Editorial
The Gist
- Speed and productivity rise in integrated teams. Cross-functional squads act faster because they have the skills and approvals needed in one place.
- Shared intelligence beats silos. Multidisciplinary teams exchange insights openly, driving better problem-solving and error correction.
- Coordination replaces conflict. Integrated teams align around joint goals, avoiding the friction and competing objectives of siloed structures.
- Customer experience improves. When silos break down, teams spot and fix journey gaps that hurt customers.
- Diverse teams fuel innovation. Exposure to varied perspectives sparks creative solutions that silos often stifle.
- Morale strengthens with purpose. Employees in integrated teams feel more valued and motivated by their broader impact.
Leaders call them tiger teams, circles, pods or squads. Whatever term you use, the objective is the same: integrate the organization to better tackle evolving customer dynamics and whatever comes your way. Leading companies are progressing toward a multidisciplinary approach that is more agile and customer responsive than traditional functional silos.
Table of Contents
- Clinging to Old Silos Is Risky for Customer Experience
- Work Like a Tiger Team
- 6 Reasons Integrated Teams Meet Uncertainty Better Than Silos
- How to Get Team Integration Started
- FAQ: Marketing and Customer Experience Leadership
Clinging to Old Silos Is Risky for Customer Experience
2025 celebrated the 10th anniversary of General Stanley McChrystal’s best-selling book, "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World” and the topic could not be more relevant.
In his book, McChrystal shares insights about how he transformed a cumbersome, conventional, special forces organization into a modern powerhouse able to meet the new challenges it faced in Iraq. Amazon’s summary describes it this way: “By giving small groups the freedom to experiment and share what they learn across the entire organization, teams can respond more quickly, communicate more freely, and make better and faster decisions.”
These attributes are needed for today’s marketing and customer experience teams. Like McChrystal's military, businesses compete in a fast-paced, complex world where situations constantly change, and leaders don't call most of the shots. Companies lacking an accurate view of what’s happening at the edge or unable to respond quickly to shifting dynamics risk losing customer loyalty and sales.
One barrier to this intelligence and agility that companies often miss is traditional organizational silos. In earlier decades when things moved more slowly, companies succeeded when they organized by job function. Grouping similar experts together can be efficient and make management easier. However, ease and efficiency no longer drive growth. It's innovation and customer experience that create competitive advantage.
Related Article: Your Missed Opportunity in Customer Experience Culture
Work Like a Tiger Team
Today’s challenges demand an evolution in the structure of teams serving customers. Leaders are progressing towardsinterconnected, empowered, multidisciplinary squads that are more agile and customer-responsive than the traditional hierarchy of functional silos designed for industrial 20th-century needs.
Multidisciplinary teams work like "tiger teams". Experts with various kinds of expertise join forces to achieve customer-centric objectives. These types of teams are found in many dynamic environments. Certain military applications are one example. Surgical teams, where doctors, nurses and other specialists collaborate to achieve patient health and safety, is another. Other example is film companies that assemble teams of directors, actors, creatives, and technicians to create a customer-pleasing production.
One company used a multidisciplinary team approach to quickly scale an account-based marketing (ABM) program. Teams formed around role-based personas (e.g. chief data officer). Each team had eight members: a leader plus seven specialists (analytics, content, web/inbound, outbound, communications, sales enablement, and social). Specialists collaborated across teams to develop customizable, journey-staged content; to centralize customer data and develop feedback analytics; and to work with sales on the right tactics. Channel specialists assembled personalized campaigns.
In four months, the CMO met his goal of nearly 100 ABM programs. The sales team was ecstatic. One sales manager suggested that the company "fire 10 salespeople and put the money into marketing."
Another company, recognizing the growing disconnect between how they were selling and how customers were buying, reconfigured all the members of their marketing, sales, and customer support teams around five customer “tasks to be done”. These tasks were learn, buy, order/install, adopt, and support. Year-over-year revenue grew by 48%.
6 Reasons Integrated Teams Meet Uncertainty Better Than Silos
In uncertain situations, teams can’t rely on what worked in the past. Integrated, multidisciplinary teams exhibit six attributes that make them more successful at discovering new options and adapting.
| Reason | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Increase speed and productivity | When people with all the core skills necessary to solve the problem are connected in a collaborative, well-oiled squad, they can avoid the delay of seeking or negotiating the skills, information, or approvals necessary to act. Information flow, decision-making, acting and getting feedback happen faster. |
| Improved intelligence | In siloed organizations, critical knowledge often gets lost, hoarded, or hidden between hand-offs. Multidisciplinary teams with joint missions and metrics are more likely to share important intelligence. They have no incentive to withhold information or game the system. Diversity of experience and expertise contribute to greater insights and problem-solving capability, and error correcting. |
| Coordinate | With silos, problems always seem to arise elsewhere, making solutions more difficult. Long-standing friction, such as disputes between marketing and sales, crop up repeatedly and don't seem to get resolved. Siloed metrics can enable one team to beat their goals and look good, even if others are failing. Members of multidisciplinary teams gain a better understanding of their role in the bigger picture, reducing the tendency to foster conflicting local objectives. |
| Improve customer experience | Silos cause inadvertent pain for customers. Sequestered in silos, employees miss or ignore situations where customer-facing processes have gaps or duplications. For example, companies may lack mid-journey content where customer questions are usually tough, pragmatic inquiries about service, competition and risks. Because this kind of content doesn’t bring in leads (where marketing typically gets credit) and it doesn’t close deals (where salespeople typically get credit) it falls between silo cracks. |
| Innovate | Exposure to a range of ideas boosts opportunity for creative and cross-functional solutions, but people with similar jobs tend to have similar backgrounds, experiences and skills thus inadvertently narrowing the range of available ideas and remedies. |
| Foster employee morale | Employees with an expanded sphere of influence are motivated to help solve problems. Employees feel like they are part of something greater. |
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How to Get Team Integration Started
Big, sudden shifts and reorganizations are ill-advised in most uncertain situations. Instead, nudge your way to success in shorter, iterative phases where you can act, learn and adapt. Expect your team organization, their roles and processes to continually evolve as better ways are discovered and the path changes.
Try beginning with a Minimum Viable pilot. The term viable means that you are aiming to identify everything needed for success. But minimum guides you to only go for what is truly necessary to get going and get feedback for the next nudge. For example, you could assemble a multidisciplinary team whose mission is to help customers overcome the objections found in the middle of their buying journey. Empower them and see what they can do. Be flexible in roles. As they hit barriers (and they will!) support what is needed to bust through.
Harmonizing people with the skills to meet the dynamics at the ever-changing edge where companies meet their customers must become every company’s organizational strategy.
FAQ: Marketing and Customer Experience Leadership
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