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Many teams are cross-functional: they are made up of people from different departments or functions or even organizations. In this situation, each person has a part-time role on this team and another job elsewhere. It is crucial that you take this into account.

If your team members have another regular role elsewhere, then they also have a regular line manager, regular teammates, regular objectives and regular loyalties. This is referred to as a ‘matrix organization’. The different lines of management and responsibilities make it much easier for people to become overloaded, distracted or confused, and conflicts of interest are much more likely.

In order to minimize the likelihood of problems with a cross-functional team, you need to work hard on six areas of your management skills. You will notice that the initial letters of these skill areas spell TOPCAT.

• T = Team building. You have to work really hard at this because your team members are already members of other teams. They already have a team identity and team loyalties elsewhere and these continue throughout the lifetime of your team. You need to balance getting them involved in your team without appearing to be trying to break them away from their other teams.

• O = Objective setting. You not only have to set clear, unambiguous SMART objectives (see Jargon buster), but you have to do this in conjunction with the objectives and deadlines that your team members have in their other teams. This requires constant review and adjustment as well as extra liaison with team members and their other bosses.

• P = Performance feedback. No one wants to be unappreciated, especially when a team member might be unpopular with their line manager for being ‘absent-on-duty’ with your team. Therefore, performance feedback is critical. If people are doing well, tell them (also tell their line manager). If they are not doing so well ask them what else they need from you in order to perform.

• C = Communication. If you don’t see your team members on a day-to-day basis, or they don’t see each other each day, you have to keep everyone informed of activities, successes, problems, solutions, changes and everyday news. But you have to avoid overloading people who might be getting similar updates from their other teams!

• A = Arbitration. You can’t expect your team members to negotiate for your benefit with their other boss; you are going to have to do a lot of arbitration for your team members’ time and resources. You will have to do this at the outset, when you set objectives, and frequently throughout the life of the team.

• T = Tackling conflict. Life in a matrix organization is full of potential conflict. You are naturally going to feel that your team is the most important, while every other manager is naturally going to feel the same way about their team!

Be a TOPCAT to manage a cross-functional team successfully.