Excerpted from Works Well With Others.
In order to realize strategic objectives around digital, leaders throughout an organization must all consider themselves chief collaboration officers. Collaboration can be instilled across functions in a variety of ways:
New thinking: Improving the organization’s ability to collaborate can begin with one or two functional leaders embracing the mindset that digital is a long-term priority whose success hinges upon challenging oneself to work with others in new ways. This can then spread across functions.
Collaboration between functions can be uncomfortable when turf lines have been clearly drawn in the past. For example, marketing groups at some companies established specialized technology teams over time within the function in response to digital. Today, however, as digital capabilities are increasingly a business-wide need, some marketing leaders are finding they have to relinquish control of some of their digital platforms to IT. When functional leaders trust that their shared agenda will be supported as technology continues to advance, they are less likely to struggle with handing off control of resources.
Shared focus: Cross-functional collaboration is made vastly easier when leaders share the same focus: the customer. Creating a seamless omnichannel experience for the customer demands a holistic approach which must be mirrored in the internal organization. Each function brings its own specialized knowledge and data that, when combined, can culminate into a more unified digital customer experience. Marketing, finance, product development and other functions all need to be well-versed in the language of digital, from page views to the ROI of a mobile app, so that everyone has a common vocabulary when talking about the impact on the customer and the business.
CEO involvement: The CEO must take the first step in breaking down cross-functional barriers, beginning with difficult conversations with shareholders and the board about the greater investment needed for digital — sometimes at the expense of other legacy priorities — and mandating collaboration among functional leaders in order to maximize the return on that investment.
Accountability: Some leaders use key performance indicators around digital, such as mobile readership, customer satisfaction and conversion rates, in order to measure and articulate the success of certain initiatives. This serves to reinforce the collaborative behavior behind positive results or expose the roadblocks to collaboration that result in poor performance.
Personal use: Digital is a dominating force in business and life; thus, all functional leaders and their teams need a common understanding about digital and their roles in achieving shared business objectives around it. Everyone in the organization — not just the IT team — needs to “own” digital and become an active user of mobile, social media and other technologies. Individuals and functional teams can educate themselves by experimenting with new ideas and regularly joining another department’s meetings to share discoveries and insights.
When leaders across the organization are active users of digital technology, they gain a better understanding of the needs of customers and are more able to contribute ideas for new innovations.
Digital cannot deliver on its full potential without one very human element: connection. Advances in digital require similar advances in how functional leaders work together. Cross-functional collaboration around digital is vital for producing more integrated experiences for the customer, as well as improved operations and streamlined processes for the organization as a whole. Digital is larger than any single function and its success relies upon CEOs, functional leaders and team members who embrace the fact that collaboration is a part of everyone’s job description.