As organizational priorities changed and continued to shift around the new flagship mobile product, I worked with teams and individual talent to align roles and responsibilities being phased out around new unfilled needs:

• Conducted deep-dive talent audits through one-on-one interviews and skill assessments to understand existing capabilities, interests, and emotionality.

  • Example: Identified personal biases, triggers, and blindspots, as well as adaptive patterns, network supports, and emotional intelligence using a therapeutic-like humanistic assessment method. 
    

• Cross-referenced audit results with new strategic needs, creatively mapping misaligned and/or phased-out responsibilities to new roles and job descriptions.

  • Example: Identified marketing and customer success talent whose roles were tied to supporting the legacy product, and redeployed them towards emerging sales and market development needs.
    
    

This drastically reduced reported role ambiguity amongst staff, while eliminating long-standing overlap and duplication between roles, redeploying, rather than replacing, underutilized talent.

Over the following two years, organizational priorities continued to shift between teams quickly, at times week-to-week. To ensure the most immediate priorities could be routinely met, I implemented a ‘networked’ organizational approach:

• Established transparent priority tracking where critical projects and team objectives were made visible to the entire company via a shared dashboard.

  • Example: A combination of project management and business software enabled staff to readily view company-wide objectives and track progress across teams. 

• Launched weekly all-hands town halls to discuss ‘big picture’ organizational goals, and for talent and teams to share their current objectives and challenges / barriers towards those goals. 

  • Example: Sharing product design and development plans prompted customer success and sales staff to share emerging client feedback and trends, creating clearer product direction. 

• Created a peer-driven recognition program that rewarded contributions outside traditional roles towards the current organizational goals.

  • Example: A ‘spotlight’ initiative for staff to nominate colleagues for outstanding cross-functional contributions, backed with small incentives such as future project leadership opportunities, priority consideration for stretch assignments, etc.

This reinforced a foundation of transparency, adaptability, and alignment, shifting company culture toward proactive cross-team collaboration, trust building, and shared problem-solving, cultivating a company-wide “rallying effect.”

As Norada started to benefit from leaner, more interconnected, and adaptable teams, talent engagement took off, and turnover plummeted. 

This painted a picture of the human and social capital previously untapped within the company and hindering our potential for organizational progress. This fundamental understanding created a springboard for our cross-functional development system, which went on to become foundational to the company's operations and culture. 

• Founded talent development policies where staff could dedicate 20 - 50% of their time (priority dependent) to cross-functional projects, job growth rotations, and stretch assignments of interest.

  • Example: Business development personnel with an interest and talent in UI/UX gained an opportunity to contribute to product development projects and collaborate with design teams.

• Designed an internal ‘growth marketplace’, where teams could post needs and individuals across the company could opt-in to assist.

  • Example: Facing a tight deadline, the product team needed extra research support for an upcoming feature launch. A customer success specialist, interested in product strategy, was selected through the marketplace to assist.

• Coached individual talent to better navigate change, new working relationships, and identify opportunities of mutual interest and skill. 

  • Example: A sales employee who felt continually left out of exciting organizational changes struggled to conceive how they could become more involved. Through humanistic coaching, we worked through root resistance points and disengagement, reorienting 30% of their time to gaining experience in needed business development projects, increasing their engagement and sense of belonging.

• Paired employees with mentors from different teams to accelerate knowledge-sharing and professional development within new projects.

  • Example: A client specialist was paired with a long-standing operations leader to better navigate organizational culture and career progression. Through structured mentoring conversations, job shadowing, and small shared projects, they gained insight into cross-functional decision-making and developed strategic thinking skills, accelerating their readiness for leadership opportunities.

This promoted contribution, learning, and relationship-building outside existing teams and responsibilities, enabling staff to continually seize career development opportunities and interests, cultivating a sense of ‘psychological ownership’ and greater career autonomy.