Resources

Consider how political, social, and economic pressures shape patterns of collaboration in your world.

Cross-functional teams in Government are nothing new. Over my years working within Government, and as a contractor for Government, I’ve heard them called many things such as “Swat Teams," “Tiger Teams,” and “Special Project Units” just to name a few. Whatever you call your cross-functional team, they can bring both powerful synergy and destructive conflict to an organization. As you set up your cross-functional team, here are three simple things you can do to bolster its success.

What? Recently I worked with a group of organizational leaders who bring disparate groups together to collaborate on political and social issues. One of the challenges they face is helping their client groups define how they will make decisions together, ensuring adequate representation of their individual constituencies. Among this group, their largest question was about how they decide about engaging others and then make their intensions clear. In that conversation I shared four options for effective shared decision making.

What is Imposter Syndrome? The popular term imposter syndrome describes the “pervasive feeling of self-doubt, insecurity, or fraudulence despite often overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Anyone can feel this way, and many people do.

I have been distracted this week by the events in Washington, to say nothing about what is happening in London, on the Texas border, in Indonesia and North Carolina, and everywhere in between. These events challenge a set of fundamental beliefs I hold. I learned them from my parents, read them in classics of Western philosophy, observed them in communities of my youth, and vote to uphold them whenever the polls are open. The principles seem a bit naïve today, but they form the core of my relationship with personal, social, and political reality. I will be more specific.