- Ensure that you and your executive colleagues model the behaviors you want.
- Develop a culture of openness and trust. How often do your managers and executives seek direct feedback on their trickiest issues from their peers?
- Get closer – much closer – to your customers. The more you and your team are focused externally, on identifying and meeting the needs of your customers, the less insular and territorial they will become.
- Clarify program leadership accountabilities. Ensure that your managers are not stepping on each other’s toes in terms of their accountabilities.
- Co-locate program teams. It’s harder to act against another department when you’re working with them.
- Reward cross-functional behaviors. Ensure that behaviors are just as important to rewards as results.
- Embed cross-functional career development. Experience in different roles encourages your people to work more cross-functionally and be less loyal to specific functions.
- Train the behaviors you’re after. Relationship building and management, influencing and communication, and meeting facilitation, for example, are all learnable skills.
- Undertake periodic process reviews. And ensure that your support and back-office functions are, as far as possible, built around key processes.
- Cross-business mentoring. Encourage executives and senior managers to mentor your up-and-coming managers in other functions.
© Stuart Cross 2011. All rights reserved.