When I joined the Scottish Institute of Sport in 2006, our core philosophy was integrated services around the coach and athlete. As with many difficult things in life, it was easy to say and hard to do. When we got it right, and getting it right was rare, gold medals happened.
Whatever your version of a gold medal looks like at work, my view is this: you will get there faster through genuine cross-functional working. Easy to talk about. Much harder to do.
Siloed working and communication breakdowns are the two most common complaints I hear when I walk into organisations. Not occasionally. Almost universally. Which means cross-functional working is worth pausing on, because most organisations are not actually doing it, even when they think they are.
Here is what genuine cross-functional working is not: it is not a meeting with people from different departments. It is not a shared inbox or a project update sent to a wider distribution list. These are coordination, and coordination is not collaboration.
Real cross-functional working is people from different parts of the business solving problems together, in real time, with enough trust to say what is actually going on. That trust does not come from org charts or good intentions. It comes from relationship currency, built slowly, through enough small interactions that people know what to expect from each other when the pressure is on.
But before the structures and relationships, there is a more fundamental question. What does this actually require of the people involved?
It requires self-management. The ability to notice when you are protecting territory, prioritising your own function's metrics, or filtering information through the lens of how it reflects on you, and to choose differently. That is not a small ask. Most of us are doing those things automatically, below the level of conscious awareness, much of the time.
It requires the absence of ego. Not the performance of humility, the real thing. The willingness to have your idea improved by someone else's thinking. To let a better answer come from somewhere you did not expect. To care more about the outcome than about who gets credit for it. In high-performing teams this tends to be visible. In the ones that underperform, the presence of ego, often subtle, sometimes not, is almost always a factor.
It requires adaptability. Cross-functional work surfaces problems you did not know you had, and asks you to respond to conditions that are genuinely new. That takes a learning mindset, the orientation that says I do not need to have this figured out yet, I need to stay curious and keep moving. Leaders who need to look like they have the answers tend to close down exactly the kind of exchange that cross-functional working depends on.
All of this follows the leader. At the Institute, the variable that mattered most was not the structure of the integrated services model. It was whether the Performance Director (PD) lived and breathed it. When the person at the top was genuinely curious about what the physiologist had to say, genuinely interested in how the psychologist's work connected to the S&C coach's observations, genuinely willing to be changed by the conversation, it rippled. People noticed. They started behaving the same way, because the culture was set from the room that mattered most.
When the PD was protective of their own domain, or subtly competitive, or too busy to actually engage across functions, it also rippled. The integrated services philosophy stayed on the wall and off the floor.
This is why the resistance most leaders meet when they try to build cross-functional working is not really a structural problem. It is a human one. People protect what they know. Departments default to their own priorities. Long-tenured staff worry that efficiency gains mean more work, not better work. That resistance is not a verdict on your direction. It is information about where the fear sits and what still needs to feel safer.
The instinct to argue harder, to make the case more clearly, to push the logic of collaboration, rarely moves things. People do not adopt what they cannot yet picture. They adopt what they have already experienced.
This is why proof points matter more than persuasion. An operational improvement the logistics team can point to. Hours returned to people who were drowning in them. A problem fixed in three days (rather than three months), because you had the right relationship in place. These are not just results. They are demonstrations. Demonstrations travel further than arguments, because people do not have to take them on faith.
Joint problem-solving accelerates trust faster than separate conversations about working better ever will. When people experience collaboration as an advantage rather than an imposition, the conversation shifts. Others notice. Curiosity follows. The goal is to create enough visible success that working across boundaries starts to look like the obvious move, not the risky one.
The question for most leaders is not whether cross-functional working is worth pursuing. It clearly is. The question is whether you are prepared to do the inner work it actually requires, managing yourself, setting your ego aside, staying genuinely curious, and whether the person at the helm is modelling all of that visibly enough for it to mean anything.
Gold medals do not happen by accident. But they also do not happen because someone made a compelling presentation about cross-functional working.
Where is your own self-management the limiting factor in the cross-functional working you are trying to build?
Understanding The Choice Point begins with dialogue.
If you want your leaders to operate above the line more consistently, explore whether this framework fits your organisation.