Hi Reader,
Pull up almost any organizational chart and you'll see a collection of boxes.
One for Finance, one for Operations, one for Programs, Sales, or Marketing, etc. Each box has a leader, responsibilities, goals, and usually a growing collection of processes and measures designed to help that part of the organization perform.
We spend a lot of time thinking about what's happening inside those boxes.
But what about what happens between them?
Much of the most consequential work in an organization doesn't fit neatly inside any one box.
Who has the authority to make a decision when it crosses functions? How do leaders work through competing priorities? How does information move across the organization? What happens when two executives disagree? How do we hold one another accountable when something isn't working?
These aren't (only) finance issues or (only) operations issues or (just) HR issues. They're shared ways of working that affect everyone, and they can have an enormous impact on how well the organization performs.
The Work We Leave to Chance
Leadership teams tend to spend significant time on the big things like: developing a new vision, setting strategy, establishing priorities, or reworking the organizational structure. And when something isn't working, we can go in the other direction. We look at policies, procedures, workflows, job descriptions, or individual performance.
It’s important work, but if we stop there, the change effort likely won’t achieve its intended outcome. Flying at these two altitudes misses an important middle level.
Between high-level strategy and the details of execution sits a layer we often leave surprisingly undefined: how we work together across functions.
We assume people will figure out how to collaborate. We assume everyone knows who gets to make which decisions. We assume leaders will give one another feedback when it's needed. We assume information will find its way across functions and that tension will get addressed before it becomes a larger problem.
Sometimes those assumptions work, but often they don't.
We carefully design each functional area while accidentally leaving what happens between them to chance.
The Most Important Work Rarely Fits in Area of Responsibility
There's another reason this matters: the most meaningful work in an organization rarely belongs to a single function.
Consider launching a new product or service. One team may be responsible for developing it, but bringing it successfully into the world requires much more than that. Operations has to figure out how to deliver it. Marketing has to create the story, finance has to understand unit economics and a team will have to support it once it launches.
The bigger and more consequential the initiative, the more likely it is to cross the lines on your org chart.
Yet there's an interesting contradiction here. We spend enormous amounts of time designing and managing the work inside individual functions, while some of our highest-impact work happens between them.
When multiple functions are involved, who makes the decision? Who needs to provide input? How do we resolve competing priorities? How does information move between teams? What happens when one department isn't delivering what another needs?
The quality of those interactions can determine whether an important initiative moves quickly, gets bogged down, or falls apart.
Start With an Experiment
The good news is that improving what happens between functional areas doesn't require creating a giant operating manual or redesigning everything at once.
Start by identifying one place where the way you work together is creating friction. Maybe decisions involving multiple departments take too long. Perhaps important information isn't moving across functions. Or your Executive Team avoids giving one another feedback when something isn't working.
Then create a simple agreement about how you want to work differently and treat it as an experiment.
You can even make improving one of these ways of working a short-term priority for the Executive Team. Give someone responsibility for helping the team test the new approach, create opportunities to practice it, and then come back together after 60 or 90 days to ask: What worked? What didn't? What should we keep or change?
The point isn't to perfectly design every way we collaborate across functions. It's to begin treating these shared ways of working as something your team can intentionally shape. Over time, those small experiments can become the ways of working that allow your organization to move together on your most important work.
A Final Thought
The boxes on your org chart matter. They create clarity about who owns what, and that functional clarity is certainly important.
But some of the most important priorities your organization is trying to accomplish will require people from multiple boxes to work together. And as the work becomes more complex, what happens between those boxes matters even more.
We spend a lot of time designing the individual parts of our organizations. Maybe it's time we gave just as much attention to how those parts work together.
So, pull up your org chart and ask your Executive Team a simple question: What's happening between the boxes?
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