How well you function within or across departmental silos? Because your professional success involves creating a cross-functional passport, so you get to where you really need to go. Together. One millimeter at a time.
How adept, conversant and comfortable are you traversing across the sales-engineering interface®? Or perhaps the business-operations abyss in your organization? In your daily functions, do you have opportunities to collaborate with colleagues within or across departmental silos?
How you answer these questions makes a difference in the quality and value of your professional outcomes.
Many of you reading this blog are mid-career professionals. By that time, you focus on developing skills to become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically visible. Why? Because you want to lead, rather than follow.
Does your preferred professional style involve collaborating within or beyond departmental silos?
If you already are a creative leader, then you focused on complex problem-solving across departmental silos. As a result of your intentionally cross-functional career journey, you develop empathy, cultural awareness, and conflict resolution skills. Thus you listen rather than lecture, translate your message rather than relying on professional jargon.
Plus, you are courageous. You willingly traverse across departmental silos to locate hidden pockets of tribal knowledge. And along the way you discover troves of knowledge contracted for in the past and now abandoned as failed projects. Are these really failed projects: today? Your journey propels you across perceived differences, yours and theirs, which become strengths to better serve one another. So everyone gets to where they really need to go. Together. One millimeter at a time.
Your cross functional professional success involves what you choose to do with what you learn to do.
Will increasing your skills also involve actually using these tools and skills, daily? Because changing habits and mindset requires continuous reinforcement. Otherwise, what you learn to do gathers dust with the rest of the certifications you add to your professional resumes.
So before you earn one more degree or certification, ask yourself how you intend to use these tools to lead, rather than follow. Becoming more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable, post-pandemically, leverages collaboration across department silos and cultures.
Planning your next team, corporate or association meeting? Searching for a one-on-one catalyst to get you unstuck? Engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person. Contact me here.
Babette Ten Haken | Change Catalyst | Purpose-Driven Professional Innovation | Cross-Functional Team Leadership | Trust-Based Client Retention | In Person & Virtual Speaker, Consultant, Coach, Author |
Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™ Speaking & Consulting, catalyzes trust-based, purpose-driven, cross-functional leadership. She leverages Voice of the Customer and storytelling to translate across communication and collaboration disconnects impacting successful business outcomes across people and professional disciplines. Babette is a cross-functional business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). She is a member of the ASQ, SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock.
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