The role of leaders is to enable diverse team members to grasp one another’s perspectives and productively share their insights. The problem, as poet John Godfrey Saxe explained, is that “each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong!” In the same way, people on cross-industry teams frequently spiral into perplexed and emotionally charged disagreement, unable to see value beyond their limited field of view. Each man reaches a different conclusion about the elephant on the basis of his observation of a single part of it. The parable of the learned blind men encountering an elephant captures the essence of the cross-industry challenge. A digital start-up in Germany and a large health care provider in the United States will have very different cultures-but if the companies are going to innovate together, they’ll need to get on the same page.
Thus when cross-industry teams come together, they often suffer from culture clash. These assumptions shape behavior in subtle ways-and deviations, by definition, feel off. Within an industry, for example, people commonly share assumptions about the mission, how people at different levels should interact, the quality needed at various project stages, and so on.
The gulfs between behavioral norms and values across industries and professions can be even wider. Participants often live in different intellectual worlds and have distinct technical languages. The challenge arises from the broad mix of expertise common on cross-industry teams.
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How to build and run them is another matter. That such cross-industry collaborations can generate radical innovations is clear. But as the premium on innovating grows, especially for wicked problems-those with incomplete, contradictory, or changing requirements-more organizations are tapping the capabilities of new and far-flung partners. The Solutionįour leadership practices can help cross-industry teams meet their potential: fostering an adaptable vision, promoting psychological safety, enabling knowledge sharing, and adopting an execution-as-learning mindset.Ĭompanies have long cooperated within their ecosystems, working with suppliers, partners, customers, and even competitors.
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Teams struggle to perform for a variety of reasons: Roles are uncertain expertise, professional values, and organizational cultures are varied and participants’ diverse perspectives and experience may cause conflict or even overt antagonism. But managing such diverse teams is challenging. Though these practices are broadly familiar, their application within cross-industry teams calls for unique leadership approaches that combine flexibility, open-mindedness, humility, and fierce resolve.Ĭross-industry teams made up of far-flung participants outside the usual business ecosystem are necessary for radical innovation. She has identified the leadership practices that make successful cross-industry teams work: fostering an adaptable vision, promoting psychological safety, enabling knowledge sharing, and encouraging collaborative innovation. HBS professor Amy Edmondson has studied more than a dozen cross-industry innovation projects, among them the creation of a new city, a mango supply-chain transformation, and the design and construction of leading-edge buildings.
Companies today increasingly rely on teams that span many industries for radical innovation, especially to solve “wicked problems.” So leaders have to understand how to promote collaboration when roles are uncertain, goals are shifting, expertise and organizational cultures are varied, and participants have clashing or even antagonistic perspectives.
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