Many organisations are vertically strong but horizontally weak, says this leadership expert. That’s why cross-functional alignment needs to be a core leadership capability. Here’s how HR can help to build it.
Ask leaders where collaboration breaks down and they will often point somewhere else: another function, another layer of leadership or a stakeholder who does not understand their priorities. Their own team is usually working hard. It’s everyone around them who seems to be the problem.
I see this pattern repeatedly in leadership teams. People feel committed to their work and protective of their teams, yet the organisation as a whole struggles to move. Decisions slow down. Strategic priorities compete with business as usual. Functions blame one another for missed handovers, changing requirements or a lack of responsiveness.
The issue is rarely that people don’t care. It’s that many organisations are vertically strong and horizontally weak. People know how to lead down through reporting lines, but not necessarily how to lead across boundaries where they have little formal authority and priorities are genuinely different.
That gap is where strategy falls short, because strategy is not delivered by one team. It’s operationalised in the spaces between teams.
With that in mind, here are five considerations to help your business execute on its strategy.
1. Alignment is not the same as agreement
Alignment is often treated as consensus: everyone agrees, tension disappears and the path forward feels comfortable. That is neither realistic nor desirable. In complex organisations, different functions should bring different perspectives.
Risk and innovation will pull in different directions. Operations may prioritise reliability while transformation teams push for speed. A customer-facing function may want responsiveness while a support function must protect consistency and governance.
These differences are not evidence that collaboration has failed. They are the work of collaboration.
Teams don’t need to agree on everything. They need enough clarity and commitment to move forward together. Alignment means understanding the shared purpose, the trade-offs being made, who holds decision authority and what each party has committed to do. It allows people to challenge a decision before it’s made, then dedicate themselves to the collective way forward.
Without that clarity, apparent agreement can mask misalignment. You hear one thing in the meeting and another in the corridor afterwards. People leave with different interpretations, protect their own priorities and quietly continue as before.
2. Make interdependence visible
Behind a lot of cross-functional tension is a simple fact: we depend on the people who can sometimes frustrate us.
Yet organisations frequently reinforce the opposite message. Structures, performance measures and recognition systems encourage people to optimise their own function. Language such as ‘stay in your lane’ can be helpful when roles are unclear, but it can also become unintended permission to disengage from the wider system. The result is an ‘us versus them’ dynamic: our team is doing its bit; that team isn’t.
HR can help leaders zoom out. Instead of asking which team is at fault, ask what the system is producing. Where are goals in conflict? Where is accountability unclear? Which decisions require input from several functions? What work is falling into the gaps between formal roles? What pressures or incentives are shaping each team’s behaviour?
This is also where senior leader forums can either matter or become tokenistic. Bringing the top 50 or 100 leaders together may create a positive day and welcome connection, but a strong event is not the outcome. The real test is whether leaders build the relationships and operating habits that help them work together after the room empties.
I see this often when I facilitate these forums. People tell me how good it was to finally talk to peers they never see. Then the day ends, everyone returns to their own patch and nothing happens in between.
Connection cannot be left to corridor conversations or an annual gathering. It has to be maintained deliberately between formal meetings.
“Teams don’t need to agree on everything. They need enough clarity and commitment to move forward together.”
3. Face into competing priorities
One team’s urgent priority may barely register for another. Avoiding that tension doesn’t make it disappear; it pushes negotiation underground and increases the risk of delay, resentment and blame.
A more productive conversation starts with curiosity rather than assumptions.
- What matters most to each team right now, and why?
- What capacity constraints are they managing?
- Where do their goals intersect?
- Where do they genuinely differ?
- Which trade-offs need to be made, and who has authority to make them?
Healthy cross-functional collaboration doesn’t remove conflict. It makes disagreement about the work usable. Leaders put the work between them, challenge ideas without diagnosing one another’s motives and distinguish a difficult position from a difficult person.
This requires an ‘and’ mindset, meaning organisations need straddle strategy and delivery, speed and inclusion, risk and innovation, or short-term performance and long-term capability at the same time.
These aren’t problems with a single correct answer. They’re ongoing tensions to manage through transparent choices.
4. Turn collaboration into an operating discipline
Collaboration can become excessive. More meetings, more consultation and more consensus-seeking are not necessarily signs of better alignment. Poorly designed collaboration can create operational drags in the same way siloed ways of working can.
The aim is intentional collaboration: involving the right people, for a clear purpose, with explicit decision rights and follow-through. Three practices make this more concrete, and HR can lead each of them:
- Map critical relationships.
HR can help leaders identify the stakeholders and cross-functional partners whom the team’s success depends on. Be clear about the purpose of each relationship, its current strength and who is accountable for maintaining it (consider trying this ‘power mapping’ method to map these relationships). - Clarify roles and decisions.
For shared priorities, HR can help leaders specify who is responsible for the work, who is accountable for the outcome, whose expertise must be consulted and who needs to be informed.
Role clarity reduces duplication and prevents important work from becoming everybody’s and therefore nobody’s job. - Build a rhythm for realignment.
Priorities and conditions change. Help leaders create regular points to revisit shared goals, capacity, dependencies, trade-offs and commitments.
Realignment is not a sign that the original plan failed; it’s how teams stay responsive without fragmenting.
A question for HR to consider: Which of these three is already happening in our organisation, and who owns it?
5. From silos to shared ownership
HR has an important role in shifting cross-functional collaboration from a hopeful value to an organisational capability. That means looking beyond team-building within intact teams.
Leadership development, performance measures, role design, meeting rhythms and recognition all need to encourage people to lead horizontally as well as vertically.
It also means helping senior leaders model the behaviour they expect. When executives protect territory, contradict collective decisions or escalate every disagreement up the hierarchy, those patterns ripple through the organisation.
When they surface competing priorities, make trade-offs explicit and share accountability for outcomes, that ripples too.
The organisations that execute strategy well are not free from tension. They are just better at working with it. Their leaders recognise that alignment, collaboration and accountability are connected: alignment creates clarity and shared ownership; collaboration enables work across functions; accountability turns commitments into outcomes.
Strategy becomes real when people stop asking, ‘Has my team done its part?’ and start asking, ‘What do we need to achieve together, and what is my contribution to moving it forward?’
🧰 HR’s career resource toolkit
- Micro-credential: The Business Strategy & Cultural Leadership AHRCF Micro-Credential is designed to elevate HR practitioners into strategic partners within their organisations. It focuses on alignment of HR strategy with the overarching business strategy while fostering a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion.
- Course: AHRI’s Strategic HR Leader course is designed to help you acquire essential skills in critical and strategic thinking, strategic human resources, and value-added business partnering.
- Resource: Map the strategic relationships that you need to build in your organisation using this ‘power mapping’ tool
Claire Gray is a leadership and team facilitator, executive coach, and author of Thriving Teams: When Teams Unite, Align & Achieve. She works with HR leaders and executive teams to build accountability, psychological safety and high-performing cultures. She is also the host of the Thriving Leaders Podcast, where she explores the real-world challenges of leadership and team performance.
