Aligned Teams Can Move Mountains

Aligned teams can move mountains but alignment rarely happens by accident.

Behind every high-performing organization is a network of leaders who know how to connect ideas, people, and priorities. They don’t just lead their teams, they lead across them, ensuring that momentum isn’t lost in translation.

The true test of leadership today isn’t whether you can motivate your direct reports. It’s whether you can influence without authority, bridge competing priorities, and create clarity where structure falls short.

This is the essence of leading across — the invisible force that transforms collaboration into execution and execution into impact.

Why Leading Across Matters

As organizations become more matrixed, distributed, and fast-moving, the lines of hierarchy blur — but the need for alignment intensifies. Authority alone can no longer guarantee execution; influence and emotional intelligence now carry equal weight.

Research by McKinsey shows that poor cross-functional collaboration can erode productivity by up to 25%. Yet the real opportunity isn’t just avoiding friction, it’s unlocking momentum. When peers align laterally, they accelerate innovation, shorten decision cycles, and strengthen trust across the system.

At N-BAC, we call this Managing Across — the second pillar of our Trio Model™ for holistic leadership:

• Managing Up creates clarity by aligning with strategic direction.

• Managing Down builds trust by empowering teams.

• Managing Across sustains momentum by connecting perspectives.

If managing up builds clarity and managing down builds trust, managing across builds cohesion, the connective tissue that turns leadership into a collective act.

The Translator Role: Turning Silos into Systems

Every department speaks a different language. Finance speaks risk. Marketing speaks reach. Operations speaks process. HR speaks culture.

Leaders who can translate between these dialects turn friction into flow. But translation isn’t just about communication clarity — it’s about cognitive empathy. It requires what I call perspective-taking — the deliberate act of understanding how a situation appears to another person and how they are reacting to it, both cognitively and emotionally.

As I discuss in my book The Art of Managing Up, perspective-taking is more than empathy. Psychologist David W. Johnson defined it as “the ability to understand how a situation appears to another person and how that person is reacting cognitively and emotionally to the situation.” Daniel Pink describes it as empathy with your brain instead of your heart — the pause that lets you see through someone else’s lens before responding.

When leaders practice perspective-taking across functions, they anticipate not only what others need but why they need it. They adapt language to resonate with different priorities — framing risk in terms of impact for finance, or timelines in terms of opportunity for marketing.

A 2018 Harvard Business Review study found that teams intentionally practicing perspective-taking reported 43% fewer cross-functional conflicts. Neuroscience research supports this: studies from the University of Cambridge (PNAS, 2013) show that effective leaders flex between empathic and analytic neural networks, allowing them to balance emotional understanding with strategic reasoning.

Perspective-taking is empathy in motion — the discipline that turns silos into systems and colleagues into collaborators.

The Emotional Intelligence Advantage

Managing across is less about process and more about presence. It requires empathy to understand others’ realities, self-regulation to stay centered when agendas diverge, and social skill to align without authority.

Daniel Goleman’s research on emotional intelligence reveals that nearly 90% of the difference between average and high-performing leaders can be traced to EI competencies rather than technical expertise. Those same skills — self-awareness, empathy, and relationship management — are what make “across leadership” sustainable.

Emotionally intelligent leaders navigate complexity with curiosity instead of control. They seek to understand before persuading, and by doing so, they create alignment that endures beyond the meeting room.

Three Ways to Lead Across with Impact

1. Create Shared Context Before You Communicate

Misalignment usually begins before a single word is spoken. Before presenting ideas or solutions, set the context: Why does this matter? How does it connect to our collective goals?

In one N-BAC client organization, project leads began using a short “Context First” brief before cross-functional meetings — summarizing the problem, desired outcomes, and assumptions. Within a month, meeting time dropped 30%, and decision-making doubled in speed.

Shared context creates shared commitment.

2. Listen Across Functions, Not Just Up the Chain

Influence begins with curiosity. Instead of advocating for your priorities first, ask peers what success looks like for them — and what barriers they face.

That one question reframes the conversation from competition to collaboration. When people feel heard, they open the door to partnership. Listening across functions transforms meetings from updates into opportunities for co-creation.

3. Build Influence Through Reciprocity, Not Authority

Cross-functional credibility is earned, not given. Leaders who help peers meet deadlines, share insights, or celebrate their wins build reservoirs of trust they can draw on later.

Reciprocity is the quiet engine of alignment: people align with those who help them succeed.

This mindset turns influence from a tactic into a relationship strategy — one rooted in contribution, not control.

Reflection: Where Alignment Lives

Leading across is where emotional intelligence and perspective-taking meet execution.
It’s not about managing relationships — it’s about mastering alignment.

The next time your team hits a bottleneck, ask yourself:

“Where has communication stalled sideways, not just upward or downward?”

True alignment begins when leaders translate understanding into action.

That’s where your next level of leadership lives.

The N-BAC Trio Approach in Action

At N-BAC, we help organizations build leaders who can manage in all three directions — up, across, and down.

Through assessments, training, and coaching, we turn awareness into alignment and alignment into measurable performance.

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