CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM ALIGNMENT

Cross-Functional Team Alignment

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:

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:

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:

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:

  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.

Effective Structural Strategies For The Cross-functional Team

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:

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: