Create Better Conditions for Cross-Functional Collaboration
Elevating thinking through purpose, framing, and teaming.
As companies grow, senior leadership requires different muscles. For one, executive team members have to learn to balance siloed thinking with cross-functional collaboration that drive performance. For the President or CEO charged with getting a team of highly capable, experienced leaders to engage across entrenched silos can be maddening.
One common resistance from team members is: “What do I have to say about anything in their area of expertise?” A lot, actually, I’d say. The more senior in an organization you are, how you think becomes more important than what you think – but the facilitation of the team has to activate that thinking. The job of the President/CEO, then, is to create the conditions for cross-functional collaboration through purpose, frames, and teaming.
Set a Cross-Functional Purpose
The role of the executive team must be bounded by a clear, consequential, and strategically-aligned purpose. Developing a charter with team input can be a really useful exercise here – in that shared document, spell out that the team needs to collaborate cross-functionally to learn, decide, and lead change across the organization.
Frame Cross-Functional Priorities
This is where many leaders have a real opportunity to invite collaboration. The challenges framed in the executive team need to be:
Cross-cutting, consequential, enterprise-level challenges or opportunities.
Sufficiently complex to require multiple perspectives.
Long-term enough to demand extended time horizons.
And, frankly, interesting.
Examples might include:
Integrating AI as a Capability: Which AI investments have the potential to create lasting value, and how do we separate meaningful opportunities from hype?
Organizational Agility and Resilience: Where is our organization most fragile, where do we lag in adaptability, and which capabilities matter most to stay competitive amid uncertainty?
Talent Advantage: What future skills and leadership do we need, and how do we attract and retain them in a world of remote work, demographic shifts, and fragmented employment models?
Data-Driven Intuition: How can we expand access to data and analytical capability in ways that strengthen—not stifle—our culture of decisive judgment?
Crystalize Cross-Functional Working Groups
For challenges like those above, require that team members build out their working group with individuals from outside of their function — teams need to ask themselves a question like: what kind of thinking or experience would be most beneficial to have on our team to explore this challenge? From there each working group can frame out the challenge, learn the context, and then run small experiments to discover insights on potential paths forward. From there they can take what they’ve learned and amplify what seems most promising. Full team meetings can then focus less on updates and more on what each working group is learning, what questions remain, and how others can help refine their thinking.
There’s much more to say about getting a team to work effectively across silos—psychological safety, self-awareness, awareness of others—but the art of framing cross-functional challenges and making collaboration more likely through intentional structure is one of the most overlooked disciplines I’ve seen.