How to effectively manage a cross-functional team?

Successfully leading a cross-functional team is a big challenge. Compared to classic hierarchical responsibility, several specifics make the task particularly complex: - The team is made up of people with very diverse profiles, due to their professional background or geographical origin; - It does not have common work 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.

1-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 soundness of solutions), possessing fundamental human qualities such as empathy and integrity, i.e., people skilled in interpersonal relations, inspiring trust 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.

2-Second condition: Invest in developing a common framework
You must establish a clear and shared framework, essential to effectively mobilize energies. This requires clarifying orientations beforehand, not hesitating to be directive if necessary to create a clear direction, and establishing shared standards by collectively defining rules of conduct (e.g., respecting schedules, degree of transparency, conflict management, etc.) and creating effective tools to support dialogue (e.g., a grid matching the marketing definition of needs and their translation into technical characteristics).

3-Third condition: Develop a sense of shared responsibility
To ensure everyone's involvement, you must share the responsibility for results with the entire team. To do this, you must promote collective decision-making to manage key problems, prioritizing consensus decisions; and encourage constructive conflict 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 conflicting debates are not shortened unless they turn into personal attacks.

4-Fourth condition: Foster a strong climate of trust
Strong trust is essential for everyone's involvement and the quality of discussions. To build this trust, you have several options: Invest in building relationships (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 flow (clarify everyone's roles and tasks, distribute decision records, emphasize the importance of informing others about the progress of their own work).

5-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 over the team and the decision-making mechanisms; to ensure good relations with the different departments by identifying communication needs with the outside and organizing to meet them (periodic newsletter, scheduled meetings…); 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, it is necessary to adapt to these new organizations because even in classic "vertical" management organizations, transversality is developing with systems that make people from different departments work together (project management, process management, network operation…).

Philippe Montant CEO of ExeKutive.biz