Cross-Functional Collaboration: How to Lead Teams That Do Not Report to You

"Lead like it’s yours, even when the people aren’t yours."   
Watch the episode: How to Lead People Who Don't Report to You at Work 

When You Own the Results But Not the People

You own the result. You do not own a single person who has to deliver it.

That's what happens in cross-functional work. Three teams, none of them yours, all of them already too busy with their own priorities to worry much about yours. 

Here is how it falls apart. Product designs a strong new app and goes well past beta before anyone tells marketing. Marketing is heads down on the annual customer conference and has no idea the CEO plans to announce the app there. Sales is thrilled to get in front of customers, right up until they learn there is no collateral and pricing needs six weeks to approve a new tier. Customer success hears about the product when a customer calls asking for help with it.

Individually, every team did its job. Collectively, they ruined each other’s good work & got in each other's way. 

Three out of four cross-functional teams are dysfunctional

 Stanford professor Behnam Tabrizi studied 95 cross-functional teams across 25 companies. Writing in Harvard Business Review, he reported that three out of four were dysfunctional, failing on at least three of five measures: budget, schedule, specifications, customer expectations, and company goals.

What separated the teams that worked was not talent and it was not chemistry. It was clear ownership. The successful teams had one person with real authority and accountability for the whole outcome. The failures had a committee.

Sony paid for that lesson. Sony invented portable music. The Walkman was theirs, the market was theirs, and their divisions built competing music players and fought each other while Apple arrived with one mission and one product and took the market. Gillian Tett writes about this pattern in The Silo Effect. Success ignites territorial behavior, and one by one each function builds its own bureaucracy and starts defending its own resources. You do not have to be Sony to live this. A mid-size company assembled out of three acquisitions has every bit of it, with less time to recover.

 Lead like it’s yours, even when the people aren’t yours.

Start With Your Perceptions

The Helm Method℠ opens with AIM, and AIM starts inside you, not in the plan.

Are you walking into this already convinced that another team is the problem? That marketing is territorial and sales does not listen? You decided that before the project started, and it colors every decision you make and every conversation you have. Notice that first. Then look at the work. Who does it touch, who does it depend on, what does it require in insight, contribution, and approvals.

Then name the shared outcome that matters more than your team’s metrics or anyone else’s, and set your intention to lead a collaboration where all of you win.

One owner, and a close eye on the handoffs. 

ACT means take considered action. Name a primary owner, as high up the chain as you can get without creating a bottleneck. Not a coordinator who books the meetings. An owner who is accountable for the result across teams and has the authority to make the call when functions disagree. 

If that owner is you, lead like it. The moment you visibly defer to a sponsor, you lose respect, momentum, and attention for the initiative. Check with your sponsor behind the scenes. Out front, lead through the shared goal and the collective stake, not through the org chart.

Leading people who do not report to you is Peopleship℠ in practice, shaping how the work feels so that people want to work with you no matter which part of the company they sit in.

Then ADJUST, all along the way.

Watch the handoffs, not just the tasks, because failures live in the space between teams where everyone assumes somebody else picked up the work. Watch the incentives too. When two teams are paid to want opposite things, take it to your executive sponsor with a few options. Ask for feedback. Correct with grace, for yourself and for the people you are working with.

Cross-functional work does not run on everyone liking each other. It runs on shared outcomes and collective gains, and it has to be owned and led. One shared goal, one owner, and a close eye on the handoffs.

Subscribe to Mini but Mighty℠ Leadership Lessons for a new episode every Friday.

Start with yourself. Lead yourself. Then lead others. Be a Boss.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you see a lack of collaboration across the company, we can help.  Boss at the Helm builds Humanity Skills like this one across organizations through live workshops, online courses, and the Helm Leadership Essentials℠ cohort program. Start a conversation at bossatthehelm.com/contact.