At Beiersdorf, a director had the vision to bring together selected roles and functions from three different departments — Sustainability, Strategy, and Learning — to form a new strategic unit.

These three areas serve the same brand and are deeply interconnected:

• Sustainability shapes strategic direction.

• Strategy sets priorities that must be learned and lived across the organisation.

• Learning ensures employees understand and implement strategic and sustainability goals.

Despite these natural overlaps, the roles were previously distributed across different departments, working largely independently — especially in remote settings.

The new strategic unit aimed to unlock the potential that only emerges when these themes work together.

Although the organisation chart had been changed, the people inside it hardly noticed:

• They still worked in their old structures.

• Remote work reinforced the separation.

• The “new team” existed on paper — not in reality.

In practice, the new unit consisted of three small groups extracted from larger departments, without shared identity, purpose, or workflows.

To become an actual team, they needed clarity, alignment, and a real understanding of how their work connected.

To create a clear, purpose-driven strategic unit by:

• defining roles and responsibilities in each subteam

• making overlaps and synergies visible

• identifying new responsibilities relevant to the combined mission

• building a shared Team Purpose

• forming cross-team collaboration structures
  
  

The goal:
A team that not only exists structurally — but works and thinks as one.

The work began where every transformation beginnen muss: with transparency.

1. Roles & Responsibilities Inside Each Subteam

In each of the three groups, teamdecoder was used to:

• map all roles

• describe responsibilities

• outline current tasks

• clarify resource distribution

• identify skills

• surface gaps and overlaps

This created clarity about how each part of the future unit currently operated.

2. Integrating New Strategic Expectations

The director defined new areas the unit should cover in the future.
These were directly added into teamdecoder as:

• new responsibilities

• future roles

• emerging topics that would shape the purpose of the team

The team saw for the first time what the new expectations for their combined unit looked like.

After individual clarity, the next step was the question: “Where do you need to collaborate?” The surprising answer: They didn’t know. The members still felt closer to their former departments than to each other. Remote work made this even more pronounced. This revealed an important truth:

👉 A new unit doesn’t become a team just because the structure changes.

Making the collaborative potential visible

Beiersdorf helped the team identify concrete topics where their three areas naturally intersect. These included:

• strategic initiatives

• sustainability-driven change

• learning needs for strategy rollout

• internal enablement

• cross-functional campaigns

As soon as these overlaps became visible, it was possible to form:

Cross-Teams

Teams composed of members from all three subunits, working on joint projects where synergy truly existed. This was the first moment the new unit began to exist in real collaboration.

Although each subteam now had clarity about its own role, something was still missing:

👉 Why do we exist as a combined unit?

When individual subteam purposes were put next to each other, the team realised:

• They needed one unifying thread.

• A shared identity.

• A strategic purpose that captures the reason for bringing these roles together.

Together with the director, we facilitated the creation of a shared Team Purpose.

This was the breakthrough:

• Suddenly, the collaboration made sense.

• The team understood the strategic idea behind the reorganisation.

• The new unit gained a collective identity.

• People saw how their contributions connected.
  
  

From this moment on, the team began to work together intentionally.

Outcome

1. A clear identity — individually and collectively

By the end of our engagement, each subteam had:

• a defined purpose

• transparent roles

• clear responsibilities

And the new strategic unit had:

• a shared overarching purpose

• real cross-team collaboration

• a sense of collective identity

2. Structural clarity that enables future collaboration

The foundation was set:

• The team knew how to work together.

• The roles were clear.

• The strategic why was defined.

• The unit could now grow into its organisational place.

3. A transformation that turned a structural idea into a living team

What started as a conceptual merge became:

👉 a real team with shared purpose, shared work, and shared identity.