Cross-Functional Team Alignment

Table Of Contents:

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.

Examples of Cross-Functional Teams

Cross-functional teams usually take two forms:

Integrated units that coexist within the functional organization’s hierarchy (sales and marketing teams organized by region or product for example)
Temporary project-based teams created for specific purposes (a product development team made up of members from R&D, marketing, and engineering, for example)

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:

Innovation – When you bring experts from different specialties together, they bring different perspectives and problem solving techniques along, which leads to creative solutions and ideas.
Communication – Cross-functional teams can drastically improve interdepartmental communication across a company.
Leadership – These teams provide opportunities for growth, and give department heads the ability to stretch into new roles, and lead by example.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

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.

According to a global study:

39% of employees say the people in their company don’t collaborate enough
3 out of 4 employers rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important”
27% percent of employees receive communication training — and only about that amount are actually confident in their ability to communicate in the workplace.
18% are evaluated for their communication during annual reviews

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.

Cross-Functional Collaboration Example: Contracting

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.

See more Vivid Vision examples.

How To Create Cross-Functional Team Alignment

Leaders who’ve studied and reported on cross-functional teams all suggest the common elements (in various forms) of an aligned collaborative team are:

A clear vision of their desired outcome, and well-defined goals to get there
Accountable leadership with a diverse understanding of their team’s various skill sets
A cross-functional organizational structure that prioritizes constant & effective communication, and rigorous project management systems

In other words, each part of The Alignment Triad: Vision, Talent, and Structure.

Cross-Functional Team Alignment: Vision

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:

Create A Shared Identity – People working together as a team begin to form neural synchrony: their brain activity actually begins to mirror one another. This is called “tribalism,” and it can be unhealthy if not managed correctly. That’s why creating a shared identity helps improve collaboration on a team made up of people from other tribes AKA departments.
Build Organizational Solidarity Around A Shared Purpose – A “shared purpose” is essentially the same thing as a “shared identity” or “mission.” However, “organizational solidarity” refers to building a team culture around that shared purpose. In other words, infusing it into how your team functions.
Engage The Senses – Having a purpose is one thing, but imagine how much more driven a team who can see, hear, and feel what they’re pushing towards will be like when reflecting on their mission, identity, and/or purpose.

Cross-Functional Team Alignment: Talent

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.

The Best Way To Build A Cross-functional Team

Here’s what the experts have to say about building a cross-functional team:

Gain Clarity What’s Needed – First, gain a clear understanding of what skills are needed, as well as characteristics.
Complementary Views – To inspire innovation and creative problem solving, many companies suggest building a team made up of views that are complementary to one another.
Look For The “It Factor” – People are different, and even if someone has the necessary skills for a role on your cross-functional team, that doesn’t mean they’re the right fit. When assembling your team, look for people who can collaborate, clearly communicate, and stay adaptable.
Define The Leader – There should be an accountable leader who has a holistic understanding of all parts of the team. They should model empathy, curiosity, and be proficient in conflict resolution. And they should determine who has final say.
Clarify Roles & Be Flexible – Each team member should be clear of their primary role and the purpose that role plays in the larger group. Since this is a team built for innovation and creative problem solving, it’s normal for roles to evolve. Leadership should be prepared, and team members should be adaptable and flexible.

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:

Executive Investment – Leadership teams must clearly communicate vision, purpose, and a shared interest in the outcomes of the team, as well as interest in developing individual team members.
Focused Training In Collaborative Skills – Training in collaborative communication and problem solving while the team is performing it’s function.
Task and Relationship Oriented Leaders – The most productive and innovative teams were led by people who were task-oriented, but also capable of improving social relationships of the team.

Effective Strategies For Cross-Functional Talent Management

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:

Start Small – To ease your team into the collaborative mindset, and to get them warmed up to one another, start things off with a small project the group can all work on together.
Get Your Stars To Collaborate – Competitive change in the marketplace demands collaboration between a company’s top performers. But some of those at the top of their game aren’t as willing to collaborate as you might think (or aren’t trained to be collaborative). Here’s how to inspire the stars in a company to work together.
Create Collaborative Intelligence & Collaboration Spaces – Whether virtual or physical, your people should have access to the same project intelligence, in an environment that facilitates collaboration.
Avoid Collaborative Overload – Burnout is real, no matter who you are. Especially when you assemble the top performers from any given department. Avoid burnout at all costs.

Cross-Functional Team Alignment: Structure

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:

Bonding Practices
Executive Collaboration
Mentorship Culture
The Right Training
Community
Skilled Leadership
Trust & Rapport
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.

Effective Structural Strategies For The Cross-functional Team

Build Around Organizational Solidarity – As your team evolves, build out processes and SOPs based on the solidified decisions of the group. This will only make execution more efficient.
Model Collaboration – A collaborative leadership team’s behaviors will trickle down, so long as it’s visible. Create models of collaboration for your team to follow through cultural initiatives.
Centralize Communications – Remote and hybrid teams know the benefit of having one centralized communication and project management tool. While there are plenty of tools available, what matters is finding the right one for your team.
Infuse Clarity – Create engagement through clarity and ensure your team members prioritize the cross-functional team goals and their individual or departmental goals.
Build Innovation Cells – Take what Cirque Du Soleil did and apply it to your company.
Be Like NASA – Be adaptable, and build “communication wires.”
Use These 5 Tips – “Now my employee turnover is almost non-existent.”

Cross-Functional Team Decision Making Process

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:

The Single Most Effective Tool Is Leadership – The key differentiator between teams with effective decision making processes that increased productivity, and those that fell behind, was great leadership with the ability to take decisive action.
Use Guiding Principles – Drive performance through simple decision-driven organizational standards.
Act Quickly – Agree upon a clearly defined role for key decisionmakers, and empower them to do so quickly enhances cross-functional team performance.

In order to avoid conflict, experts also suggest these three approaches to decision-making:

Leadership Accountability – When there’s one leader who’s accountable for the results of the team, this incentivizes them to expedite the decision making process, or jumping in when the team cannot come to a resolution (EOS has great tools that help cross-functional teams make decisions with their accountability chart.).
Mid-Level Management Overrule – In some larger organizations, mid-level managers step in to make the final call on a decision-induced bottle neck.
Constant project re-evaluation – Cross-functional teams should routinely cut projects and priorities that aren’t working or moving the team towards its main objective.

Cross-Functional Team Communication

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:

Teach Members To Listen, Rather Than Talk – Build sustained collaboration by encouraging team members to focus on communicating with more awareness.
Conflict Resolution – This article by Lucidchart lays out excellent conflict resolution strategies to model for cross-functional teams.
Breakdown Silos – Do whatever you can to eliminate silos within the team.
Or Build Cross-Functional Silos? – Cross-silo leadership for those who can’t break down their silos.