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Cross functional partnership is an oxymoron. Typically one of the participants has the more dominant role and will make the final call on crucial decisions. For example, the finance and marketing departments may claim to have a “partnership” but marketing will ultimately decide how to invest in the marketplace. The finance department may advise and monitor best practices to ensure ROI, but it is a really bad idea to let finance make the call on customer generation and retention investments. This is because marketing is closer to the customer than finance.

Both parties are able to amicably work out issues for the most part. One reason for this is that a best practice in finance is to assign a financial analyst to the marketing department. This person’s job is to develop a deep understanding of what marketing does, understand the vocabulary and intent, and provide guidance in the language used by marketing. The marketing department will not hire anyone to do the same with finance.

No matter how hard the financial analyst works, they will never see the world the way marketing does. In an ideal world, the financial analyst would be a former marketing person. This idea is so impractical, it simply will not happen. Marketing people do not become financial analysts, or vice versa.

The original problem still remains. In cross functional collaboration, how do you see the world though your partner’s eyes? How do you see this without having done their job?

A few best practices are to sit in the other department’s staff meetings, take a couple of courses to learn the vocabulary, shadow one or two people to see what they do, visit their customers to understand the real life problems. In other words, try to immerse yourself in their world to improve your empathy.

This is true for any two departments of your choice.

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In an earlier blog we looked at the 3 critical roles in an organization. Another way to look at the roles is as follows:

• Those who define the problem.
• Those who solve the problem.

Problem solvers are sought after and rewarded. They hold the spotlight for their success and failures. Relentless action is considered a sign of energy, commitment, and is comforting to see. The business value for this approach can be explained with an analogy: if the patient is bleeding, stop the bleeding! This is a good thing, because it will keep the patient alive while you figure out the root cause. If you invest in understanding root causes too early, there will be no patient to cure.

The ones who define the problem are most useful for big and strategic topics. Problem definition for big, strategic topics takes time. Research and validation are the foundational efforts. If the problem is identified correctly, the right priority can be set, and proper investments can be made, and the ROI is large enough to justify this investment. Those who can define problems at a strategic level are typically not very good at execution. This is an overhead that few organizations can afford. Thus, such people end up working for large organizations that have large projects.

A nuance to the above taxonomy is the size of the problem. For small problems, the same person is expected to define and solve the problem. As the size of the problem grows, there is a tipping point where specialists are required for defining and solving.