Demonstrating cross-functional leadership

For cross-functional teams, project and product success is defined at the team level, not at the functional level. In other words, engineers cannot be successful without their cross-functional teams. Where software development is a team activity, we must take a whole-team view of performance and success. As engineering managers, we may tell our teams this with our words, but the best way to impart the idea is by demonstrating it with our own behavior.

If we tell our engineering teams that cross-functional partnerships are important but we consistently place engineering priorities over those of our partners and don’t make time for them, our engineers will see this and come to believe those partnerships are not actually that important. If we rely on lip service and good intentions rather than concrete actions and compromise, our engineering teams will do the same. Their relationships and product outcomes will suffer.

Leading great...