by David Burkus
A couple years into your career, you’ll find a few different opportunities to step up and practice your leadership skills. Sometimes it will be preparing and running a team meeting. Other times it may be volunteering for a new task the team requires.
You may find that your first “real” leadership role is managing a newly formed, cross-functional team for a specific and short-term project. Today, cross-functional teams — those with people from different departments who have varied expertise — are becoming more common, as is the rise of project-based work arrangements.
The most common reason for assembling a cross-functional team is speed — speed of information, speed of innovation, or even just the speed required to complete the project. Traditional organizational designs create functional silos, and those silos slow down the flow of information and ideas. Cross-functional teams build bridges that connect once-distant parts of the business and, if done right, allow people to work together better and faster.
But cross-functional teams also face a number of challenges that must be overcome to get off to a great start. Sometimes there are territorial tensions, where members feel accountable to their original functions and are not open to others weighing in on their expertise. Sometimes people have different ways of working, which can make collaboration slower and more difficult. Sometimes teammates are working inside an incentive compensation system that only rewards individual, rather than collective, performance or weights performance in their “normal job” as more important than performance on this project.
While these barriers may be present, they don’t mean your project is doomed. There are a few key actions new leaders can take to get their cross-functional project off to a great start. (more…)
