Structuring the CCO Role and Team

Once you’ve determined where the effort should report, determine what structure will work best in your organization based on commitment and resources. Organize for cat herding the silos together based on your culture and how far along you are in working together.

The structure you select should enable you to influence change and drive action. There are four ways you can go with organizational structure (future posts will discuss each structure in detail):

1. Staff leader with dedicated team

2. Line leader with dedicated team

3. Staff leader with dispersed team

4. Line leader with dispersed team

You’ll notice that two options include a dedicated team and two options a dispersed team.

Dedicated Team

You’re going to have to push to get a dedicated team and make a strong case for this level of resources. A dedicated team is what I call a hard-wired engagement.

With a dedicated team, you secure a commitment up front by having a person from each operating area become a part of the change team. They can be a direct report to the team or a dotted-line member.

• A direct report participant suspends his or her official duties in the operating area to be a part of the customer team.
• A dotted-line participant retains what’s supposed to be a paired-down version of his or her duties with a commitment to devote half-time to the customer effort.

When working on the customer effort, this participant has a dotted-line reporting relationship to the leader of the customer effort and takes marching orders from that person for that work.

Dispersed Team

The principle here is that you need practitioners who know the inner workings of the operating areas to be able to dig in and help redefine the experience. In having them be part of the team, you develop the new skill sets the company needs to drive the change and integrate the customer work into the operating areas. It makes sense that a direct report from each operating area residing on the customer team is the ideal formula. But it just can’t work that way in many companies.