What top 3 skills do I believe are needed to effectively lead cross-functional teams?
1.
Listening
2.
Humility
3.
Focus
Let me explain. If you are in a cross functional team or leading a cross functional team, you are working with diverse functional experts. This means – different people on the team have different levels of knowledge. The entire purpose of a cross functional team is to get them to use their individual expertise to create solutions to problems that take into account – the cross functional problems that arise in every solution ever created. It’s an attempt to head off – and fix before they are problems – likely problems.
Listening
To do this well – requires people to be willing to listen and to learn things
they don’t know. You are bringing in experts. Listen to them.
Humility
The next skill is
humility. Humility to know that – there are indeed things you don’t know that you
should and humility to understand that whatever the main thing that you are
concerned about it – it has to be weighed against the main things other experts
are concerned about. Finding good solutions to problems, often involves
compromises that in an ideal world – would not have to be made, but in the real
world – are required to get things done. Humility – helps us make those
compromises so that we can create the best solution possible and so that we
don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
Focus
Finally – we need to be focused on effective ethical quality problem solving.
The best way to get a diverse team to work well together, is to focus them on
collaborative problem solving. Help them define what a good solution is – that
they can all agree on – then help them collaborate to create the best solution
they can. When disagreements occur – and they will occur- the role of the
leader is to help refocus and reframe that disagreement into solving the
problem at hand. Disagreements are natural – and healthy in effective problem
solving – IF people listen and learn and have humility. Focusing on problem
solving helps remind people to do the first two skills – listen and humility.
An example of each skill in practice.
It is probably easiest
to provide examples of what happens when this doesn’t happen. Think politics. I
live in Florida. We have water problems. And the problems are difficult. There
is no one single cause to the problems and not one single solution to the problems.
We need cross functional teams with various expertise to figure out how best to
protect our water ways. We need scientists, and engineers and politicians and
business people – to all work together. What doesn’t happen – is that – the
incentive to listen to opposing views with humility – is very low. So – it
rarely happens. But if it did, a cross functional team of experts would be
created and the leader – would focus them on collaborative problem solving.
The hardest part – is actually – making sure all the right experts get
into the team. Often – we don’t like certain people – so they are excluded –
and then – we don’t have access to all the information we need and our solution
doesn’t work – or doesn’t have widespread support.
What does this look like when it’s done right? Movies are a good example of this. To make a movie – you have to bring in – story tellers, artists, actors, stage management, costuming, props etc. If they don’t work together – the end product isn’t good. Movie making is probably one of the best examples of leading cross functional teams successfully. People have to listen, and have humility and put themselves in service of the vision and that happens – by focusing everyone on the vision.
I am a Humanistic
leadership expert – I run Humanist Learning Systems and provide online and in
person training on how to be a better leader. My newest program is a 2
hour course on Principles of Humanistic Leadership. I also teach how to
de-escalate conflicts using behavioral science.
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- https://humanistlearning.com/de-escalate-conflicts/
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