Leading Beyond Your Lane: The Teamwork Gap We Don't Talk About Enough
I've noticed a pattern in several of my recent conversations with leadership teams. 3 days. 3 companies. Same thing. And it reminded me I've seen it many times before.
The issue wasn't that people weren't good at what they did. In fact, quite the opposite. They knew their functions. They cared about their teams. They understood their responsibilities. They were working hard and, in many cases, doing very good work.
The opportunity was in what happened between them, between departments, between leaders, between one step of a process and the next, between the person who decides and the people who have to execute it. It was in the space between my team and our organization.
And that space matters more than we sometimes realize. We spend a great deal of time teaching leaders how to lead their teams. We talk about communication, accountability, trust, performance, motivation, and engagement. All those things matter. But there is another side of leadership that deserves just as much attention. If we're going to lead great teams, we have to be great team members ourselves.
As our responsibilities grow, that can become harder. A leader may belong to a department team, senior leadership team, project team, client team, implementation team, or temporary working group, all at the same time. We aren't simply leading our team. We are members of multiple teams, and the organization needs something from us collectively that it cannot get from any of us individually. That is an important distinction.
The Work Doesn't Stop at the Edge of Our Department
Organizations aren't relay races where we simply run our portion, hand off the baton, and declare our work complete. What happens at that handoff matters. I've said for years that every time there is a handoff or transition, there is an opportunity to improve something in multiple directions. I learned that on my first 2nd shift job at age 16. A handoff can improve communication or expose its absence. It can clarify accountability or muddy it. It can transfer knowledge or lose it. It can strengthen a relationship or add another layer of frustration. It can catch a problem early or send that problem farther downstream where it becomes more expensive and difficult to solve.
Think about how many handoffs happen in your organization every day. A customer moves from sales to operations. A new employee moves from recruiting to onboarding to their manager. Finance needs information from operations. A project moves from planning to execution. A senior leadership team makes a decision that managers then have to translate for employees. The quality of the work on either side of that transition can be excellent, and the overall experience can still fail because of what happened between them.
This is why I don't consider workplace relationships separate from performance. Relationships are part of how performance happens. Working relationships influence how quickly information moves, how easily concerns are raised, how decisions are made, and how effectively people work through problems together. When those relationships are stronger, we are better able to surface problems earlier, reduce duplication and rework, navigate disagreement, and make better cross-functional decisions.
That isn't the soft side of work. That's the work.
I’m also known for saying, “Every time the team adds a person or a person moves out, you have a new team.” The name on the organizational chart may not change. Seven of the eight people may be exactly the same. The regular meeting may still be on Tuesday at 9:00. But the team itself has changed.
Someone new brings knowledge, experiences, expectations, habits, relationships, communication preferences, questions, and ways of looking at the work. When someone leaves, knowledge, relationships, routines, and informal ways of getting things done may leave with them. We tend to focus on getting the new person "up to speed." That's important, but there is another question worth asking: How does the team need to learn to work together now?
The same principle applies beyond staffing changes. A team can become a new team because its purpose changes, responsibilities shift, a major project begins, new technology changes a workflow, or the organization goes through significant change. We shouldn't assume that because people worked well together yesterday, they automatically know how to work well together under today's conditions.
Teams require recalibration. So Where Is the Gap? I think there is a gap between doing your job well and helping the organization work well.
Cross-functional leadership lives in that gap. It's easy to advocate for collaboration when everyone's priorities align. The real test comes when they don't. What happens when the best decision for the organization makes something harder for your department? What happens when another team needs information from you sooner than is convenient? What happens when you disagree with a decision but are still responsible for helping execute it? What happens when solving the larger problem requires resources, flexibility, or compromise from your area? Those moments tell us a lot about whether we are simply strong functional leaders or whether we are also strong organizational leaders.
So, if you are thinking about your own leadership team, project team, cross-functional process, or working relationships, here are five places I would start.
1. Look Beyond Your Lane: Before making the next significant decision in your area, ask who else will feel the impact of it. Not just who needs to approve it. Who will implement it? Explain it? Support it? Answer questions about it? What happens one or two steps downstream? Being a strong organizational team member requires understanding how the priorities and decisions in our own area affect other functions and the organization as a whole. It also means being willing, at times, to prioritize what is best for the organization even when it creates challenges for our own area.
Your lane matters. But so does the whole road.
2. Examine the Handoffs: Pick one process that regularly crosses functions and pay attention specifically to the transition points. Ask what the person receiving the work actually needs from you—and what you need from them.
Where does information get lost? Where do people wait unnecessarily? Where are assumptions being made? Where is work duplicated? Where does someone regularly have to go back and ask for something that could have been provided the first time? Sometimes we spend tremendous energy improving individual parts of a process while ignoring what happens between them. Don't just improve the work. Improve the movement of the work.
3. Invest in the Relationships Your Work Actually Depends On: One exercise I've recently used with leaders is to identify the five working relationships they rely on most to be effective in their roles. Then we explore what they need from each relationship, what the other person needs from them, how strong the relationship is today, and what they could do to invest in it. But there is one more question I particularly like: Are the five relationships you invest in most the same five relationships your role requires you to invest in most? That's worth some consideration. We naturally invest in people we like, people we see frequently, and people with whom working comes easily. But some of the most important relationships in an organization cross boundaries. They may require more intentionality precisely because proximity doesn't create them for us.
4. Recalibrate When the Team Changes: When someone joins or leaves a team, don't simply update the roster and keep moving. Take time to revisit how the team works. What do we expect from one another? How will information move? Where do responsibilities overlap? How will we raise concerns? How are decisions made? What does this new person need from us? What do we need from them? Has anything else changed that means some of our old ways of working no longer serve us? You don't need a two-day retreat every time somebody changes jobs. You do need to acknowledge that the system has changed. New member. New team. Give people an opportunity to build the team they are now rather than expecting them to keep operating as the team they used to be.
5. Ask What the Organization Needs From You Collectively: This may be the most important question of all: What does this organization need from us collectively that it cannot get from us individually? It's a question I've been using with leadership teams because it moves the conversation beyond individual expertise and functional responsibility.
If the answer is nothing, then you probably don't need a team. You need a group of competent individuals doing their respective jobs. But most organizations need far more. They need leaders to solve problems that don't fit neatly inside departmental boundaries. They need competing priorities to be reconciled. They need information shared. They need risks to be identified from multiple perspectives. They need decisions that consider customers, employees, operations, finances, quality, safety, and the future—not simply one functional viewpoint. That's why merely putting talented people together doesn't automatically create an effective team.
Great Teams Need Great Team Members: We talk a lot about building great teams. Perhaps we should spend a little more time asking ourselves whether we are being the kind of team member those great teams require.
Do I share information that helps others succeed? Do I consider downstream impact before making decisions? Do I raise concerns directly instead of allowing frustration to build elsewhere? Do I follow through? Do I seek to understand before offering my own perspective? Am I willing to adjust my approach when circumstances change? Do I make it easier or harder for other people to do good work?
Those aren't abstract characteristics of teamwork. They are individual behaviors, and they're very similar to the behaviors I ask leaders to assess in themselves when we work on building stronger teams.
We don't get to declare ourselves collaborative because we attend the same meetings, share an organizational chart, or use the word team.
We demonstrate it in the spaces between our responsibilities: in the handoffs, the conversations, the relationships, the decisions, the disagreements, and the moments when what is best for the organization doesn't perfectly align with what is easiest for our own area.
That's the gap.
And for many organizations I've been working with lately, I think it's a gap worth paying much more attention to.
Learn More:
Listen to over 24 hours of content on the Workplace Chameleon Podcast: https://workplacechameleon.buzzsprout.com/
Check out our online, on demand learning system, a great way to meet your teams where they are, when they're ready to learn: https://www.leadershiplearningnow.com/
Photo by Alex Radelich
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