Cross-functional thinking – the ability to understand, connect, and integrate perspectives from different disciplines or departments – creates value for your business:
- Strategic Benefits – Multiple perspectives produce more comprehensive solutions, generate novel ideas and approaches, and deliver decisions with broader positive impact across the organization.
- Operational Benefits – Greater agility results from fewer silos and barriers, higher productivity from efficient processes with fewer redundancies, and faster time-to-market via concurrent versus sequential actions.
- Talent Development Benefits – Competencies and trust grow from higher employee engagement, diverse skills development, and stronger cross-team relationships.
- Customer Benefits – Relationships are strengthened through more seamless customer experiences, solutions that simultaneously address multiple customer needs, and aligned communication across your business functions.
Leaders who engage cross-functionally benefit directly from a dual leadership development strategy, which strengthens their own, and their team’s, competencies. Leaders gain:
- Broader Perspectives – Exposure to the challenges and solutions of other functions provides insight about how those functions contribute to business success, while enhancing the leader’s ability to see patterns and interconnections across seemingly separate issues.
- Increased Strategic Acumen – Considering decisions that connect cross-functional operations to business strategies strengthens strategic thinking by revealing trade-offs that impact multiple stakeholders, and by identifying consequential effects.
- Stronger Peer Relationships – Developing cross-functional peer relationships builds trust, creates allies who share alternative viewpoints, and expands sources of informal support and counsel outside of direct reporting lines.
- Enhanced Executive Presence – Demonstrating big-picture thinking that transcends departmental concerns, and speaking credibly about complex, interdependent business priorities, boosts leadership visibility.
Leaders who encourage cross-functional engagement develop their direct reports by:
- Expanding Their Perspectives – Mindsets are opened by exposing team members to other departments through shadowing, rotations, and joint meetings so they discover how their work impacts others.
- Modeling Collaboration – Cooperating with other functions enables more transparent decision-making that builds effective cross-functional partnerships, while providing opportunities to appreciate team members who successfully work across boundaries.
- Creating Growth Opportunities – Capabilities and confidence grow by assigning team members to cross-functional projects, connecting them with mentors in other functions, and providing openings to present their work to cross-functional audiences.
- Building Strategic Understanding – Helping team members connect their daily work to broader business goals increases visibility into how decisions flow, helps them understand how they make a difference, and develops their ability to influence.
How often are you using cross-functional activity to accelerate development?