Cross-Disciplinary Team Building

One thing we did constantly in Special Forces was cross train. Everyone had a specialty. Weapons. Communications. Engineering. Medical. But we didn’t just stay in our lane. The weapons guy learned communications. The engineer learned medical. The communicator understood weapons systems. Because on a team, you never know when someone might be unavailable or when the situation changes. Cross training meant the team could keep moving no matter what happened. No single point of failure. I’ve seen the same principle apply in business and in government programs. The strongest teams aren’t built on isolated expertise. They’re built on shared understanding. When people understand each other’s roles: • Collaboration improves • Problems get solved faster • Teams become more resilient You still have specialists. But the team operates better when everyone understands how the mission fits together. It’s something I always think about when building teams. Set aside one day each week and partner with someone on your team. Learn their role, what they do, and how their work impacts the mission. Then do it again the next week with someone else. Encourage your team to do the same. You’ll be surprised how quickly understanding grows—and how much team performance improves.

Most of my academic career was dedicated to working on interdisciplinary research projects. In the early days, I found there was little consideration for the inherent challenges of this type of work, particularly in managing power dynamics across the STEM/social science disciplinary divide. While there is a lot to be gained from interdisciplinary research, it can be a hard road to walk. It’s so refreshing to see interdisciplinary research gaining more prominence from funders, and critically, a more intentional approach to creating supportive spaces for people to communicate across disciplinary divides. Here are some key lessons I learnt along the (sometimes rocky) journey: 🔹Language Matters: Ensure everyone on the team understands the key terms used to articulate the research. For instance, on an antimicrobial resistance project I was working on, the term ‘driver’ meant different things to different academics. Spending time interrogating this helped the team to have a shared understanding of the objectives of the project. 🔹 Regular Knowledge-Sharing Sessions: Building an understanding of what each team member is doing to contribute to the project can help to foster a positive working environment. Facilitated sessions, where each team member presents their work, can help to foster a shared understanding. For me, learning about how microbiological sampling techniques worked was helpful when developing my own ethnographic study. 🔹 Foster a Culture of Mutual Respect: Post-docs and project administration staff, often the hardest working, sometimes see their contributions rendered invisible. I cannot stress enough how vital it is to create an environment where all disciplines and team members are valued equally. Avoid empty platitudes; good leadership comes with actively listening to each other and recognising that the project wouldn’t happen without every member of the team. 🔹 Utilise Facilitation Techniques: Don’t assume that a group will naturally come together; intentional facilitation, such as round-robin discussions, ensures everyone has a chance to contribute. This can also help to manage power dynamics and give voice to quieter members. 🔹Create a Psychologically safe space: When people do not feel safe to share their ideas, they will not take risks and experiment. Safe spaces for learning are essential; public criticism and shaming can deter people from sharing. Encourage team members to explore ideas outside their comfort zones in a way that is supportive. Creating safe spaces is the only way people will experiment together. Interdisciplinary research can indeed be a hard road to walk, but the journey is enriched with diverse perspectives and the potential for groundbreaking discoveries. It's about managing the complexities with care and ensuring every voice is heard and respected. Let's continue to push the boundaries of knowledge, together. #interdisciplinaryresearch #academicresearch #power #facilitation

Medical degrees create terrible healthcare leaders. The white coat grants automatic respect. But true leadership? That's earned differently. Throughout my journey—from designing a US Navy destroyer to running a telehealth company—I've discovered healthcare leadership requires skills they never taught in medical school. Leading a provider, a medical assistant, an engineer, and a billing specialist demands something different than clinical knowledge. Here are 5 strategies that actually work: 1/ Break the silence hierarchy creates ↳ Support staff often have solutions but fear speaking up ↳ Create psychological safety through consistent responses ↳ When someone points out your mistake, thank them publicly ↳ Rotate meeting facilitation to different team members, not just leaders 2/ Develop adaptive communication channels ↳ Some staff won't speak in meetings but will message privately ↳ Others need formal structures to contribute ideas ↳ Create multiple pathways for input (anonymous surveys, office hours) ↳ Match your feedback style to each team member's preference 3/ Speak each professional language fluently ↳ Medical staff respond to clinical evidence and patient outcomes ↳ Engineers need clear specifications and technical challenges ↳ Admins thrive on process clarity and measurable efficiency ↳ Translate between these languages without speaking down 4/ Create structural accountability (not just authority) ↳ Your MD won't save failing projects—metrics will ↳ Implement regular cross-functional reviews ↳ Use objective measurement systems everyone understands ↳ Share results openly, especially when they're disappointing 5/ Know when to step aside ↳ The skills that built your team may not scale it ↳ Great physician-entrepreneurs often make poor operational leaders ↳ I've learned to recognize when my strengths become limitations ↳ Be willing to hire your replacement when the team needs different skills Building teams is difficult and sometimes so is knowing where you fit in to that team. Sometimes your greatest contribution is recognizing when someone else should lead the next phase, while you return to your where you can shine. —----------------------------- ⁉️ What have you found works in leading cross-functional healthcare teams? ♻️ Share to help healthcare leaders build stronger teams. 👉 Follow me Reza Hosseini Ghomi, MD, MSE) for more like this.

Let's be honest: extensive cross-team coordination is often a symptom of a larger problem, not an inevitable challenge that needs solving. When teams spend more time in alignment than on building, it's time to reconsider your organizational design. Conway's Law tells us that our systems inevitably mirror our communication structures. When I see teams drowning in coordination overhead, I look at these structural factors: - Team boundaries that cut across frequent workflows: If a single user journey requires six different teams to coordinate, your org structure might be optimized for technical specialization at the expense of delivery flow. - Mismatched team autonomy and system architecture: Microservices architecture with monolithic teams (or vice versa) creates natural friction points that no amount of coordination rituals can fully resolve. - Implicit dependencies that become visible too late: Teams discover they're blocking each other only during integration, indicating boundaries were drawn without understanding the full system dynamics. Rather than adding more coordination mechanisms, consider these structural approaches: - Domain-oriented teams over technology-oriented teams: Align team boundaries with business domains rather than technical layers to reduce cross-team handoffs. - Team topologies that acknowledge different types of teams: Platform teams, enabling teams, stream-aligned teams, and complicated subsystem teams each have different alignment needs. - Deliberate discovery of dependencies: Map the invisible structures in your organization before drawing team boundaries, not after. Dependencies are inevitable and systems are increasingly interconnected, so some cross-team alignment will always be necessary. When structural changes aren't immediately possible, here's what I've learned works to keep things on the right track: 1️⃣ Shared mental models matter more than shared documentation. When teams understand not just what other teams are building, but why and how it fits into the bigger picture, collaboration becomes fluid rather than forced. 2️⃣ Interface-first development creates clear contracts between systems, allowing teams to work autonomously while maintaining confidence in integration. 3️⃣ Regular alignment rituals prevent drift. Monthly tech radar sessions, quarterly architecture reviews, and cross-team demonstrations create the rhythm of alignment. 4️⃣ Technical decisions need business context. When engineers understand user and business outcomes, they make better architectural choices that transcend team boundaries. 5️⃣ Optimize for psychological safety across teams. The ability to raise concerns outside your immediate team hierarchy is what prevents organizational blind spots. The best engineering leaders recognize that excessive coordination is a tax on productivity. You can work to improve coordination, or you can work to reduce the need for coordination in the first place.

As Chief Program Officer at the Dubai Autism Center, I don’t just supervise our education/clinic department. I also oversee our Occupational Therapy, Psychology, and Speech-Language departments. When I stepped into the role, I understood the initial hesitation about a Behavior Analyst overseeing other disciplines. Honestly, I’d likely feel the same if the situation were reversed. Over time, our teams have seen that I genuinely value an interdisciplinary approach and respect each department’s perspective on treatment. Collaboration isn’t only about being “easy to work with” (though soft skills matter). It also requires a shared foundation and sufficient understanding of each other’s disciplines to communicate clearly, interpret recommendations accurately, and provide meaningful feedback. That’s why I really enjoyed the paper “Interdisciplinary Collaboration Training: An Example of a Preservice Training Series.” What stood out most is its practical approach to building interdisciplinary fluency inside an organization. It doesn’t focus on teaching “collaboration skills,” but it also emphasizes learning key aspects of one another’s disciplines, enabling teams to develop a shared frame of reference. That kind of cross-disciplinary understanding helps us better appreciate each discipline’s values and decision-making and communicate in ways that reduce friction and build trust. It also (in my opinion) provides stronger, more informed input on intervention plans, which ultimately deliver more cohesive support for families. This paper is packed with a lot of good ideas, and I’m planning to start rolling some of them out soon. Worth the read! #Autism #Dubai #DubaiAutismCenter #InterdisciplinaryCare #InterprofessionalCollaboration #TeamBasedCare #ABA #BCBA #OccupationalTherapy #SpeechTherapy #SLP #Psychology #ClinicalLeadership #EvidenceBasedPractice #ProfessionalDevelopment

Cross-disciplinary science teams are being asked to solve increasingly complex problems—but many of our leadership habits are still built for a simpler world. I’ve been re-reading Dr. Gemma Jiang’s 2023 paper on collaborative leadership in team science, which frames these teams as complex adaptive systems and then asks a practical question: how do we actually lead when outcomes are emergent, not predictable? The article highlights three recurring pitfalls: 1. Perpetual sensemaking with no real decisions or actions 2. Decisions made by a small inner circle without inclusive sensemaking, undermining both quality and buy‑in. 3. Rigid adherence to initial plans even as context shifts, treating the project plan as “the bible.” To move beyond these traps, Gemma brings together three conceptual frameworks that, in effect, act as lightweight operating systems for collaborative leadership: >> Theory U – Encourages teams to go “down the left side of the U” into deep, inclusive sensemaking before committing to action, linking the depth of inquiry to the quality of outcomes. >> Divergence–Convergence Double Diamond – Makes visible the oscillation between divergence and convergence in both sensemaking and action, including the inevitable “groan zone” where integrating diverse perspectives feels hard but is essential for innovation. >> Strategic Doing – Replaces long, hierarchical planning cycles with fast iterations and “pathfinder projects,” integrating thinkers and doers in short loops of sensemaking, deciding, and acting. What I find especially useful is how these frameworks shift leadership from a person to a process: distributed leadership becomes the disciplined practice of structuring conversations so that coherence, decision making, and actions continually inform one another. For those working in large, multi-institutional projects—or building innovation platforms and ecosystems—this paper offers a practical way to design the rules of engagement so that adaptive behavior can emerge without generating chaos or reverting to the rigidities of command‑and‑control practices.

I was sitting in a critical meeting about a privacy-sensitive feature when our engineering lead showed complex block diagrams and code snippets for 30 minutes. I watched as the non-engineers' eyes gradually glazed over. Suddenly, one of our lawyers interrupted: "So if I understand correctly, what you're saying is..." and succinctly summarized the technical problem and possible solutions in under a minute, even identifying the legal requirements we'd need to check. That lawyer was what I call a "Translator" - one of three critical enablers in cross-functional teams. In my study of cross-functional teams with Dr. Homa Bahrami (where I surveyed 100+ tech professionals), I discovered three types of enablers that grease the wheels of collaboration: 1️⃣ 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘀: People with knowledge of multiple domains who can bridge communication gaps. That lawyer with technical understanding became our communication hero. 2️⃣ 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗿𝘀: People with exceptional interpersonal skills who build networks, navigate conflicts, and create connections. I've watched an influencer transform a resistant stakeholder into our strongest advocate through careful listening and follow-through. 3️⃣ 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗼𝗿𝘀: Executives who champion and support cross-functional teams from the outside, removing roadblocks and providing resources. ⭐ What is one action you can take today to become an enabler for your team? #TeamDynamics #ChaiTime   

Human Performance Collaboration & Team Science We often talk about multidisciplinary work without really unpacking what it means. In team science, there are three collaboration models: multidisciplinary, where experts from different fields work side-by-side but largely remain in their own lanes; interdisciplinary, where methods and perspectives begin to cross boundaries; and transdisciplinary, the highest level of collaboration, where expertise remains intact but boundaries dissolve as ideas and problem-solving are co-created. Importantly, transdisciplinary does not mean people step outside their qualifications or perform work they aren’t trained to do. In fact, when one discipline tries to masquerade as another, it’s the highest form of disciplinary disrespect—undermining both the integrity of the field and the trust of the team. True transdisciplinary work honors expertise by connecting it at full strength, creating something entirely new that no single discipline could achieve alone. As Stokols et al. (2008) put it: “Transdisciplinary collaborations are intended to transcend disciplinary boundaries by creating new frameworks, hypotheses, and methods that integrate and extend beyond the contributions of individual fields.” That’s the model of collaboration where performance and innovation truly thrive.

Reliability is built where disciplines connect. We’ve made meaningful progress with nursing shared governance—but #HighReliability requires us to go further. Interdisciplinary Professional Governance is the evolution. In an HRO, safety and quality aren’t owned by one discipline—they’re co-produced at the point of care. Yet governance often remains siloed: nursing, physicians, quality, and operations working in parallel—driving variation. #InterdisciplinaryCare closes that gap. It aligns decision-making across disciplines, grounded in evidence and accountable to the same standards of reliability. But structure alone isn’t enough. This only works with #HealthcareLeadership that is authentic—because real collaboration introduces tension. Without trust, it fragments. With the right leadership, it sharpens decisions and surfaces risk early. In practice: - Interdisciplinary teams co-design care—not review it after the fact - Leaders create #PsychologicalSafety for challenge, not just agreement - Dialogue is transparent, focused on risk and outcomes - Decision rights are clear, with shared accountability Most importantly, it shifts us from “my discipline” to “our system.” That’s where reliability is built. - Less variation at the interfaces—where harm occurs - Earlier escalation of risk - A culture where speaking up and standardizing practice are expected The alternative is clear: fragmented governance and persistent normalized deviance. The opportunity is better: aligned decisions, integrated expertise, and reliable care—every time. That’s the next level of #ProfessionalGovernance. #PatientSafety #HealthcareQuality #ClinicalLeadership #HealthcareTransformation

Icebreakers are the corporate equivalent of a root canal That's what an engineer whispered to me during a team offsite. He was right—but the solution isn't ending them. It's engineering them. Most leaders try to fix team chemistry with better icebreakers. But great teams aren't built on better questions—they're built on better systems. After many years of building global tech teams, here's the counterintuitive truth: introversion isn't the problem. Poor system design is. Here's how to transform those awkward moments into trust-building engines: 𝗥𝗲𝘄𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗶𝗿𝗰𝘂𝗶𝘁 ↳ Start async: Share technical challenges 24h before meetings ↳ Give prep time: Introverts process internally first ↳ Create choice: Offer both verbal and written options 𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝗮𝗳𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗽𝘀 ↳ Begin with pairs, not groups ↳ Focus on shared challenges, not personal exposure ↳ Design interactions that build on each other 𝗠𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 47% more cross-team collaboration 3x more participation in planning sessions Faster time-to-trust in new project teams We built an async 'challenge-pairing' system where engineers shared technical blockers 24h before meetings. Participation jumped from 20% to 90% in the first week. Systems thinking isn't just for code. It's for humans too. The best teams I've built weren't divided by intro/extroversion. They were united by well-designed interaction patterns that worked for everyone. Here are 3 easy intros that help build rapport and trust without the typical icebreaker pain: - What's your most unusual but effective life hack that you think more people should know about? - What's a common saying or tradition that you'd love to know the real story behind? - If you could instantly possess expert skill at something, what would it be? What's your most unexpected yet effective trust-building technique? Share below 👇 #TeamBuilding #SystemsThinking #StartupLeadership