Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription, to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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Cross-functional teams can be notorious for generating reports, recommendations, and suggestions for implementation — but no actual results.

Next time you manage a team of people from different parts of the organization, focus them on making change, not proposing it.

The first step is to alter the nature of the task. Don’t ask your team to “look at” or “study” a certain issue.

Challenge them to solve it: reduce costs by 10% or improve the speed of a process two-fold.

Then, authorize them to experiment. Encourage them to try possible improvements to see which work. Not all will, of course, but the team will build momentum for implementation and prepare the organization for change. You may still want a report, but it should cover “what’s been done,” not “what can be done.”

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “Do Your Teams Produce Reports or Results?” by Ron Ashkenas.

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