
about telling a team when to take theirhands off the wheel and step back as it
is about telling a team when they needto step forward because in a meetings
(07:42):
kind of FOMO environment, the problemthat you have is maybe that some of
those people should have been in themeeting in the first meeting, in the
second meeting, but not the 49th meeting.
There was a point at which itwas time for them to go on to the
other work that they had to do.
And nobody was able todefine when that point was.
And so those meetings and thoseprocesses just become really bloated.
(08:03):
Yeah.
I think for people that are addressingcollaboration drag in the organization,
I hear them talk about agility,productivity, speed to market on programs.
It's hard enough to get campaignsout that we'd planned on doing.
And then someone has some ideafor something new and pivoting
to that becomes really hard.
When we published earlier this year, ourCMOs Guide to Marketing Orchestration,
we also talked about two other thingsin your report: revenue loss and
(08:28):
key employee churn that very muchhappened as a part of this as well.
Can you talk about what you saw there?
Yeah.
So as I said, 84 percent oforganizations are experiencing
high rates of collaboration drag.
So that sense that there's too manymeetings, there's too many processes,
there's too many stakeholders.
When organizations experience highrates of collaboration drag, those
(08:49):
organizations are 37 percent lesslikely to achieve their revenue and
profit objectives, which is huge.
37 percent less likely toachieve those objectives.
And their teams are 15 times morelikely to burn out, and they're 9
times more likely to report thatthey intend to leave their job.
So it's damaging at alllevels of the organization.
(09:13):
And I think a good reminder to us, atan executive level, that even though
executives often recognize the painof cross functional collaboration and
complex cross functional work, theexecutives are not necessarily the
ones in those working groups actuallyexecuting on those processes, right?
And so it's the people who are inthe trenches doing the work that are
(09:36):
really affected and ground down byall those kinds of dysfunctional group
working behaviors that lead to toomany meetings and too many processes.
And so you're not only going tobe less likely to achieve your
revenue and profit objectives,you're also going to see probably
some of your best people leave you.
I'm curious as for thoselistening and nodding their head
vociferously around this, how dowe help them take action on it?
(09:57):
If I'm a CMO, how should I address this?
I know larger organizations tendto have a PMO office as well
that has their fingers in this.
So where do you see companies start andwho's championing this to really reduce
or eliminate that collaboration drag?
So RACIs and DACIs will help.
Defining more clear, more definedroles and responsibilities in a project
(10:22):
workflow and defining those handoffs.
That's huge.
We did find that like when it comesto reducing collaboration drag,
reducing stress and friction inworkflows-- so improving workflows.
And adding some supportive changemanagement to help people adapt
to new workflows-- that reducescollaboration drag by 15%.
So that's a great strategy to take.
The other thing that we saw, though,that really is in your purview as
(10:43):
an executive, if you're listeningto us today is talent development.
When we invest in developing the kindof talent that helps people become
stronger collaborators, collaborationdrag can be reduced by 23%, which is huge.
That's nothing to sniff at.
I think you can imagine the roleof a PMO office in maybe auditing
workflows or determining those RACIsand DACIs, setting those mandates, doing
(11:07):
governance around how work is scoped,how it's resourced, how it's completed.
Setting things like stop workcriteria that tells us when
we have finished a project.
How many deliverables will we do?
What will good look like?
How many rounds of revision do we dobefore we say we're finished with this?
That stuff that an executive canown in marketing, a marketing
operations leader might own it.
(11:28):
Project Management Office,maybe even a Chief of Staff.
And then the talent developmentside, that's something that any
executive can own in their function,that team managers, the people who
report into you can start to own.
And that we found was really aboutdeveloping people's critical thinking
skills, their political judgment, solike trust building, problem solving,
(11:51):
systems thinking, all those kinds ofskills make people better collaborators.
Yeah.
I think, if we were having thisconversation 10, 15 years ago, B2B
marketers, just a lot of media buying,a lot of external coordination,
and that still happens, butincreasingly we see more and more
B2B companies really managing data.
It's about information.
Intent signals, how those get leveraged.
(12:13):
And so all of a sudden the people inthe organization that are coordinating
and managing that, how they worktogether versus just what money they
have to spend externally on a mediabuy becomes much more important.
And it means that addressingthis is much more critical.
We have found in our work that onceyou get to a marketing team of about
20 to 25 people, that's when you startto really feel collaboration drag.
(12:34):
Take a webinar.
You may have had a couple peoplethat could just knock it out, and
now you've got eight people that havedifferent roles in getting that done.
And if you start to feelcollaboration drag, it means
it's been there for a while.
Are there symptoms or evidencethat companies should look for or
recognize and say, boy, this is asign we need to go and do something?
So certainly if you were doing anykinds of internal employee service,
(12:58):
and it's that time of year a lot oforganizations are running their end of
year employee health, employee sentimentsurveys, and if you're getting anything
bad from those surveys where people aresaying it feels like process gets in
the way of outcomes or it feels likeit takes a lot of work and effort to
get work done, those are good signs.
But there are some otherthings that I would look for.
There are four other groupdysfunctions that we saw.
(13:21):
These are observable behaviors.
So if you're seeing them in yourorganization, there's symptoms that
collaboration drag is probably present.
We called one the Ready,Fire, Aim Dynamic.
So if you see groups taking actionbefore they have agreed on what
they're trying to achieve, theymove to action too quickly...
Ready, Fire, Aim-- that's a sign thatcollaboration drag could be present.
(13:43):
If you see Control Freaks in yourorganization, and sometimes that might
be you if it's a senior stakeholderwho is a bottleneck for decisions--
all decisions have to go throughjust one person and it slows progress
down, that creates collaboration drag.
You might also see Naysayers.
Those are the folks in the room whochime in with criticisms or complaints
(14:06):
and they cause unnecessary delays.
And then you might also see Dictatorships,which is where the working group gets
overruled by a stakeholder who mightnever have been part of the core team.
Like 90+% of teams say that theyhave experienced at least one of
those things in the last year.
And wherever you see even rareinstances of that kind of group
(14:28):
dysfunction, collaboration dragshoots right up as a result.
That is a phenomenal checklist thatwe will publish that in the notes.
to say, kind of like, JeffFoxworthy, you might be a redneck...
You might have collaborationdrag if some of those things
exist in your organization.
Okay, last question for you.
We talked about project management toolsbeing a great tool, but if just bought and
(14:50):
thrown at a team can be counterproductive.
What about AI?
Is AI going to make this easier or will AIactually add complexity to this problem?
I would say in the shortterm, it may add complexity.
The way that AI allows for theproliferation of content and emails
and makes it easier to do morevolumes of work in a way that can
(15:13):
allow us to become very temptedinto throwing spaghetti at the wall.
We're just executing more.
And that kind of focus on more volume,even if the quality is higher, but
more volume and more outreach and moremessaging and more personalization.
All of that more requiresmore work from teams.
(15:34):
And so in the absence of those workflowand process governance that we've been
talking about, or in the absence ofthe right kind of talent development,
you're probably going to see morecollaboration drag if you're just using
AI to help your teams do more stuff.
It's possible over time that being able touse AI to take on some execution related
(15:55):
tasks and free teams up for more strategicwork, that could have a long term effect.
But I would lay bets that without goodsupportive workflows, good supporting
talent development, you won't see AIsolve the collaboration drag problem.
I think you're right.
And I think we already seeevidence of that in other places
in the organization as well.
Kristina, this has been amazing.
We will make sure we've gotthe CMO's Guide to Go To Market
(16:17):
Orchestration in the show notes.
But for people that want to follow youlearn more about and some of the research
I know you've got coming up over thenext few months, where do people go?
LinkedIn is the best place to find me.
Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, youcan connect with me on LinkedIn.
And then you'll have access toall the stuff that I share about
the research that I'm working on.
And then of course, if you happen to bea Gartner client, it's all on Gartner.com
(16:38):
Awesome.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for doing this.
This is amazing.
If you're watching or listening to thisand you can think of people that are
the Dictators, if you think of peoplein the organization that are Ready to
Fire Aim, you think of people whereyou've had these conversations, feel
free to forward this episode to them.
on demand on LinkedIn, as well as shootthem over to SalesPipelineRadio.com
and they can get a copy there as well.
Amazing.
Thank you so much everyone forwatching, listening, subscribing.
(17:01):
We'll see you next week.
Until then, take care.
We'll see you soon.
All right, Welcome everybody to anotherepisode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
So excited to have youall here joining us.
I am really, reallyexcited about this episode.
I'm excited about all the episodeswe do, but this topic and our
guest today, I'm just so excitedto get into this conversation.
If you're listening, watching,subscribing on demand.
Thank you so much for continuing todownload and listen and watch every
(00:35):
episode of Sales Pipeline Radio isavailable at salespipelineradio.com
Super excited to have joining us todayfrom Gartner, Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.
Kristina, welcome.
Thank you.
What a warm welcome.
Thanks so much for having me today.
Oh my God.
I've been looking, I seriouslybeen looking forward to this.
Cause I geek out on something andI think you geek out on as well.
And so we're going to talktoday about collaboration drag.
(00:58):
We've been working with clients alot on what we call go to market
orchestration, just helping tocoordinate better how the work gets done.
And one day I get an email from Gartnersaying here's the three priorities
for CMOs for 2024, and one of themis eliminating collaboration drag.
And it was the first time I'dreally seen someone name the
problem and quantify the problem.
(01:18):
So maybe start from there, theorigins of this research and how
and where you found this problem.
Yeah.
This research is 18 months ortwo years or more in the making.
And I remember when it started.
We've run a study every year,asking chief marketing officers
and other executives what they'reworking on for the year ahead.
(01:40):
What are their challenges?
What are their priorities?
What do they think is it going to get inthe way of achieving those priorities?
We started to hear from chiefmarketing officers, primarily, that
they were struggling with doingmore and more cross functional work.
And we brought it to a meeting.
We had a multi client meetingand we opened it up to the group.
We said, is this true?
How are you feeling about this?
What does it look like for you?
(02:01):
And we got this emphaticround of head nods and some
collective pain in the rooms.
We said, okay, let's go out andtake a look at what this is.
So we ran a survey.
We studied over 600 marketersand over 300 marketing leaders.
So a mix of executives and marketeersor marketing practitioners.
And we interviewed abunch of them as well.
(02:24):
So we did surveys, we did interviews,we did qual, we did quant.
We were asking people, What is crossfunctional work like at your organization?
Describe it to us.
Tell us what it's like.
And what we heard back was this thingthat we've named collaboration drag,
which means there are too many meetings.
There are too many processes.
There is too much feedback.
(02:45):
There are too many stakeholders, andit takes too long to get their buy in.
And it's unclear how decisionsshould be made or where
decision accountability lies.
And something like 84 percent ofthe enterprises that we surveyed
and interviewed said that they hadhigh rates of collaboration drag.
So it was, nigh universal people justsaying this sucks at our organization.
(03:08):
These things are really hard.
Yeah, when you describe the problem andwhere that comes from, so many people
are like, Oh my gosh, I feel that.
And oh my gosh, Iassumed it was just here.
And I think, what I've noticedis that the company's doing go to
market the best sometimes experiencethis the worst because go to
market motions today are complex.
You got long buying cycles, yougot bigger buying committees.
(03:32):
There's more coordinated effortsacross marketing channels that needs
to happen, let alone coordinatingefforts across go to market teams.
So if you're just still just flingingout emails and just doing random acts of
marketing, you may not feel this as well.
But if you're trying to do modern go tomarket sales and marketing right, I think
you're more likely to have this problem.
Have you found that as well?
Yeah, we've certainly heard marketing andsales and all kinds of other executives
(03:56):
saying, I really thought it was just me.
It's almost a relief to hearthat this happens to everybody.
I had one chief marketingofficer tell me that she thinks
her team has meetings FOMO.
Far from trying to encourage peopleto collaborate, she was like, I
wish they would collaborate less.
Everybody just wants to be so involved.
And it comes from this great place.
(04:18):
And really what you describe,we understand that buying
journeys are complex and goto market motions are complex.
And in a lot of organizations, a lotof commercial organizations, I think
have really bought into the idea thatin order to go to market successfully,
we need great internal alignment.
We need marketing and sales and maybeservice to be working in lockstep.
And we want to have A RevenueCouncil, a Lead Council.
(04:41):
We want to do better ABM.
And we understand that all ofthose things require partnership.
Earlier we were talking aboutorganizations buying a tool like an
Asana and saying, Oh, that'll fix it.
We've got it.
I think to that point, one of the thingswe discovered is that, It's not enough
to set a mandate for collaboration.
It's not enough to buy a tool.
It is not enough to get moremeetings on the calendar.
(05:04):
It's maybe not even enough to be morerigorous about who's in those meetings.
If you are not also paying such stringent,rigorous, disciplined attention to things
like workflows, operations, processes,handoffs, even talent development.
A lot of the stuff that is maybea little less sexy than buying a
(05:25):
technology solution collaborationdrag is gonna run rampant.
It is.
Oh man, talking to today on Sales PipelineRadio with Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone.
She's a Senior Director at Gartnerand authored research about a year
ago around collaboration drag.
You mentioned this concept of meetingFOMO, which I think is super interesting.
And I think in some cases, whetherit's meeting FOMO or I wasn't on the
(05:48):
email thread or it's something's inSlack and everyone has to chime in...
There's a lot of different ways togo about fighting collaboration drag.
One of the most important tools I'veseen is RACI which is an acronym
and it stands for Responsible,Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.
And it's a really powerful way ofdesignating who needs to chime in on
what, and who needs to be involvedwhere, so that across a complex
(06:10):
project, the right people are in theroom on the thread at the right time.
Can you talk a little bit about yourexperience with, RACI, DACI, I know
there's lots of different formats aroundthat, but like, why that's so valuable?
Yeah, RACIs and DACIs.
So DACIs, for those who mightbe unfamiliar because I feel
it's a bit of a newer acronym,it's a decision making chart.
So who is the Decider and who isAccountable and Contributing and Informed.
(06:35):
They're terrific tools for combattingcollaboration drag because they help
to define handoffs and they helptell people when they need to lean
in and when they need to lean back.
I have seen marketing teams use theseand sales teams use these really
effectively in partnerships with oneanother across, for example, a go to
market process to be able to identifythe places where the marketing team is
(07:00):
going to take more responsibility andthen also identify the places where
that marketing team is going to stepback and hand some of those activities
off to sales and let sales lean in.
I've also seen things like RACIS andDACIs work really well for orchestrating
global to regional handoffs.
So what kinds of things do we want aglobal team to take responsibility for?
(07:22):
And where do we want the regional teamto be able to have autonomy and agency
and be able to leverage their expertise?
The pivot point there, the thing thatmakes it work is that it is as much
about telling a team when to take theirhands off the wheel and step back as it
is about telling a team when they needto step forward because in a meetings
(07:42):
kind of FOMO environment, the problemthat you have is maybe that some of
those people should have been in themeeting in the first meeting, in the
second meeting, but not the 49th meeting.
There was a point at which itwas time for them to go on to the
other work that they had to do.
And nobody was able todefine when that point was.
And so those meetings and thoseprocesses just become really bloated.
(08:03):
Yeah.
I think for people that are addressingcollaboration drag in the organization,
I hear them talk about agility,productivity, speed to market on programs.
It's hard enough to get campaignsout that we'd planned on doing.
And then someone has some ideafor something new and pivoting
to that becomes really hard.
When we published earlier this year, ourCMOs Guide to Marketing Orchestration,
we also talked about two other thingsin your report: revenue loss and
(08:28):
key employee churn that very muchhappened as a part of this as well.
Can you talk about what you saw there?
Yeah.
So as I said, 84 percent oforganizations are experiencing
high rates of collaboration drag.
So that sense that there's too manymeetings, there's too many processes,
there's too many stakeholders.
When organizations experience highrates of collaboration drag, those
(08:49):
organizations are 37 percent lesslikely to achieve their revenue and
profit objectives, which is huge.
37 percent less likely toachieve those objectives.
And their teams are 15 times morelikely to burn out, and they're 9
times more likely to report thatthey intend to leave their job.
So it's damaging at alllevels of the organization.
(09:13):
And I think a good reminder to us, atan executive level, that even though
executives often recognize the painof cross functional collaboration and
complex cross functional work, theexecutives are not necessarily the
ones in those working groups actuallyexecuting on those processes, right?
And so it's the people who are inthe trenches doing the work that are
(09:36):
really affected and ground down byall those kinds of dysfunctional group
working behaviors that lead to toomany meetings and too many processes.
And so you're not only going tobe less likely to achieve your
revenue and profit objectives,you're also going to see probably
some of your best people leave you.
I'm curious as for thoselistening and nodding their head
vociferously around this, how dowe help them take action on it?
(09:57):
If I'm a CMO, how should I address this?
I know larger organizations tendto have a PMO office as well
that has their fingers in this.
So where do you see companies start andwho's championing this to really reduce
or eliminate that collaboration drag?
So RACIs and DACIs will help.
Defining more clear, more definedroles and responsibilities in a project
(10:22):
workflow and defining those handoffs.
That's huge.
We did find that like when it comesto reducing collaboration drag,
reducing stress and friction inworkflows-- so improving workflows.
And adding some supportive changemanagement to help people adapt
to new workflows-- that reducescollaboration drag by 15%.
So that's a great strategy to take.
The other thing that we saw, though,that really is in your purview as
(10:43):
an executive, if you're listeningto us today is talent development.
When we invest in developing the kindof talent that helps people become
stronger collaborators, collaborationdrag can be reduced by 23%, which is huge.
That's nothing to sniff at.
I think you can imagine the roleof a PMO office in maybe auditing
workflows or determining those RACIsand DACIs, setting those mandates, doing
(11:07):
governance around how work is scoped,how it's resourced, how it's completed.
Setting things like stop workcriteria that tells us when
we have finished a project.
How many deliverables will we do?
What will good look like?
How many rounds of revision do we dobefore we say we're finished with this?
That stuff that an executive canown in marketing, a marketing
operations leader might own it.
(11:28):
Project Management Office,maybe even a Chief of Staff.
And then the talent developmentside, that's something that any
executive can own in their function,that team managers, the people who
report into you can start to own.
And that we found was really aboutdeveloping people's critical thinking
skills, their political judgment, solike trust building, problem solving,
(11:51):
systems thinking, all those kinds ofskills make people better collaborators.
Yeah.
I think, if we were having thisconversation 10, 15 years ago, B2B
marketers, just a lot of media buying,a lot of external coordination,
and that still happens, butincreasingly we see more and more
B2B companies really managing data.
It's about information.
Intent signals, how those get leveraged.
(12:13):
And so all of a sudden the people inthe organization that are coordinating
and managing that, how they worktogether versus just what money they
have to spend externally on a mediabuy becomes much more important.
And it means that addressingthis is much more critical.
We have found in our work that onceyou get to a marketing team of about
20 to 25 people, that's when you startto really feel collaboration drag.
(12:34):
Take a webinar.
You may have had a couple peoplethat could just knock it out, and
now you've got eight people that havedifferent roles in getting that done.
And if you start to feelcollaboration drag, it means
it's been there for a while.
Are there symptoms or evidencethat companies should look for or
recognize and say, boy, this is asign we need to go and do something?
So certainly if you were doing anykinds of internal employee service,
(12:58):
and it's that time of year a lot oforganizations are running their end of
year employee health, employee sentimentsurveys, and if you're getting anything
bad from those surveys where people aresaying it feels like process gets in
the way of outcomes or it feels likeit takes a lot of work and effort to
get work done, those are good signs.
But there are some otherthings that I would look for.
There are four other groupdysfunctions that we saw.
(13:21):
These are observable behaviors.
So if you're seeing them in yourorganization, there's symptoms that
collaboration drag is probably present.
We called one the Ready,Fire, Aim Dynamic.
So if you see groups taking actionbefore they have agreed on what
they're trying to achieve, theymove to action too quickly...
Ready, Fire, Aim-- that's a sign thatcollaboration drag could be present.
(13:43):
If you see Control Freaks in yourorganization, and sometimes that might
be you if it's a senior stakeholderwho is a bottleneck for decisions--
all decisions have to go throughjust one person and it slows progress
down, that creates collaboration drag.
You might also see Naysayers.
Those are the folks in the room whochime in with criticisms or complaints
(14:06):
and they cause unnecessary delays.
And then you might also see Dictatorships,which is where the working group gets
overruled by a stakeholder who mightnever have been part of the core team.
Like 90+% of teams say that theyhave experienced at least one of
those things in the last year.
And wherever you see even rareinstances of that kind of group
(14:28):
dysfunction, collaboration dragshoots right up as a result.
That is a phenomenal checklist thatwe will publish that in the notes.
to say, kind of like, JeffFoxworthy, you might be a redneck...
You might have collaborationdrag if some of those things
exist in your organization.
Okay, last question for you.
We talked about project management toolsbeing a great tool, but if just bought and
(14:50):
thrown at a team can be counterproductive.
What about AI?
Is AI going to make this easier or will AIactually add complexity to this problem?
I would say in the shortterm, it may add complexity.
The way that AI allows for theproliferation of content and emails
and makes it easier to do morevolumes of work in a way that can
(15:13):
allow us to become very temptedinto throwing spaghetti at the wall.
We're just executing more.
And that kind of focus on more volume,even if the quality is higher, but
more volume and more outreach and moremessaging and more personalization.
All of that more requiresmore work from teams.
(15:34):
And so in the absence of those workflowand process governance that we've been
talking about, or in the absence ofthe right kind of talent development,
you're probably going to see morecollaboration drag if you're just using
AI to help your teams do more stuff.
It's possible over time that being able touse AI to take on some execution related
(15:55):
tasks and free teams up for more strategicwork, that could have a long term effect.
But I would lay bets that without goodsupportive workflows, good supporting
talent development, you won't see AIsolve the collaboration drag problem.
I think you're right.
And I think we already seeevidence of that in other places
in the organization as well.
Kristina, this has been amazing.
We will make sure we've gotthe CMO's Guide to Go To Market
(16:17):
Orchestration in the show notes.
But for people that want to follow youlearn more about and some of the research
I know you've got coming up over thenext few months, where do people go?
LinkedIn is the best place to find me.
Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone, youcan connect with me on LinkedIn.
And then you'll have access toall the stuff that I share about
the research that I'm working on.
And then of course, if you happen to bea Gartner client, it's all on Gartner.com
(16:38):
Awesome.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for doing this.
This is amazing.
If you're watching or listening to thisand you can think of people that are
the Dictators, if you think of peoplein the organization that are Ready to
Fire Aim, you think of people whereyou've had these conversations, feel
free to forward this episode to them.
on demand on LinkedIn, as well as shootthem over to SalesPipelineRadio.com
and they can get a copy there as well.
Amazing.
Thank you so much everyone forwatching, listening, subscribing.
(17:01):
We'll see you next week.
Until then, take care.
We'll see you soon.
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