Breaking Down Silos and Building Effective Cross-Functional Leadership Teams at a North American Grocery Chain
August 1, 2025
2023 Brandon Hall Bronze Winner – Best Team Development Program
Two years after the COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the retail sector, one of the largest grocery chains in North America was experiencing low engagement, high turnover, and decreased effectiveness across the organization.
The organizations strategy was strong. Execution was not.
The root cause? Leadership teams were misaligned, disconnected, unclear on shared priorities and still struggling to adapt to hybrid work — a challenge familiar to many companies.
A Bold Commitment to Team Effectiveness from the Top of the Organization
Determined to break down the siloes that were hindering cross functional collaboration and to cascade team effectiveness throughout the organization, the firms’s executive leadership team engaged AIIR Consulting to design and deploy a targeted program to develop all 12 of the company’s senior leadership teams.
The company partnered with AIIR Consulting to design and deliver a 9-month development journey that combined assessment, individual leader development, team development, and ongoing reinforcement to help these mission-critical teams increase their productivity, improve their team cultures, 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 a team’s strengths and weaknesses along 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 motivation.
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. Teams met for one full-day in-person development session or two half-day virtual development sessions to discuss the results of their TES surveys, augment their strengths, unearth their weaknesses, and create an ongoing development plan.
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.
Tangible Results at the Enterprise Level
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
Teams were more aligned, collaborative, and execution-focused — so much so that most leaders requested continued coaching and expansion of the program to the next level down the organization.
“The team gets along great and 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. To break the silos, we need to demonstrate to our teams how everything and everyone needs to work together.”
Team Member
An Unexpected Organizational Change and an Agile Partnership Designed to Adapt
Of the 12 teams that started the program, 9 teams completed it as designed. However, mid-way through the program, the grocery chain experienced a tremendous amount of change as an organization, including a c-level exit and a voluntary buyout, during which several of the participating teams’ leaders and other members exited the organization.
AIIR worked to quickly adapt the program to the challenges specific to the remaining three teams, each of which had undergone significant personnel changes. Rather than extensive group sessions, we refocused on providing 1:1 coaching for team leaders and individual members, providing them the support they needed to thrive through a complex transition.
An Organization Leading its Industry
ROI from AIIR’s partnership with the grocery chain went well beyond the impact we helped the organization create for its leadership teams. Rather, our partnership helped the organization achieve a culture shift.
Leaders now speak a shared language of teaming. Siloes are broken down. Collaboration is stronger. Decision-making is faster. And, the organization has risen to become one of the largest privately held companies in the U.S.
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