A step beyond teamwork

Working across functions is much beyond teamwork and networking. Every organisation and individual has a collaboration quotient with a bearing on career and life. Large-scale changes in organisations and society come from better cross-sector collaborations rather than from isolated interventions. Knowing this, organisations are exploring collective impact to tackle social problems.

The planet with depleting resources and a turbulent job market demands new ways of working together. Current and future skills demand a cross-functional collaboration — cooperation over different areas of expertise — in unprecedented ways, be it creativity and innovation, research and development or marketing and strategy.

From teamwork to collaboration

Team sports like football are the best examples of teamwork. In a football team, each one has a job — defending, fielding, striking and goalkeeping. Skills required to work in a group include interpersonal skills, communication and listening.

However, we need to go beyond teamwork for solving complex problems and addressing large-scale research challenges. In most medical projects related to the pandemic, you can see different degrees of cross-functional collaboration.

Similarly, a cross-functional collaboration of facilities, security, systems, volunteers, communications and caterers can be seen in a well-organised event. There is much interdependence of concepts, knowledge, frameworks, tools, skills and their overlapping implications. In this way, collaboration is a type of teamwork where the skills, experience, perspectives and methodologies of members are complementary.

Forming communities

It has never been easier to practice and foster collaboration. Advancements in distributed and decentralised digital tools make collaboration easier. Here are some practical ways to develop cross-functional collaborations.

Starting collaborations early in your career is key. The young Einstein, while a student at Zurich’s Polytechnic Institute, befriended Marcel Grossmann. From Nobel winners to next door start-up champions, we can see this pattern of forming connections.

Being flexible in thinking, leadership and hierarchy is another key. To do so, one has to challenge the assumptions and be willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations from different domains and perspectives. You can catch mutually reinforcing ideas and activities which are raw materials for a flexible mental model.

The third aspect is to explore virtual collaboration spaces and select the right tools to collaborate. Most new tools accommodate remote and flexible learning settings.

Fourth is learning from the self-organising systems of nature. Ants exchange information by leaving behind their pheromone traces on their way. By doing so, they develop a complex network of trails creating efficient routes to many food sources. This is known as stigmergy and its essence is collectivity. You can spot a minor form of stigmergy in the workplace when designers and engineers work closely and configure novel forms of collaboration, which turn out as a cross-domain workplace commune.

Joining professional communities is one way of learning career collaboration. Remember that some of the best professional communities are private and driven by personal passions towards a cause, not by traditional career ladders. Such communities offer structured methods for knowledge exchange and grow into ‘networked learning’.

Cross-functional collaborations are hard. They may not always have the niceties of ordinary teamwork and the joy of socialisation and networking. One has to be prepared to encounter collisions and contradictions of differing perspectives.

This is the beginning of creating new models and exploring the future of work. As we reach the effective limits of traditional hierarchical organisational structure, platforms and new business models continue to grow. This will further trigger alternative forms of cross-functional collaboration.

Think of GitHub that offers a repository for programming projects and makes easier real-time collaboration for individuals and teams. Imagine that GitHub is not limited to computer science but expanded to diverse fields and professional practices across many disciplines.

Add the capability to reprocess skills, ideas, workflow, tools and experiences in a range of cross-functional teams. It has an open structure, richness of contribution and inclusive common space that connects people and projects. That will be one plausible future of cross-functional collaboration.

In this future, what is the portfolio that you are planning to bring into the collaboration scenario? Who will be your collaborators and what will be the causes that inspire you? Back to the thinking board.

(The author is an Education Officer, University Grants Commission. Views are personal.)