“Your functional team is the family you’re born into; your cross-functional partners are who you marry.”
Creating products & running a business is a team sport. All functions must work together for the organization to achieve its aspirations—there’s no way around it.
Note: While the phrase uses the term “family,” a corporation is not a family… That’s a topic for another post.
Here are some thoughts on how to improve and maintain cross-functional (XFN) dynamics and collaboration:
Communication: This is foundational. The biggest issues in life (not just work) come from a lack of clear, consistent, and open communication. You can save yourself a lot of pain by internalizing this deeply.
Some table stakes for communication:
- Do it frequently, timely, openly, and clearly.
- Regularly bring everyone together for updates on progress, challenges, and blockers. Aim for cohesion.
- Use async tools (slack, notion, docs, etc) for round-the-clock comms.
- Create spaces (meetings, channels, etc) for continuous sharing and communication to ensure everyone is informed.
Learn about your XFN partners: Your partners possess knowledge and insights that are invaluable, that’s why they’re on the team. Remember that it’s a collaboration, not competition. You all have to work together to achieve common goals.
Working cross-functionally provides an opportunity to lean in and learn more about a different function, the challenges and pressure they face, and other ingredients that will make you a more rounded, and better partner.
By adopting a learner’s mindset, you’ll not only gain a more well-rounded understanding but also strengthen the team’s collective capability through deeper comprehension.
Align on Roles and Expectations: While this might seem obvious, it’s often overlooked. It’s worth pausing to discuss and align on responsibilities, how decisions will be made, and what success looks like. Pausing to do this early will prevent potential overlap, friction, and ensure that everyone is on same page. It’s also important to regularly revisit these to review and modify, if needed.
Influence without authority: In an XFN setting, authority isn’t a given. If you want to align folks towards a vision and goals you’ll need to inspire and persuade, not dictate. To do that, focus on building trust and deeper connections, demonstrating the value of collaboration through actions, not just words, and crafting a compelling narrative that aligns with the greater orgs goals.
Embrace difficulty: Things aren’t always going to be sunshine and rainbows (like everything in life). Sometimes honest and difficult conversations need to be had, that’s part of all relationships. Solid and frequent comms, mutual understanding, clearly defined roles, and positive influence will set the team up for those difficult and constructive conversations , which overall will lead to stronger relationships and resilience.
XFN dynamics may not always be straightforward, but getting these right will set you up to navigate them well.