A patient waited four days for a routine CT scan that should’ve been completed within hours. When Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson looked into what happened, she found that people had done good work within their own teams. Edmondson traced the delay to poor cross-functional collaboration. You can talk to everybody involved, hear a perfectly reasonable account of what each person did, and still have no good answer for the person who had to wait.
If you want to know how well your teams work together, look at a problem from the point of view of the person who needed it solved. A patient wants to know when they’re getting the scan. A customer wants to know when their equipment will work again. Neither needs a tour of your org chart. Follow the work in the order the patient or customer experienced it. Start there the next time somebody tells you the problem belongs to another department.
See Where Cross-Functional Collaboration Breaks Down
Pick a problem that’s come up more than once and bring in the people who handled it. Ask the first person what they did and what they expected to happen next. Then ask the next person when they found out they had something to do. If you’re reviewing cross-functional collaboration, ask people to show you what they could see at the time. If the second person was waiting for information the first person thought they already had, show both people where the information was recorded and who could get to it. You may save everyone a month of meetings by giving the second person access to a record the company already keeps.
Pay attention to what people do when they can’t get an answer through the usual channels. If an employee has learned to call a former colleague in another department whenever a request stalls, ask what that colleague does with the call. They may know which supervisor can give an answer or which detail the employee needs to include. You’ll learn more about cross-functional collaboration from that call than from the written procedure. Ask why the usual route didn’t get the employee the same answer. A workaround is often the most useful thing an employee can show you.
In a medical practice, cross-functional collaboration can start before anyone books an appointment. A medical SEO agency can help the practice see which service pages people are finding through search. The people answering the phones know which services callers regularly ask for and whether they’ve reached an office that offers them. If callers keep getting routed to the wrong office, put the scheduling lead and whoever manages the website in front of the page together. The scheduler may know in seconds what the page needs to say. The person updating the site would have little reason to notice the omission by looking at traffic alone.
A useful way to assess cross-functional collaboration is to look at a request that went well alongside one that went badly. If both requests needed the same approval and one took much longer, find out what was different about the faster one. Maybe someone provided the right information early. Maybe an employee happened to know who could approve it. Go back to the people doing the work before you decide which explanation is right. You’re looking for something the next person can use on an ordinary day, without needing the same set of circumstances to line up.
Give Teams a Result They Have to Share
In a piece I wrote on leading through change, Aunt Flow founder Claire Coder described packing and hand-delivering products when she started the company. As Aunt Flow grew, she gave other leaders responsibility for major decisions. She put her vice president of revenue in charge of building teams for the company’s next stage and said it became clearer who was accountable at different points in the customer’s experience. When the founder is the person who knows how everything fits together, cross-functional collaboration can still depend on the founder even after the company hires people to run its departments. Coder’s account shows what changes when the founder puts someone else in a position to see and act on work that spans multiple teams.
Shared goals help cross-functional collaboration when the people involved can use them to make a choice. If you’re responsible for a product launch, ask what both the product team and the people selling the product need to be able to say about it on launch day. If a feature won’t be ready, product can explain what’s left to do, and sales can tell you which customers are expecting it. Decide together whether the launch can proceed with a different promise. If the people who know what’s ready learn about the announcement when customers do, you’ve waited too long to have the conversation.
Leaders also have to make room for the work they’re asking people to do. If you want an engineer to spend two hours each week reviewing customer proposals, their manager needs to know what can come off the engineer’s list. Otherwise, the engineer is left to choose between helping a colleague and meeting a commitment you’ll still hold them to. Before adding cross-functional collaboration to someone’s job, ask what work you’re prepared to move or stop. The conversation will tell you whether you value the new responsibility enough to give it time.
If you’re trying to measure cross-functional collaboration, start with the outcome both teams can influence. A service team can record when it sends a replacement part. The customer cares when the equipment is working again. The people who stock the part and the people who install it can keep the measures they need to run their teams. Give them a reason to look together at the full time it takes to restore service. That makes it possible to see whether a change saved the customer a day or merely moved the day from one team’s report to another’s.
Decide Who Gets to Make the Call
There’s a point in cross-functional collaboration when people have talked enough and need an answer. If two managers want different launch dates, find out who can choose a date both teams will work toward. Give each manager time to make their case. Tell them when you’ll decide and what could change the decision afterward. Otherwise, the people who have to plan around that date may end up putting together two schedules while their managers continue the discussion.
Look at the decisions that have come to you more than once. Ask the people involved what they thought they were allowed to do and why they decided to wait. Someone may be able to approve a routine exception within their own team but need help when it affects another team’s budget. That’s a detail you can address without changing the whole reporting structure. When cross-functional collaboration gets stuck in the same place repeatedly, the answer you give the first time is worth less than what you make it possible for someone to decide the next time.
- If two departments are each waiting for the other to approve the same request, tell them whose approval is required and who should be consulted. Put that information where the next employee can find it.
- If the same decision keeps coming back after it’s been made, write down what prompted the choice and what new information would justify reopening it. People can then raise a real change without having to start the argument again.
- If changing one deadline puts another team’s commitment at risk, ask who made that commitment and what they’ll tell the people who are relying on it. Make that part of the decision while both teams are there.
One way to make cross-functional collaboration harder is to leave people to reconcile deadlines you’ve already decided are incompatible. If you move up a product review, ask the reviewers what they’ll have to put aside to make it happen. If their manager had promised their time to another project, bring that manager into the decision and let the people on the other project know what changed. You’ll get a better answer next time you ask for help if people know you’ll take responsibility for the trade they have to make.
Get to Know the People Who Use Your Work
A study of Microsoft employees found that after the company moved to remote work in 2020, the share of collaboration time employees spent with people outside their groups fell by about a quarter from its pre-pandemic level. The question I’d ask is which conversations became harder to have. A person will usually find a way to ask someone on their own team for a quick answer. They may hesitate to call someone two departments away who’s never seen their work. If you want to improve cross-functional collaboration, give those two people a reason to meet before either needs a favor.
A proposal writer can sit in on a review with the people who have to do the work the proposal describes. If reviewers keep sending proposals back to ask the same question, let the writer hear what they need the answer for. The writer may be able to get the information in the first customer conversation. The reviewers may also realize they’re asking for something they used to need and no longer use. Cross-functional collaboration gets easier when people can see what happens to their work after they hand it to somebody else.
When I asked PSI CEO Janet Garcia about leading without authority, she talked about helping people succeed by removing obstacles for them. That’s useful advice on cross-functional collaboration if you’re waiting for somebody who has no obligation to put your request first. Pick up the phone and find out what’s in the way. You might learn that you’re asking for an answer they can only give after hearing from someone on your own team. The next time you work together, you’ll know what to bring them before you ask when it’ll be done.
Build Cross-Functional Collaboration Into the Job
To see how much cross-functional collaboration depends on personal relationships, ask who gets called when two teams can’t get something done. It might be the assistant who knows which executive can say yes, or someone who used to work in the other department and knows whom to reach. Sit with that person and go through the last request they helped resolve. Which part of what they did could someone else do tomorrow? If the answer depends on an introduction, make the introduction. If they could make a decision others couldn’t, ask whether it needs to stay with them.
Personal relationships can make cross-functional collaboration easier. The risk is expecting the next employee to recreate the relationships a predecessor built over years before they can do an ordinary part of the job. If an experienced employee can call a reviewer directly while everyone else has to go through a manager, decide when other employees can make the same call. Let the reviewer tell them what information they’ll need to give an answer. You’re taking something that already works and making it available to the people who keep running into the same problem.
If your approach to cross-functional collaboration has changed, a newer employee should be able to get further on the next request before needing help. Keep experienced help available and notice where the employee still needs it. If they know whom to call and still have to ask a manager to step in, find out what the manager could see or authorize that they couldn’t. The next time the person everyone calls goes on vacation, see which decisions go with them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I tell when cross-functional collaboration is breaking down?
Pay attention when the same issue keeps reaching senior management even though everybody who works on it knows it’s a problem. Ask each team when it knew the work was in trouble. If both knew early, find out who could’ve acted and why they didn’t. If one team learned about it after the deadline was already in jeopardy, look at when the work first became visible to them. The two situations can look identical when the only thing you see is a late project.
How can I improve cross-functional collaboration if I don’t manage the other team?
Bring one problem to a person on the other team who also has to deal with it. Show them what you can change on your side and ask what would save time on theirs. Try it on one request before asking either manager to change how the whole team works. If it helps, tell your managers how much work each side saved and what you’d need to make the change routine. You’ve given them a decision they can make using something that already happened.
When does a meeting help?
A meeting helps cross-functional collaboration when the people in the room can settle something they’ve been going back and forth about. Bring the open question and make sure the person who can answer it will be there. If someone needs to see a forecast before they can choose, send it before the meeting. Check what the participants can do afterward that they couldn’t do before. If they leave knowing the latest status and still have to wait for another meeting to act, fix what kept the first one from producing an answer.
How do I measure cross-functional collaboration on a project that takes months?
Pick a decision that the two teams should be making earlier. If finance and product are trying to catch budget problems sooner, look at how many proposals are already committed by the time finance sees them. Ask what finance found in the proposals that arrived early enough to change. A few examples can show you whether people are talking at the point when the conversation can still affect the plan. That gives you something to work with before the project’s financial results come in.
What if the two managers have conflicting priorities?
Ask each manager what would have to wait if the other team’s work came first. That’s the information their boss needs to make the choice. When the same conflict comes back next quarter, check whether you’ve set targets that make it reasonable for each manager to keep making the same case. Cross-functional collaboration will still need a referee if you keep rewarding the two managers for choices that put them at odds. Decide what you’re going to ask them to achieve together before you try to settle the same dispute again.
Can a reorganization improve cross-functional collaboration?
It can help when someone is responsible for an outcome and the decisions they need to make sit in another part of the company. Before changing who reports to whom, pick one decision that keeps holding up the work and give someone the authority to make it. See what happens the next few times it comes up. If the same approval still has to go to the same executive, ask what the reorganization would actually change about that decision. You want to know who will be able to act sooner once the new structure is in place.
