Sponsoring Cross-Functional Projects That Succeed

Cross-functional collaboration has always been critical for innovation. New problems and new solutions require functional groups to work together in new ways. But it’s even more critical today, as complex challenges require system-wide responses. To understand the impact of tariffs, for example, organizations must bring together experts from finance, supply chain, government relations, pricing, marketing, and PR. At the same time, these collaborations fail at high rates. These failures tend to have common root causes: team governance (a lack of clear decision-making authority or a clear problem to solve), organizational structure (such as competing priorities and incentives); and culture (breakdowns in trust and communication). Senior executives who sponsor cross-functional initiatives have the authority and connections across the organization to combat these challenges and set teams up for success. Here’s how to do this—without getting too deeply in the weeds of the team’s work. Recommendations Start with a clear definition of the problem. It’s easy to take for granted that everyone knows what the team is doing and why. But cross-functional teams tend to have many stakeholders, and when each contributes their own perspective, it can yield a profusion of goals and general confusion. This, in turn, makes it hard to make disciplined choices about everything from who should be on the team to which tactics to pursue. As a result, team members’ efforts can be misdirected, conflicts can arise, and the project risks slowing down or even failing to meet its goals. As the project gets going, you and the team leader need to articulate: What problem are you trying to solve? What are you trying to achieve? How does this fit with your strategy? What’s the scope? What is out of scope? What are your success metrics? Who are the stakeholders? As a sponsor, this is where your involvement is critical: Get the problem definition right and you won’t need to intervene as much later on. If you have a specific idea of how you think the problem should be solved, you should also articulate this vision from the get-go. You may be tempted to delegate this work to your team leader to empower them or draw on their expertise, but if they’re working to guess what you’ve already decided, it can waste valuable time. After all these items have been articulated, you can step back during the execution phase, checking in at key milestones that you and the team leader agree on. Encourage the team leader to keep membership as small as possible. Cross-functional teams can quickly become large, as each stakeholder nominates a handful of members to ensure that each function’s perspective is represented. It’s no surprise that these teams have been growing in size for the past few decades. But every additional person can lead to more confusion around roles and decision rights, not to mention process. This can cause overwhelm and gridlock—and, ultimately, a stalled or ineffective project. As a sponsor, you should proactively encourage your team lead to keep the team as small as possible. Guide them to make a distinction between the people whose input is consistently essential (they should be on the team), and those whose feedback can be more sporadic (they can be on call as needed). Set an example by winnowing down the number of senior decision-makers and stakeholders on the project. Incentivize the team for joint success. Cascading corporate targets down through units and departments often results in overly narrow and short-term performance goals, leading to competing success metrics and jockeying for resources and credit. This is particularly pernicious for cross-functional teams that need to trust each other, learn from each other, and solve big problems together. As you establish shared goals for the team, make sure they’re incorporated into individual performance goals. This may require conversations with the team leader and/or your executive peers in those team members’ reporting structures. For example, take a software company that created cross-department task forces to address its historically poor customer service. Each task force included client service specialists, who—per their unit goals—were evaluated on the volume and speed of inquiries they handled; thus, they weren’t incentivized to share or pursue new ideas. But by updating their performance goals to include both their specific contributions to those task forces (such as proposing new solutions) as well as the project’s overall goals (like raising customer renewal rates), the team leaders were able to hold members accountable for their contributions to achieving the goal. While the performance targets were just part of the company’s broader efforts to improve customer service, the conclusion of the task force’s work coincided with customer satisfaction scores reaching an all-time high. Watch for “us versus them” language. If you hear reports of team members saying “We’ll do it our way,” or “They’re messing it up,” it’s a red flag that the team isn’t thinking of themselves as a cohesive unit and the project may be headed for a breakdown. If this happens, you’ll want to identify whether this is an individual interpersonal issue, or a whole-team issue. If it simply reflects a conflict between two team members, this may be something that the team leader can handle, perhaps with your input and guidance. But if it’s a larger team problem, or if it reflects functional misalignment, you’ll want to coordinate with other executives to unearth and address any barriers standing in the way. This often has to do with competing priorities or incentives, or unclear roles or decision rights. Share best practices across the organization. You have the opportunity to transform a single cross-functional success into a shared organizational capability. Take the time to meet with the team to understand what contributed to the success and document those practices. Share these learnings with the executive team and more broadly in the organization. You might decide to create new incentives, such as a recognition program, around effective collaboration. As the team disperses, encourage members to maintain relationships beyond the project. Ultimately you want to use the win to help transform your company’s structures and culture. . . . As the need for cross-functional projects continues to grow, senior leaders need to recognize collaboration as a core organizational need. Those who thrive at it combine universal skills—from listening to seizing opportunities—with networks and knowledge that stretch beyond their own department. Executives who influence talent strategy and shape collaborative initiatives should create opportunities for employees to participate earlier in their careers so that by the time they step onto big, high-stakes cross-functional projects, they are already adept collaborators. Deep Dives 75% of Cross-Functional Teams Are Dysfunctional By Behnam Tabrizi HBR.org, June 23, 2015 (15-minute read) Where We Go Wrong with Collaboration By Rob Cross HBR.org, April 4, 2022 (13-minute read) Performance Management Shouldn’t Kill Collaboration By Heidi K. Gardner and Ivan Matviak HBR, September–October 2022 (29-minute read) The Collaboration Blind Spot By Lisa B. Kwan HBR, March–April 2019 (25-minute read) Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams By Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson HBR, November 2007 (36-minute read) Credits Expert advice courtesy of David Burkus (organizational psychologist and author, Best Team Ever), Rob Cross (Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College and author, Beyond Collaboration Overload), and Heidi K. Gardner (distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School and author, Smarter Collaboration).

Sponsoring Cross-Functional Projects That Succeed

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