Companies need collaboration and cross-functional team management to spark innovation and launch offerings faster. However, guiding teams from different disciplines can create a mess with competing priorities, communication gaps, and unclear roles. This article shares tips for smoothly managing these diverse teams and typical troubles to sidestep.
Best Practices
- Set Clear Goals and Metrics: Keep interdisciplinary teams united by defining shared objectives and success measures. Members should understand how their work fits the company’s aims.
- Enable Regular Communication: Open and steady communication brings transparency about blocks, progress, and shifting priorities.
- Give Collaboration Training: Diverse skills and personalities require emotional intelligence, empathy, and conflict resolution coaching. This smoothens the overall teamwork.
- Recognise and Reward Successes: Uplift and motivate by recognising group and individual wins. Shout-outs, gift cards, and fun events make people feel valued.
The Ideal Size for Cross-Functional Teams
When assembling a team drawn from different business units, an important consideration is finding the right team size for maximum coordination and alignment. Research and real-world experience show that small teams of 3 to 6 people function best for cross-functional collaborations. Excessively large team collaborations often create frustration and organisational problems that impede execution.
- Social Loafing: Outsized groups can lead to social loafing, in which individuals feel less personal accountability and exert less effort.
- Coordination Breakdowns: Large teams also suffer more coordination breakdowns as information flows become complex across many stakeholders.
- Difficulty Aligning: Establishing shared mindsets on priorities and decision rights among numerous voices becomes quite challenging.
The key is to keep cross-functional teams as lean and agile as possible. If more resourcing is required, create multiple independent sub-teams rather than one giant.
Challenges
- Unclear Requirements and Goals: Without precise goals or requirements, cross-functional teams quickly become misaligned in priorities and decision-making.
- Lack of Leadership: It is important to have an actively engaged leader who coordinates across functions.
- Poor Communication: Communication breakdowns are very common in cross-functional teams. Having regular standups and access to project coordination management tools can help.
Conclusion
Leading cross-department teams takes work but speeds up innovation and delivery. Leaders enable success by setting clear goals, promoting open dialogue, providing collaboration tools/training, highlighting wins, and empowering the team. But without leader support in resolving disputes, removing barriers, and realigning priorities as needed, even great teams flounder. As cross-functional groups need engaged leadership and innovative leadership strategies to thrive, leaders must stay actively involved by offering support, resolving conflicts, eliminating obstacles, adjusting priorities, and tracking overall progress.
FAQs
1. What are the benefits of cross-functional teams?
Cross-functional teams boost speed, productivity, and innovation by bringing unique mixes of skills, experiences, and perspectives. This helps teams better solve multifaceted problems.
2. How big should cross-functional teams be?
Keep teams small, around 3 to 6 people, for efficiency and coordination. Overly large groups cause social loafing, disorganisation, and difficulty aligning. If needed, create multiple agile teams instead.
3. How can teams foster open communication?
Leaders should encourage openness, productive conflict, listening skills, and self-awareness. They should also avoid dominance by any one team member.
4. Should workflows in cross-functional teams be defined?
Some structure and clarity of responsibilities across the team prevent confusion and ensure that priorities don’t slip through the cracks. But always encourage flexibility.
