A cross-functional cohort looks, on paper, like an intact team with a wider membership list. However it rarely behaves like one in the room. The reason is that everyone in that room keeps their real reporting line and their real accountability sitting with their own function, and that doesn’t change just because a program has assembled them somewhere else for a day a month, or a single offsite event. This reality shapes what people are willing to say while the group is together and what gets protected once everyone returns to their own patch. A program treating this cohort as if it were simply a bigger version of an intact team tends to underperform and underdeliver on its planned outcomes. Of course, this doesn’t mean we ignore the needs and benefits of integrating learning experiences across an enterprise. We just need to approach it with a sharpened focus.
The instinct to provide something that simultaneously addresses multiple business lines is legitimate. Every development program reaches a familiar point in a cycle – it has done what it can, and the next commitment needs to look different. Perhaps a program that pulls leaders in from across functions rather than up through one. For example, a program built around the fractures that show up when finance, operations, and sales teams try to move together and don’t quite manage it. What’s usually less clear is what assumptions need unpacking before a brief gets written or a design process begins. This will require some effort if we are to discover what is most likely to provide that much desired edge to a program.
Intentional engagement in ‘Discovery’ – considering the questions worth asking, the voices worth gathering, and the design choices that follow from both – will give any program a greater probability of success than one built on a set of ‘educated guesses’. And it’s not as easy as creating a ‘must have’ checklist. A cross-functional program is harder to scope well than an intact-team program precisely because the challenges it’s meant to address don’t sit inside one reporting line.
Shaping the right questions
Most development pipeline conversations start with a series of familiar questions, “What should the program cover? How long should it run? How many cohorts and which ones?”. These are reasonable operational questions, but they often arrive too early in the process. Before we start scoping it is crucial to have as clear an understanding of the relational landscape as possible, and if you are addressing cross-functional friction, for example, such disputes are rarely signposted in a team’s weekly meeting agendas.
For instance, when two functional leaders stop collaborating effectively, the issue is often framed as poor communication. Sometimes it is. More often, the friction signals an unresolved structural issue between their functions – such as unclear shared responsibilities – appearing as an interpersonal problem.[1] This distinction matters for program design. Stronger dialogue skills will not solve a problem that requires clear ownership and accountability across contested boundaries.
The sharper starting questions are perhaps the less comfortable ones:
- Where does this friction actually originate, and is it symptomatic of individual capability? Or is it something structural between the functions involved that’s being framed as a capability conversation?
- What’s already been tried here, and why might it not have lasted?
- If the program succeeded, what visible changes would occur, who would notice them first, and where would they see them?
These are difficult to answer, partly because the person commissioning the program often sits inside the structure producing the friction. Some of the most useful answers may only surface once discovery reaches people outside that vantage point. Knowing this before the work begins is far more valuable than discovering it midway through program delivery. In turn, if this process helps avoid the friction spreading to the leaders’ teams, then the value of discovery is certainly multiplied.
Engaging the right voices
Questions expect answers, and answers require voices. A program built mainly on conversations with sponsors and key stakeholders tends to reflect a limited grasp of the problem, which is one perspective among several and unlikely the most complete one. Cross-functional friction is experienced differently depending on where a person sits in relation to it, and sensemaking research suggests people don’t so much observe organisational reality as construct it retrospectively from where they stand.
Genuine discovery listens past the top layers.It notices what goes unsaid as carefully as what gets stated, because the tension that’s hardest to name aloud is often doing more work than anything in the approved minutes. This might include a resourcing decision nobody’s revisited but everyone regrets, or a history between two departments that predates the current leaders but continues to erode trust between everyone.
This is harder to surface than straightforward stakeholder interviews suggest. People inside structural tension are frequently the least likely to describe it as structural, because it’s the water they swim in – they honestly don’t notice it. Accurately understanding the situation may require multiple conversations and diverse approaches.
Engaging questions and voices through the design
By the time discovery has hinted at a direction, a pull begins toward familiar contours – a cohort is selected, a curriculum set and a handful of workshop days locked in the planner. It’s the shape training usually takes, and the shape budget cycles and calendars are mostly built for.
However, the evidence on what sustainably changes behaviour suggests ‘taking a breath,’ and pausing to consider a more useful and longer term approach. If we are looking at strengthening skills that are open and interpersonal, which is most of what cross-functional capability actually involves, then it is important to remember that these skills transfer from training to the workplace far less reliably than specific technical skills. What happens in the weeks after a session shapes that transfer more than the session itself.[3] And a cohort drawn from different functions carries a complication an intact team doesn’t have to manage in the same way – that is, participants’ primary loyalty and accountability sit with their own function first, and with the temporary cross-functional group second.[4] The approach has to work with that pull, it can’t really be designed away.
What tends to work best is engagement that returns repeatedly to real, present-day cross-functional situations rather than abstracted case studies, over a timeframe long enough for structural conditions (not only individual capability) to actually shift.[5] That’s a harder thing to scope, brief, and price than a two-day offsite or one-off event. And it’s likely closer to what an authentic discovery process will have already told you was needed.
Done well, discovery clarifies the program’s true purpose and shows why ‘easier’ options may not be enough.
So before you lock in your next cross-functional team development program, consider the following:
- Are you designing for where accountability actually sits, or where the org chart says it does? Function first, cohort second, always.
- Vantage point. What are you assuming about this friction that you haven’t tested? You likely sit inside the structure producing it, which makes your own analysis incomplete, if not unreliable.
- Whose work crosses this boundary daily, and have you sought their input? Sponsors and their direct reports are one perspective, but not the whole picture.
- What’s already been tried, and are you ready to really sit with why the learning may not have ‘stuck’? Mere novelty won’t address fundamental misunderstanding.
- Budget and calendar. Are you able to fund something harder to scope than a two-day offsite, if that’s what real change needs?
Wrestling with these questions is often where the real design work begins and where development and growth can eventually flourish.
Notes
[1] Stacey, R. D., & Mowles, C. (2007). Strategic management and organisational dynamics: The challenge of complexity (5th ed.). Pearson Education.
[2] Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publications.
[3] Blume, B. D., Ford, J. K., Baldwin, T. T., & Huang, J. L. (2010). Transfer of training: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Management, 36(4), 1065–1105.
[4] Ancona, D. G., & Caldwell, D. F. (1992). Bridging the boundary: External activity and performance in organizational teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37(4), 634–665.
[5] Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall.
PG