Your biggest challenge as a cross-functional team leader is in identifying, managing, and resolving all the various types of conflict that will arise, making sure the team delivers on its objectives.

Cross-functional team leaders will experience many common forms of conflict.

Conflicting priorities

Conflicting priorities occur when people have their regular full-time jobs and they’re working on tasks on a cross-functional team too. While both sets of tasks have to be completed, prioritization isn’t always clear.

Conflicting ideas

Conflicting ideas are common on a cross-functional team. One of the beauties of these teams is people bringing different perspectives and ideas. What gets problematic is when people disagree on which idea or approach is best. At the very least, people don’t like having their ideas challenged or criticized by colleagues.

Conflicting styles

Conflicting interpersonal styles come up when some people like working from home versus working in the office. Some people like coming in late. Some people like staying late. Some people like sending email on weekends. And some people don’t even want to see their computer. There are a lot of different stylistic differences out there. Given you’re leading people from all different functions, styles are definitely going to clash.

Conflicting personalities

Conflicting personalities are caused by mixes of introverts and extroverts. Or risk-takers and risk-averters. You may have optimists and pessimists. You may have the logical and the emotional. There are all different combinations of personality types. And there’s a lot of potential conflict there.

Conflicting performance

Conflicts over performance crop up when someone is perceived to not be pulling their own weight. When one person fails to deliver, it tends to have knock-on effects that affect other team members. This is especially sensitive if someone’s failure to perform negatively impacts the results of someone whose doing a great job.

Your biggest challenge as a cross-functional team leader is in identifying, managing, and resolving all these various types of conflict while at the same time, making sure the team delivers on its objectives. Learn how to sense when these types of conflict are likely, or even present. Take action quickly to resolve them. And get the team focus back on the cross-functional teams objectives at hand.

Want to learn more about managing cross-functional teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to manage a cross-functional team. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Effective communication is crucial when you’re leading a cross-functional team. Here are a few communication vehicles you can use.

A cross-functional team leader has a lot of communication vehicles at their disposal. These need to be used effectively. Here are some of the most common ones and a few suggestions on how you can use them.

Steering committee meetings

There are steering committee meetings. These are the most formal, and usually the least frequent. They involve senior stakeholders from multiple functions. You’ll provide a formal team progress update. You may conduct deep dives into specific areas of concern. Sometimes you’re coming to the steering committee for a major decision. These occur on a monthly, bimonthly, or even quarterly basis, depending on the size of the project.

Team project updates

There are team project updates. These are conducted with the entire cross-functional team. Every team member reviews their progress, shares concerns and needs for assistance, and team decisions are made here. These generally occur biweekly or monthly since they can be big and they’re very involved.

Regular team meetings

There are regular team meetings. Those involve the entire team, but they focus on specific upcoming deliverables or specific issues that need to be resolved. These are usually manage by exception types of meetings. They generally occur every week. Individual or subteam meetings involve a portion of the team. These occur on an as-needed basis. They focus on resolving a particular issue or making decisions that don’t affect the broader team or broader project.

Other communication vehicles

Other communication vehicles you can use to keep the team moving forward are project plans and update emails or calls. Keeping a project plan posted somewhere it’s accessible all the time enables team members and stakeholders to get a quick look at progress. They can see what the upcoming deliverables are. This can be posted either on a bulletin board or shared online. Update emails and calls can be sent to the broader team, or they can be used with specific team members. You can even target specific stakeholders to notify them of progress or issues. Make the update’s purpose clear up front. Is it just an FYI? Do you need a decision made? Is it a request for assistance?

All these means of communicating do take time and effort, but that’s the leader’s job on a cross-functional team. Make sure you invest the time keeping the team informed.

Want to learn more about managing cross-functional teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to manage a cross-functional team. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Unproductive meetings waste your team’s time and energy. Here are five ways to make your meetings more effective.

Meetings can be powerful communication tools or a dreadful waste of time. To make cross-functional team meetings productive, specify the meeting purpose, have the right people in the room, but maybe not all the people, manage by exception, identify sources of conflict, and be clear with the accountabilities and next steps.

Specify the meeting’s purpose

The meeting’s purpose can be to update or share information, make a decision, resolve an issue, solve a problem, or celebrate success. Let people know what the meeting is about beforehand and specify if there is any preparation required on their part before the meeting.

Have the right people in the room

Meeting attendees should be driven by the purpose of the meeting. If you’re sharing information, ensure that the people who need that information are invited. If you’re making a decision, have all the decision makers and people providing input into the decision in the room. People have a bias to invite everyone. Be thoughtful about who you invite and let the meeting’s purpose dictate who needs to be there.

Manage by exception

Managing by exception means only covering topics that are outside of expectations. If you have 10 work streams and eight are on track, you should only discuss the two that are off track. It saves time and focuses effort on the most important issues. I worked on one leadership team where we had a 10-hour update meeting. 10 hours. The reason it was so long was we went through every project and every deliverable that everybody was working on even though most of them were on track. Eventually we moved to a manage by exception process. That 10-hour meeting went down to 90 minutes.

Identify sources of conflict

Make sure you identify sources of conflict when you lead a meeting. While you should be listening to the content, look for body language that indicates conflict. Listen to what’s being said or not said. Many times, disagreement comes in the form of silence. When you see this happen, either invite the person to share their thoughts directly in the meeting or approach them after the meeting and ask what’s on their mind.

Be clear with accountabilities

Define accountabilities and next steps coming out of the meeting. Make sure everyone has an open task list and that the owners are clearly identified. Set agreed upon timelines for resolution of those open issues. Document these accountabilities in a follow-up email to the team. Be sure, if you need to, to add these items to your project plan and review them at the next meeting.

Meetings are the most common communication vehicle out there for sharing information. If you lead them poorly, they’re just a big waste of time. If you lead them well, your team is going to be that much more efficient and effective in its communications.

Want to learn more about managing cross-functional teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to manage a cross-functional team. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Leading a cross-functional team involves learning what motivates each individual on your team.

Motivating a cross-functional team requires the leader to set goals that inspire people. They have to connect each team member’s work to the project’s success. They also have to understand people from different backgrounds.

Goals need to be ambitious but pragmatic. Consider setting a commit goal and a stretch goal where it’s appropriate. A commit goal is the basic expectation of what somebody’s going to deliver. A stretch goal is if everything goes right and we do all the right stuff, and we get a little bit lucky, here’s what we can achieve. People want to know their work matters. You have to make the linkage from their task to the broader project objectives.

One technique I love for doing this is sitting the team down in front of a whiteboard. We write down all the tasks they’re responsible for on the cross-functional team project. Then, we write the broad project objectives at the top of the board. We spend time linking every single task they’re working on to those broader goals for the project. Once they see that their work is really critical for driving this big project objective, all of a sudden their work is more meaningful.

Everyone on your team is an individual. They all have different things that are going to motivate them. For some people, it’s getting a great review. For other people, it’s about getting a great bonus. Still others just want recognition or they want to overcome a personal challenge. Some people on that cross-functional team see it as a great developmental opportunity to build a new skill. Sit down with each team member. Understand what motivates them. Do your best to connect project work to these motivators.

On one team I ran, we were replacing our phone system. I had somebody from telephony, operations, and project management on the team. The person from telephony was really excited about getting a new phone system. That’s what motivated them. They were tired of fixing the old system and having it break. This was an opportunity to get something cool and new for them to play with. The person from operations was excited about the project because it was a developmental opportunity for them. They normally worked the day-to-day operations. This was going to give them exposure to an area they knew nothing about. They’re working with technology and they thought that was pretty cool. The project manager on the team also saw this as a developmental opportunity. She had never worked on a big cross-functional team across a division. There was great visibility here for her and she was motivated by that.

When a cross-functional project has a crisis occur—and they will—the leader has to pull the team together and motivate them to overcome the challenge rather than playing the blame game and breaking the team apart. It’s easy to blame other people for failing to deliver. Once the blame game starts, the project is at risk and team dynamics can get very unhealthy after that. To resolve this, hold a fact-based review. Focus on what happened instead of saying whose fault it was. Understand why it happened. Look at the impact of the incident to time, cost, or quality for the project. Most importantly, sit down with the team and say, “What’s it going to take to fix this?” Casting blame doesn’t get you any closer to a solution. Instead, by focusing on the solution, you can reassign tasks, adjust deadlines, and change budgets accordingly.

On that same phone system project, we went live with one of our biggest locations. It didn’t work. We flipped switches and the phones didn’t come on. Instantly, everybody was saying, “Oh, it’s his fault. No, it’s her fault. No, it’s your fault.” Everybody was blaming each other. I said, “Team, we need to stop. Let’s understand why isn’t it working. Let’s understand what it’s going to take to get it working and then let’s look at who’s going to do what work to fix this issue.” By seeing that the blame game was starting and immediately cutting it off to get the team focused on moving forward, we were able to resolve the crisis pretty quickly.

The better you understand what motivates people and the more effectively you can avoid the blame game and manage crises, the better your cross-functional team will perform.

Want to learn more about managing cross-functional teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to manage a cross-functional team. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!