Building your organization: Part II - Cross Functional Support

Cross functional support is critical to building stores on time, on budget, and to your specs

About 1REC

I realized not everyone who receives this knows what 1REC really is beyond the Substack, or that you can find the library of content on my Substack homepage, so I wanted to mention a couple things:

• 1REC's mission is to enhance retailers' strategies and processes by providing executive advisory services accompanied by custom business solutions. I write Clicks to Bricks: The Playbook because I love sharing my insights from prior experiences, and I believe long form content is more helpful in this field than high level LinkedIn posts. I’ve seen the same mistakes in DTC brands repeatedly that I hope to help prevent/fix even if I’m not formally advising or consulting for you (but let me know if you’re interested!).

• You can check out prior posts on the 1REC Substack home page here or learn more about 1REC’s services on the company website here.

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The tl;dr

1. A strong Store Development team will fail without the proper support of, and partnership with, cross functional partners

2. Even if you have the perfect checklist of tasks/workflows, you may still flounder in the actual decision-making process if you’re building the teams out for the first time, and certainly when things inevitably go wrong even with an experienced team

3. Start by mapping out every team’s (or better yet, person’s) role using RACI designations for every action/deadline/process; this determines who calls the shots

4. Augment those with clearly defined Decision Types to establish how shots are called

5. And then maybe read up on how the CIA planned to destroy decision-making efficiency in enemy organizations to train yourself in identifying what to avoid!

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Introduction

In Part I: Building the Foundation I provided a high level overview of the core Store Development functions. To keep the human anatomy analogies going in these substacks, if the core team is the heart of the Store Development program, then the cross functional teams are the other organs, and the collection of cross functional processes is the connective tissue. The success and survival of the part is dependent on the collective group working together.

I’ve outlined three major considerations as you think cross functionally':

1. Cross functional dependencies

2. Designating role types

3. Designating decision types

I hope that this at least provides a comprehensive starting point for the beginning stages of your program’s development, or an organizational audit if you’re a bit more established.

Cross functional dependencies

It’s important to note that this only reflects 2 of 3 critical areas where you should map cross functional workflows:

1. The things other teams need FROM the Store Development team to then in turn provide

2. The things they need to GIVE the Store Development team. What I’m not including this substack is the list of things other teams need to provide among themselves — but usually if you have these bases covered, those interdependencies will be discovered and created in order to achieve the below outputs

(These might be tough to read on mobile, so be sure to check it out on desktop later!)