"I've been a training leader for a decade, and a majority of the projects that I have either led or supported were cross-functional in nature. At Acme Consulting, for instance, the organizational development (OD) team usually initiates new training programs. They ran continuous process improvement campaigns and identified skill and knowledge needs. For example, the company was on a growth spurt and needed to hire or promote new supervisors.

As the training lead, I worked with the OD team to review the current playbook for our managers. They had already done the work to improve processes by standardizing and documenting them. I worked with them to identify any improvements needed in implementing these processes and improvements needed in performance management by our current supervisors. On the operational side, we collaborated with department heads from quality assurance, workforce management, and data analytics. On the enablement side, we collaborated with recruitment and the HR team, and the information technology group. I led these discussions, which were in-depth and sometimes contentious-all par for the course for these types of efforts. Everyone represents the interest of their own functional group, so it was my job to expose them to the other groups' interests. In the end, my training team successfully developed a leadership program. I'm proud to say that since then, 85% of our leaders were promoted from within, and the median tenure after their promotion has been 2 years."