Cross-Functional Alignment: What, Why & How?

What is cross-functional alignment?

Cross-functional alignment is crucial for organizational success and relatively simple to define. It means that everyone in every involved function understands what needs to be done, why it needs to be done and how it needs to be done in order to be successful. Of course it is critical that this understanding is exactly the same in every function and then gets applied by the individual contributors to their area of responsibility.  

Why is cross-functional alignment needed?

The success of many companies is increasingly dependent on their ability to efficiently and successfully execute strategy, tactics and projects across several functions. Many companies think they are working well across functional borders but are in fact still organizations governed by individual functional silos which cost them time and money (cost & profits) every single day.

How to create cross-functional alignment? 6 ways to drive results

1.      Involvement: Involve everyone from the start, sounds simple but is rarely done due to ownership struggles, please also avoid those

2.      Understanding: Help people understand the link between organizational purpose and the strategy, project or task they are aligning on. Link all the things you do to the anticipated result of the effort and the organizational purpose, always paint an inspirational picture of the future situation

3.      Capability: Make sure people are capable and also feel capable to succeed at the strategy, project or task at hand

4.      Clarity: Challenge any ambiguous words in the discussion, don’t let people talk about “stakeholders”, “ the business”, “ the front-end”, “ the back-end”, “strategy” to loosely, when you hear a business buzz word it is time to ask clarifying questions

5.      Action: Stay action-orientated and ensure personal accountability, everyone needs to know what to do precisely until the next checkpoint even though this can formulated on different levels of abstraction.

6.      Measurement: If possible link these personal accountabilities to cross-functionally shared performance indicators, shared performance indicators foster alignment and discourage organizational silo mentalities

Thank you for spending time on my page! There will be more articles in the future and I am happy to expand my views on any of these brief summary posts. I am always glad to read your comments and receive your feedback on this article, never hesitate to get in touch.