How to effectively manage a cross-functional team?
11 June 2014
Read by 2683 persons
Successfully leading a cross-functional team is no small feat. Compared to a classic hierarchical responsibility, several specifics make the task particularly complex:
- The team is made up of people with often very diverse profiles, due to their professional culture or geographical origin;
- It does not have common working habits;
- Participants are often divided between their function in the team and their usual responsibilities;
- They are often geographically dispersed, sometimes across the globe;
- Finally, the leader generally does not have formal hierarchical authority over them.
Below are five conditions for successful cross-functional management.
First condition: Build a small and balanced team
To build your team, you must select individuals capable of playing complementary roles (for example, a coordinator who organizes efforts with an innovator who proposes new ideas and a controller who validates the robustness of solutions), endowed with fundamental human qualities such as empathy and integrity, i.e., people skilled in interpersonal relations, inspiring confidence and knowing how to listen to others while asserting themselves. All this within a team ideally composed of 5 to 10 people maximum to encourage rich and intense discussions.
Second condition: Invest in developing a common framework
You must establish a clear and shared working framework, essential to effectively mobilize energies.
This requires clarifying orientations upstream, not hesitating to be directive if necessary to create an unambiguous direction and establishing shared standards by collectively defining rules of conduct (e.g., respecting schedules, degree of transparency, conflict management, etc.) and creating effective dialogue support tools (e.g., a grid matching the marketing definition of needs and their translation into technical characteristics).
Third condition: Develop a sense of shared responsibility
To ensure everyone's involvement, you must share responsibility for the results with the entire team.
To do this, you must encourage collective decision-making to manage key problems by prioritizing consensus decisions; and encourage constructive conflicts so that everyone feels heard by encouraging the expression of differing viewpoints (restarting the debate, being attentive to nonverbal signs of disagreement, supporting minority opinions) and ensuring that you do not shorten conflictual debates as long as they do not degenerate into personal attacks.
Fourth condition: Establish a strong climate of trust
Strong trust is essential to everyone's involvement and the quality of discussions. To build this trust, you have several options: Invest in relationship building (prefer face-to-face meetings and dedicate time to socializing activities to get to know each other better); Organize regular feedback (schedule sessions to avoid catching people off guard, prepare and carefully manage their progress to avoid personal conflicts); Ensure information circulation (clarify everyone's roles and tasks, disseminate decision records, emphasize the importance of informing others about the progress of their own work).
Fifth condition: Actively manage external relations
Whatever the cohesion and dynamism of the team, it is exposed to major disappointments if it does not take care of the rest of the organization. It is therefore necessary to ensure that enthusiasm for the project does not lead to neglecting the expectations of other parts of the organization.
To avoid this, you must be attentive to ensuring clear relations with management by clarifying the authority structure of the team as well as the decision-making mechanisms; to ensure good relations with different departments by identifying communication needs with the outside and organizing to respond to them (periodic newsletter, scheduled meetings, etc.); to clarify the rules of the game regarding resources by ensuring that clear rules are formulated and respected.
In conclusion, it is not easy to manage teams that are not directly dedicated to you, but by following this advice you will be able to manage your projects successfully. Today, you must know how to adapt to these new organizations because even in classic "vertical" management organizations, transversality is developing with devices that bring together people from different departments (project management, process management, network operation, etc.)
Philippe Montant
CEO of ReKrute
- The team is made up of people with often very diverse profiles, due to their professional culture or geographical origin;
- It does not have common working habits;
- Participants are often divided between their function in the team and their usual responsibilities;
- They are often geographically dispersed, sometimes across the globe;
- Finally, the leader generally does not have formal hierarchical authority over them.
Below are five conditions for successful cross-functional management.
First condition: Build a small and balanced team
To build your team, you must select individuals capable of playing complementary roles (for example, a coordinator who organizes efforts with an innovator who proposes new ideas and a controller who validates the robustness of solutions), endowed with fundamental human qualities such as empathy and integrity, i.e., people skilled in interpersonal relations, inspiring confidence and knowing how to listen to others while asserting themselves. All this within a team ideally composed of 5 to 10 people maximum to encourage rich and intense discussions.
Second condition: Invest in developing a common framework
You must establish a clear and shared working framework, essential to effectively mobilize energies.
This requires clarifying orientations upstream, not hesitating to be directive if necessary to create an unambiguous direction and establishing shared standards by collectively defining rules of conduct (e.g., respecting schedules, degree of transparency, conflict management, etc.) and creating effective dialogue support tools (e.g., a grid matching the marketing definition of needs and their translation into technical characteristics).
Third condition: Develop a sense of shared responsibility
To ensure everyone's involvement, you must share responsibility for the results with the entire team.
To do this, you must encourage collective decision-making to manage key problems by prioritizing consensus decisions; and encourage constructive conflicts so that everyone feels heard by encouraging the expression of differing viewpoints (restarting the debate, being attentive to nonverbal signs of disagreement, supporting minority opinions) and ensuring that you do not shorten conflictual debates as long as they do not degenerate into personal attacks.
Fourth condition: Establish a strong climate of trust
Strong trust is essential to everyone's involvement and the quality of discussions. To build this trust, you have several options: Invest in relationship building (prefer face-to-face meetings and dedicate time to socializing activities to get to know each other better); Organize regular feedback (schedule sessions to avoid catching people off guard, prepare and carefully manage their progress to avoid personal conflicts); Ensure information circulation (clarify everyone's roles and tasks, disseminate decision records, emphasize the importance of informing others about the progress of their own work).
Fifth condition: Actively manage external relations
Whatever the cohesion and dynamism of the team, it is exposed to major disappointments if it does not take care of the rest of the organization. It is therefore necessary to ensure that enthusiasm for the project does not lead to neglecting the expectations of other parts of the organization.
To avoid this, you must be attentive to ensuring clear relations with management by clarifying the authority structure of the team as well as the decision-making mechanisms; to ensure good relations with different departments by identifying communication needs with the outside and organizing to respond to them (periodic newsletter, scheduled meetings, etc.); to clarify the rules of the game regarding resources by ensuring that clear rules are formulated and respected.
In conclusion, it is not easy to manage teams that are not directly dedicated to you, but by following this advice you will be able to manage your projects successfully. Today, you must know how to adapt to these new organizations because even in classic "vertical" management organizations, transversality is developing with devices that bring together people from different departments (project management, process management, network operation, etc.)
Philippe Montant
CEO of ReKrute
