Case Study: Building Effective Cross-Functional Leadership Teams
August 1, 2025
How AIIR Team Effectiveness® Helped a Major Grocery Retailer Align Senior Leadership Teams and Drive High Performance
2023 Brandon Hall Award Winner, Best Team Development Program
Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the retail sector, one of the largest grocery retailers in the U.S. was facing a crisis: Across nearly 500 retail locations and a 34,000-person workforce, the organization was experiencing low employee engagement, rising turnover, and declining effectiveness.
The problem wasn’t with the business itself, but with its leaders. The company’s senior leadership teams were struggling to adapt to new ways of working in a post-pandemic hybrid environment. The shift to hybrid work had eroded the informal connections that once held teams together, without anything deliberate to replace them.
The result? Departments operated with conflicting priorities and limited visibility into each other’s goals. Teams lacked the trust and communication channels to coordinate effectively. Leaders were spending more time firefighting than focusing on strategy.
“There is a real sense of defensiveness and silos between facilities or departments. We need to break the silos and demonstrate to our teams how everything and everyone needs to work together.”
VP of Supply Chain and Logistics
A Bold Commitment to Team Effectiveness from the Top of the Organization
Following a successful AIIR Team Effectiveness® engagement for the company’s C-suite, the CEO and Chief People Officer team engaged AIIR Consulting to help them break down the siloes that were hindering cross-functional collaboration and cascade team effectiveness across 12 senior leadership teams comprising more than 100 leaders across every major function — from operations and merchandising to pharmacy, legal, technology, and human resources.
We proposed a 9-month development journey that combined both team and individual assessment, individual leader development, team development, and ongoing reinforcement to help these mission-critical teams increase their productivity, improve their team cultures, break down communication silos, and achieve high performance.
A Science-Backed Program Designed to Build High-Performing Leadership Teams
All of AIIR’s engagements are designed around the AIIR® Method — Assessment, Insight, Implementation, Reinforcement — a proven approach to transforming leaders, teams, and organizations and empowering them to achieve excellence.
Assessment
AIIR’s approach to team effectiveness helps teams achieve sustained high performance by elevating the two necessary ingredients for successful teaming: Culture and Productivity.
- Team Culture is how team members interact and relate to one another. It describes how team members build trust, remain cohesive, and engage in productive dialogue.
- Team Productivity is how efficiently and effectively the team gets work done. It describes how the team achieves alignment, executes on its priorities, and cultivates team knowledge through learning and adapting.
The AIIR® Team Effectiveness Survey (TES) is a short assessment that measures six key dimensions of Culture and Productivity. The resulting report plots each team members’ answers, anonymously, along the team effectiveness grid, so that team leaders clearly understand where their teams are strong and what they need to work on.
Team members also completed a battery of three personality inventories to add information about their individual strengths, weaknesses, values, and motivations.
Insight
During the Insight phase, AIIR’s executive coaches and consultants leverage decades of experience and expertise to help individuals and organizations make meaning of assessment data.
Individual team members met with an executive coach to debrief the results of their personality assessments. The coaches also used this opportunity to gather more in-depth information about the dynamics of that individual’s team.
Team leaders met with an executive coach to review their team’s assessment report and key findings. The coach used the time to connect the survey results with the team’s personality assessments, and to discuss the team leader’s role in driving team performance.
Implementation
The implementation phase is where we turn insights into action.
Each team participated in a full-day in-person development session (or two half-day virtual sessions) where they debriefed their TES results together, learned a shared framework for team effectiveness, and created a practical development plan targeting their greatest opportunities.
These sessions were where the real breakthroughs happened. For the first time, many of these teams had a structured, facilitated conversation about how they actually worked together — not just what they were working on. Teams established development goals ranging from building trust across departments and improving cross-functional communication to clarifying roles, improving meeting effectiveness, and creating shared accountability for strategic priorities.
Reinforcement
Following the team development sessions, team leaders met with coaches and executive stakeholders to debrief the session, discuss methods for implementing their action plan, and reinforce the insights unearthed in the session.
Teams Experienced a Significant Increase in Both Productivity and Culture
Based on AIIR® Team Effectiveness Survey (TES) data collected before and after the engagement, teams showed statistically significant improvement across key dimensions of team effectiveness. As shown in the graph, teams experienced an average:
- +6% increase in Team Productivity
- +4% increase in Team Culture
- +14% improvement in shared purpose
- +15% increase in trust between peers
- +14% improvement in accountability
Impact Across the Enterprise
The numbers only tell part of the story. Open-ended responses from post-engagement TES surveys and insights from the coaches who worked with each team point to impact that cascaded across the company:
- Teams developed a shared language for teaming. Leaders across all 12 teams now use a common framework to talk about team culture and productivity, making it easier to diagnose issues, set expectations, and hold each other accountable.
- Cross-functional collaboration replaced departmental defensiveness. Teams that had previously operated with conflicting priorities and limited visibility into each other’s work began coordinating on shared business challenges, from talent acquisition to strategic market expansion.
- Leaders took ownership of team performance. One team saw a 226% increase in alignment around communicating expectations of one another. Another achieved a significant increase in members feeling their unique strengths and expertise were respected. These represent leaders who started managing their teams differently.
- The demand for more was proof of value. Several teams requested continued coaching and additional sessions, and several leaders asked to expand the program to their teams at the next level down the organization. In response, AIIR identified an opportunity for the company to certify members of its HR team to administer and debrief the AIIR® Team Effectiveness Survey themselves, embedding team effectiveness as a permanent organizational capability.
“The team is able to connect with and respect each other, laugh and joke when appropriate, but also collaborate and push through challenges when needed as well.”
VP of Pharmacy Operations
An Unexpected Organizational Change and an Agile Partnership Designed to Adapt
Engagements of this scope don’t always unfold exactly as planned. Mid-way through the program, the organization experienced significant change that resulted in the departure of several participating team leaders and members.
Of the 12 teams that started the program, 9 completed it as originally designed. For the remaining three — each of which had undergone significant personnel changes — AIIR adapted. Rather than forcing a group development session on teams that were still finding their footing, AIIR pivoted to provide 1:1 coaching for team leaders and individual members, giving them the targeted support they needed to lead through a complex transition.
This adaptability wasn’t an afterthought — it was a reflection of how AIIR partners with organizations: not as a vendor delivering a rigid program, but as a trusted advisor who understands that real organizational life is messy, and that the best development happens when you meet people where they are.
The Retail Industry’s Leadership Challenge
This organization’s experience reflects a broader challenge across the grocery and retail industry. Leadership teams are contending with interconnected pressures that demand greater alignment and collaboration:
- Rising turnover at every level. BLS data puts the average retail turnover rate at approximately 60% for hourly employees. The problem extends to corporate and management ranks, too.
- Evolving leadership requirements. The shift to hybrid work has eroded the informal connections that once held teams together. Leaders need new capabilities around communication, coordination, and building trust across distributed teams.
- Declining trust in leadership. Only 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they trust their organization’s leadership. In an industry where execution depends on alignment from the C-suite to the shop floor, closing this gap is essential.
Investing in team effectiveness at the leadership level is how organizations close the gap between strategy and execution—and build the foundation for sustained high performance.
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