Cross Functional Team Meaning
A cross functional team is a group of employees forming teams or departments within an organization of different functional areas and working together for common objectives.
Let’s discuss in detail about one of the most important concepts of workplace, i.e. cross functional team:
What is a cross functional team?
The concept of cross-functional team has become one of the key concepts to achieve strategic objectives in this VUCA world.
Every organisation is striving for maximum collaboration to enhance productivity and efficiency in accomplishing their vision and mission.
A cross functional team is the treasure of diversified skills, huge knowledge base, expertise with deep understanding and nexus of people working for shared goals.
Cross Functional Teams’ Examples
Some of the common examples of cross functional teams are:
- Marketing Team: Modern day marketing team has cross functional teams focusing on content writing, creative designing, SEO implementation, PPC management, brand positioning and more, working together to achieve the common goal to promote, engage and convert TG into loyal customers.
- Product Team: The cross functional product team has employees working together to research the needs, introduce features, create stories, develop code, troubleshoot, engineer and more to ultimately make their product stand out
What are Key Characteristics of Cross Functional Teams?
‘Unity in diversity’ is what we can say about cross functional teams. Let’s understand the key characteristics of cross functional teams in detail:
| Diversity From varied skill sets to knowledgebase, cross functional teams create rich pool of expertise to achieve the common goal | Collaboration Collaboration is the glue that holds cross functional team together and help them execute project without any friction as a one strong team | Objective Shared objective or goals boosts the mindset of collective success rather individual achievement in cross functional teams among employees |
| Flexibility Cross functional teams work with agile mindset and always stay ready to change as per the project requirements | Communication Open, transparent and right communication channels is necessary to avoid any misunderstanding among team members | Focus Focus lies in achieving the common target with individual efforts for designated objectives |
Why are Cross-Functional Teams Important in Organizations?
Cross functional teams are important in organisation because it ensures-
- Better decision making
- Enhanced collaboration skills
- Diversified perspectives
- Collective intelligence
- Holistic understanding
- Opportunities to broaden skill set
- Equipped to adapt evolving project requirements
- Promote culture of transparency
- Ensure diversified workforce
How do Cross Functional Teams Work?
Though every organisation has their specific way of working, but there are a few step-by-step processes, most of the cross-function team follows:
- Formation: Cross functional teams work in collaboration as per the project or company’s specific requirements. So, depending on the needs and skillset of the teams, cross functional teams operate.
- Specific goals establishment: After cross functional teams are formed, they mutually decide their role and responsibilities as per skill sets and expertise to achieve specific goals.
- Communication channels: For coordination among the team members, communication channel, flow and every other thing is decided before start working
- Meeting Schedule: For working of cross functional teams, it is necessary that members pre-decide their meeting schedules, frequency, agendas and other details that requires discussion
- Cross Training/ Discussion: Many a times members in cross functional teams finds the need to upskill and understand the processes of what other members are up to, so they mutually decide to conduct training and discussion sessions
- Feedback Mechanism: For hassle-free and streamlined working, it is necessary for cross functional teams to share feedback with their team members
Why do Cross Functional Teams Fail?
Many a time, cross functional teams fail to work in collaboration and accomplish the designated goals. There are a few common reasons that could hamper their progress-
- Unclear common objectives
- Lack of transparent and clear communication
- Resistant to change or absence of agility
- Confusion in roles and responsibilities
- Inadequate resources-time, budget or humans
- Unavailability of authentic leadership
- No feedback mechanism
How to Motivate Cross-Functional Teams?
Everybody in life needs motivation to work harder and keep moving, so do the cross functional teams. So, to keep them motivated, you can approach few of the methods-
- Reward and recognition
- Emphasize on significance of responsibilities rather micromanage
- Offer opportunities to grow as a team and as an individual
- Maintain clear communication channel, leaving no scope of miscommunication
- Empower team members by requesting their POVs and taking suggestions
- Authentic leadership to manage and address gaps in execution
- Understanding individual needs to work in collaboration
Cross functional teams can transform your organisation with their collective force. But you need to navigate challenges that come in their way and address execution gaps when necessary.
Foster a culture of collaboration!
Leverage the power of collectiveness.