What Are Cross-Functional Teams & How to Manage Them

The Beatles. The International Space Station. What do these two have in common?

At first glance not much. The former are the best-selling band of all time, with 183 million units, and an unsurpassed cultural phenomenon, and the latter is the most ambitious and complex international collaboration in human history.

Also, they are the best examples of how far cross-functional teams can take you, if you can run them properly. And it’s not just anecdotal either, because according to research, collaborative teams are 50% more effective at completing tasks.

To find out more about how cross-functional teams work, why they matter, and how you can use them to grow your agency or business, check out the article below.

What Is a Cross-Functional Team?

A cross-functional team is a group of people from different departments or functional areas within the company that gets together to perform a specific task or project. For example, if you are running a small agency, you may need to have a cross-functional team that includes web developers, marketers, SEO specialists, and content writers.

Cross-functional can be temporary in their nature, or they can be a permanent structure within your agency. Each member of the cross-functional team brings a specific set of skills and expertise necessary in order to complete the project successfully.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how to run your cross-functional team, let’s get a better understanding of why cross-functional teams matter in the first place.

Why Cross-Functional Teams Are Beneficial

There is a whole raft of reasons why cross-functional teams can benefit your agency or business. We have decided to narrow down the list to include the following:

• Improved team collaboration and communication: When you have a complex problem on your hands, it’s extremely helpful to have subject matter experts from different departments who can explain all the key details to other members of the team. Imagine how much time it would take to explain everything to everyone across different departments.
• Creative problem solving and innovation: Having people with different professional backgrounds look at a problem that isn’t necessarily a part of their niche or expertise can result in original and unorthodox solutions.
• Reduced cycle times: A customer request can often get bounced from one team to the other, and takes way too much time. If that request gets passed on to your cross-functional team, they can deal with it immediately, resulting in a much more satisfying customer experience.
• Increased employee engagement: “Regular” teams are usually made up of people with similar backgrounds, which means that all of their projects start to look the same, which can get boring after a while and lead to disengagement. People on cross-functional teams get to work on projects outside of their comfort zone for a change.
• Shared sense of responsibility: Everybody on the team knows that whatever happens to the project, it is their responsibility, which can empower people to give their best.

Next up, let’s take a look at what you need to do to successfully manage a cross-functional team in your agency or organization.

How to Build and Run Cross-Functional Teams: A Step-by-Step Guide

Whether you are building a cross-functional team inside your organization from scratch or looking to improve your existing one, start implementing these effective strategies from our step-by-step guide:

Choose the Right People

As an agency owner or manager, you should have a pretty good idea of what your employees can do, which should make your job of selecting people for your cross-functional team a lot easier.

Still, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Diversity is your friend here, which means you should not only select people with different skill sets, but also those of different ages, positions, experience, and professional backgrounds.

While it’s great to have a team of experiences professionals, there is also something to be said about the energy and eagerness that younger members of the team bring to the table. Plus, you get different viewpoints, which comes in really handy when dealing with projects and problems that have a lot of moving parts.

Establish Goals

Since your cross-functional team will feature people from different departments, they will probably have different priorities, agendas, and ways they are doing things, which inevitably leads to setbacks that affect the timeline of the entire project.

This is where you step in as a manager by defining clear goals for the project. Determine what the outcome of the project should be, and what is considered a successfully completed project, and then work your way backward from there.

It’s also important to allow contributions from team members, as this will not only improve the goals and the project itself, but also provide everyone with a sense of ownership in the project.

Clear Communication Channels

Decide on a central space where members of your cross-functional team can communicate in an efficient manner with each other, as well as other teams. While tools like Slack are great, they may not be able to support all the communication needs your team might have.

With ActiveCollab, a powerful productivity workplace, you not only get a place where your team can communicate in real-time but also remain on the same page when it comes to project workflows, tasks, and priorities.

In ActiveCollab, your team can also:

Plus, it acts as a single source of information from which everyone can see who did what and when and access it whenever it is needed.

Check out this video for more information:

Build Trust

Intangible factors such as trust among team members and a supportive work environment matter more than you think. For instance, think of a situation where something went wrong on a project.

Most organizations, instead of focusing on finding the solution, are more interested in finding who’s to blame. And while accountability is important, allowing your cross-functional team to make mistakes is crucial for the generation of new ideas and solutions.

If there is no trust and support, members of your cross-functional team will change their priorities. Instead of doing what’s best for the project and the agency, they will prioritize their own survival.

Leverage the Differences

Differences among your team members can make things more complicated, but they can also represent an opportunity for people to learn from each other, view the project from a different angle, and think outside the box for a change.

Here is how you can leverage the differences inside your cross-functional team to your advantage:

• Sharing of skills and tools: For example, content writers can benefit from having access to SEO tools or Google Console to give them a better idea of how their content performs over time.
• Instant help: Team members don’t have to look for the right people in different departments. Instead, they can not only get answers, but also receive training inside the team.
• Brainstorming sessions: Because cross-functional teams are diverse, brainstorming sessions can be very beneficial, as your team can arrive to a solution much quicker.

Prepare for Conflict

Now, we’ve come to the flip side of the “difference” coin. When you have a bunch of people who are different from each other based on a number of parameters, some friction and conflict are pretty much a given.

In fact, some struggle for power, influence, and additional resources is inevitable, but it’s also a chance for you to step in and establish boundaries in terms of communication and team collaboration. More importantly, it’s also an opportunity to turn conflict into something constructive as opposed to sweeping it under the rug.

Talk to your team members, figure out the reasons behind their actions, and see if anything new and helpful can be learned after the conflict has been resolved.

Measure Team Performance

This is where all that initial effort of setting clear goals, objectives, and KPIs for your cross-functional team starts to pay dividends. Is your team making good progress? Are they meeting the milestones in a timely manner? Are they on track to complete the project successfully?

All these questions, as well as others, can answered if you decide to monitor the progress of your cross-functional team on a regular basis. With a productivity workspace like ActiveCollab, you can easily see how your team is performing, as well as each individual member.

Analyze and Improve Processes

One of the biggest strengths of cross-functional teams is their agility and ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, which is why should never rest on your laurels after a project has been completed.

Instead, you should look at the reports, all the KPIS, and the results and identify ways in which your team’s efficiency can be improved. And that includes talking with each individual on the team, gathering feedback, acknowledging the efforts, and celebrating the successes.

Challenges of Managing Cross-Functional Teams

So far, it’s been nothing but advantages upon advantages when it comes to cross-functional teams. However, they do come with their own set of unique challenges.

For starters, they can be somewhat difficult to implement, and you can expect to run into the following issues when putting together the team or running your existing one:

• Conflicting priorities: Because your cross-functional team is made up of people who are already a part of their own functional teams, they might be inclined to prioritize the agenda of their own teams. This is why you should stand firm on having a common for the cross-functional team itself in order to avoid mismatched priorities.
• Lack of communication: While cross-functional teams usually have no problem with communication inside the team, they’ll still need to get in touch and work together with other functional teams. Also, each team tends to develop its own shorthand, which makes communication with other teams more challenging.
• Unresolved conflicts: We’ve seen this happen so many times. Conflict resolution gets delayed or pushed to the side in favor of productivity, but that is only a temporary fix that can come back to haunt your team in the shape of subpar communication and a poor atmosphere inside the team.
• Lack of centralized records: Cross-functional teams create a ton of documents, files, operating procedures, as well as documentation. Keeping all of that organized and accessible in a single location can be a nightmare, which is why having a single source of truth like ActiveCollab is crucial. With ActiveCollab, your team can store files, documentation, and project details, as well as keep a record of every person, comment, and mention that is relevant to your project.

Examples of Cross-Functional Teams

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to what your cross-functional team should be like, because each agency and each business forms teams based on the specific products they deliver to customers.

But, it’s very likely that all teams will team collaboration software and tools to make communication smoother.

Here are a few examples of cross-functional teams that might help you paint a more complete picture:

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams are almost always made up of people with different skills and backgrounds, and in the case of smaller businesses, they might even be an entire agency team. A variety of roles includes professionals such as marketing managers, social media experts, SEO specialists, content writers, copywriters, and paid ads specialists.

Software Development Teams

This is a prime example of a cross-functional team, because software development teams require a whole slew of diverse professionals. Depending on the size of your company, your cross-functional software development team might include developers, software architects, QAs, product owners, UX/UI designers, Chief Product Officer, and technical writers.

Customer Support Team

Again, the makeup of your customer support team will depend largely on the size of your business, but it’s fair to assume that this this type of cross-functional team will include customer support specialists, managers, and perhaps even QAs and product owners.

Conclusion – Run Your Cross-Functional Team Like Clockwork with ActiveCollab

Cross-functional teams are absolutely essential if your agency or company is working on complex and demanding projects on a regular basis. These multidisciplinary teams not only gather diverse skills and experience in one place, but also term down silos and barriers which slow functional teams down.

Yes, making a cross-functional team work can be difficult, but it’s well worth the effort, because in the end, these teams are always more than the sum of their parts.

And the good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. With the help of ActiveCollab, running your cross-functional team and managing complex projects can be a very streamlined and rewarding process.