Cross-functional teams have seen a recent resurgence in popularity, but they aren’t new—they’ve been around since at least the 1950s. But realistically, the idea of bringing specialists from other disciplines together to solve new problems has been around for far longer. Cross-functional teams as we know them now are simply a group of specialists from other functional areas of an organization that have been assembled to achieve a desired outcome.
Cross-functional teams usually take two forms:
Assembling a cross-functional team helps reduce the costs, politics, and time spent making decisions that pop up when departments attempt to solve problems in the normal, functional way. For example, it will take a product longer to get to market if it has to pass through each department needed to produce it, whereas if it was created collaboratively by a cross-functional team from the beginning, it’s built efficiently from start to finish.
Other benefits of cross-functional teams include:
Out of the 400+ businesses Conscious Copy & Co. we’ve helped, an overwhelming majority of them mention wanting to strengthen their team alignment across departments. While they might not see this as creating cross-functional teams, what they are looking for is cross-functional collaboration.
Smaller businesses can take note of the benefits larger organizations enjoy when assembling cross-functional teams; if they have the resources, they can build their own. However, if a business is simply looking to facilitate more cross-functional collaboration and overall team alignment across departments, the methods outlined here can help.
One of our clients at Conscious Copy & Co. created a Vivid Vision for his contracting company that provides several services, which include plumbing, HVAC, and overall home maintenance.
He created a Vivid Vision so the entire company could see where the organization is headed, but he also wanted to inspire more collaboration between departments.
The success of the company depended on it!
In order to facilitate more cross-functional collaboration, part of his vision included creating a Home Performance Department: a dedicated team made up of other service departments like plumbing, heating, HVAC, electrical, and quality control to optimize the comfort of their customers’ homes.
In other words, each part of The Alignment Triad: Vision, Talent, and Structure.
To align your cross-functional team, or to facilitate cross functional collaboration, you’ll first want to define your objective. But if you want to motivate and inspire your team, they must be aligned with the overall vision.
Sure, you may need to create a cross-functional team to develop a new product quickly. But remember, with employees 50% more likely to be passionate about the work they do (and 50% more productive) when they understand its purpose, you’ll need to define more than just an outcome.
Here are three great places to start:
The goal of a cross-functional team is to combine various skill sets to achieve an outcome faster, more efficiently, and with less bureaucratic congestion. However, specialists from various parts of an organization come with different points of view, different communication styles, biases, and departmental loyalties.
For example, a leader from the marketing team might prioritize customer feedback of a new software product, while someone from engineering believes that customers don’t know what they really want.
When assembling a cross-functional team, organizations need to prioritize more than just skill.
Here’s what the experts have to say about building a cross-functional team:
And to further set a team up for success, a study which observed 15 multinational companies, with 55 large cross-functional teams, found that the most effective to align cross-functional talent had:
Once a team is brought together and has clarity of its goals, it’s up to the leader to manage and develop the superstars it brought together. Here are some other effective strategies for cross-functional talent management:
It’s not uncommon for a cross-functional team structure to be fluid.
Experts agree that while roles must be clearly defined, leadership authority should also be well-established, and hierarchical structures should be avoided to maintain collaborative spirit. What’s more important is that the cross-functional team have defined goals, outcomes, timelines, and the tools to execute.
Based on their observation of 55 global companies, including Nokia, Marriot and the Royal Bank of Scotland, researchers concluded that the best way to structure a collaborative team is to focus on eight factors:
With proper leadership and clear roles, a cross-functional team should be structured for flexibility. This is where innovation happens: giving people room to solve problems allows them more space to be creative.
While the team should have space to collaborate on ways to solve problems in the day to day, a clear process must be established for crucial decisions.
And there should be a strong emphasis on conflict resolution.
Here’s what the experts have to say about effective cross-functional decision making:
In order to avoid conflict, experts also suggest these three approaches to decision-making:
A more recent evolution of the cross-functional and collaborative team is the Agile team. These teams use various project management methodologies like SCRUM to produce value in a short amount of time.
We won’t go into much detail about Agile teams here, because the common characteristic of any cross-functional team is the central idea that the team was built to collaborate.
And most philosophical offshoots like Agile were born out of a dedication to rigorous structure and project management.
But cross-team collaboration isn’t always as simple as consolidating tasks in Asana. Some cross-collaboration happens in warehouses, and even a production team assembled to cover an event like the Olympics is considered a cross-functional team.
Since we’ll touch on remote teams in a future section, here are the best resources for communicating across collaborative teams overall:
Cross-functional teams usually take two forms:
Assembling a cross-functional team helps reduce the costs, politics, and time spent making decisions that pop up when departments attempt to solve problems in the normal, functional way. For example, it will take a product longer to get to market if it has to pass through each department needed to produce it, whereas if it was created collaboratively by a cross-functional team from the beginning, it’s built efficiently from start to finish.
Other benefits of cross-functional teams include:
Out of the 400+ businesses Conscious Copy & Co. we’ve helped, an overwhelming majority of them mention wanting to strengthen their team alignment across departments. While they might not see this as creating cross-functional teams, what they are looking for is cross-functional collaboration.
Smaller businesses can take note of the benefits larger organizations enjoy when assembling cross-functional teams; if they have the resources, they can build their own. However, if a business is simply looking to facilitate more cross-functional collaboration and overall team alignment across departments, the methods outlined here can help.
One of our clients at Conscious Copy & Co. created a Vivid Vision for his contracting company that provides several services, which include plumbing, HVAC, and overall home maintenance.
He created a Vivid Vision so the entire company could see where the organization is headed, but he also wanted to inspire more collaboration between departments.
The success of the company depended on it!
In order to facilitate more cross-functional collaboration, part of his vision included creating a Home Performance Department: a dedicated team made up of other service departments like plumbing, heating, HVAC, electrical, and quality control to optimize the comfort of their customers’ homes.
In other words, each part of The Alignment Triad: Vision, Talent, and Structure.
To align your cross-functional team, or to facilitate cross functional collaboration, you’ll first want to define your objective. But if you want to motivate and inspire your team, they must be aligned with the overall vision.
Sure, you may need to create a cross-functional team to develop a new product quickly. But remember, with employees 50% more likely to be passionate about the work they do (and 50% more productive) when they understand its purpose, you’ll need to define more than just an outcome.
Here are three great places to start:
The goal of a cross-functional team is to combine various skill sets to achieve an outcome faster, more efficiently, and with less bureaucratic congestion. However, specialists from various parts of an organization come with different points of view, different communication styles, biases, and departmental loyalties.
For example, a leader from the marketing team might prioritize customer feedback of a new software product, while someone from engineering believes that customers don’t know what they really want.
When assembling a cross-functional team, organizations need to prioritize more than just skill.
Here’s what the experts have to say about building a cross-functional team:
And to further set a team up for success, a study which observed 15 multinational companies, with 55 large cross-functional teams, found that the most effective to align cross-functional talent had:
Once a team is brought together and has clarity of its goals, it’s up to the leader to manage and develop the superstars it brought together. Here are some other effective strategies for cross-functional talent management:
It’s not uncommon for a cross-functional team structure to be fluid.
Experts agree that while roles must be clearly defined, leadership authority should also be well-established, and hierarchical structures should be avoided to maintain collaborative spirit. What’s more important is that the cross-functional team have defined goals, outcomes, timelines, and the tools to execute.
Based on their observation of 55 global companies, including Nokia, Marriot and the Royal Bank of Scotland, researchers concluded that the best way to structure a collaborative team is to focus on eight factors:
(1) Bonding Practices
(2) Executive Collaboration
(3) Mentorship Culture
(4) The Right Training
(5) Community
(6) Skilled Leadership
(7) Trust & Rapport
(8) Clarity & Flexibility
With proper leadership and clear roles, a cross-functional team should be structured for flexibility. This is where innovation happens: giving people room to solve problems allows them more space to be creative.
While the team should have space to collaborate on ways to solve problems in the day to day, a clear process must be established for crucial decisions.
And there should be a strong emphasis on conflict resolution.
Here’s what the experts have to say about effective cross-functional decision making:
In order to avoid conflict, experts also suggest these three approaches to decision-making:
A more recent evolution of the cross-functional and collaborative team is the Agile team. These teams use various project management methodologies like SCRUM to produce value in a short amount of time.
We won’t go into much detail about Agile teams here, because the common characteristic of any cross-functional team is the central idea that the team was built to collaborate.
And most philosophical offshoots like Agile were born out of a dedication to rigorous structure and project management.
But cross-team collaboration isn’t always as simple as consolidating tasks in Asana. Some cross-collaboration happens in warehouses, and even a production team assembled to cover an event like the Olympics is considered a cross-functional team.
Since we’ll touch on remote teams in a future section, here are the best resources for communicating across collaborative teams overall:
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