Reference no: EM132749301

MIXING IT UP

• How do you combine two packaged-food companies, both with very well-known household brand names, and make the new company work? That's the challenge managers at General Mills faced when it acquired Pillsburry. The company's chief learning oficer Kevin Wilde said: „Let's get the best out of both of our marketing organizations. And let's not stop there." So they decided to identify, share, and integrate the best practices from both companies. And employee teams played a major role in how the company proceeded.

• An intensive training program called Brand Champions was created and launched. The program was designed not just for marketing specialists but for all employees from different functional areas who worked on particular brands. These cross-functional teams attended the in-house training together as a unified group. According to one of the program developers, specific benefits of including these teams soon became evident. „A person from human resources, for instance, would ask a provocative question precisely because she wasn't a marketer. And you'd see the look on the marketers' faces: Whoa, I never thought of that." It helped employees understand and appreciate different perspectives.

• Another benefit of including people from different functions was improved communication throughout the company. People were no longer griping about what other functional areas were doing. Employees began to understand how the other functional areas worked and how each area's contribution was important to the overall success of the company.

• The training program has been so successful that now General Mills's production plants have asked for a mini-version of the course. „They want to understand the language marketers speak and why things are done as they are." Oh... and there's one other example of how successful the program has been. Betty Crocker is well known for packaged cake mixes and less so for cookie mixes. Inspired by input from the group, the cookie-mix team decided to go after scratch bakers (people who bake from scratch rather than from a boxed mix). As one person said, they were „taking on grandma". The cookie mixes were reformulated, and now the brand owns 90 percent of the dry cookie mix category.

Problem 1: What challenges might there be in creating an effective cross-functional team? How could managers deal with those challenges?

Problem 2: Which of the factors influencing group effectiveness would play the most positive role in this case, and which would act against the cross-functional teams' effeciveness?