Get Your Team to Produce Results,
Not Reports
Harvard Business Review, Jan. 20, 2011

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."