Learning to Play Nice: The Four Moves of Cross-Functional Influence

Cross-functional work means someone in another silo needs something from you, or you need something from them. Either way, they don’t report to you, and you don’t report to them. R&D needs your line. You need supply chain’s forecast. Someone else needs a decision only you can make. Nobody involved has the authority to just make it happen. You have to ask, and they have to be willing to say yes.

There are four moves.

• Diagnose the Conditions

• Make the Cooperative Opening

• Respond to Their Move

• Manage the Repeated Engagement

The rest of this piece will detail out each of these four moves. Underneath all of them, this is really about the relationships you depend on across those lines, and learning how to move them forward instead of letting them stall or break.

Before you ask for anything, you need to know what you’re actually walking into. The person you’re about to ask has their own stakes, their own workload, and their own reasons to say yes or no, and none of that shows up just because you need something from them.

These are three things you’re checking: interdependence, stakes, and capacity.

Interdependence

If what happens to me depends on what you do, we’re playing the same game whether either of us wants to or not.

• Are our outcomes connected?

Stakes

Sometimes they match. Sometimes they don’t, and the mismatch is the whole story.

• How important is this to me, and how important is it to them?

Capacity

Not every issue deserves your full weight.

• How much am I willing and able to invest here?

Here is an example of how these questions play out in a real work setting. We will use this same example as we cover all four moves here.

You’re a supervisor in a factory. Your job is to safely build the best quality products in the amounts needed each day. A colleague from R&D sends you an email, and in it they say they need four hours of capacity on your main line next Tuesday to run trials for a future product offering. The stakes are slightly higher for them, since they need this done quickly and yours is the only line in the company that can make this type of product, so you’re interdependent. It’s the end of the month on that Tuesday, and you’re cutting it close on your production numbers. You don’t actually have the capacity to give up that day.

After reading the email, the supervisor had the information about the conditions here. The email told the supervisor something useful. R&D needs the supervisor to say yes to the request; the supervisor has the authority to decide when the line is available, so now their issue is with Capacity and Timing. This isn’t a one-time transaction, though; it’s an ongoing relationship, and that means reciprocity matters. How the supervisor handles this ask here shapes what the supervisor can ask for in return from their R&D colleague.

Here’s how that opening actually played out.

The supervisor replies to the email and sets up a meeting instead of handling it over email. Going in, they assume positive intent, R&D isn’t trying to blow up their production numbers, they just don’t know what the end of the month looks like from where they sit.

In the meeting, the supervisor tells R&D the trial can happen, but the timing is the problem. They are behind on volume, and running the trial on the last day of the month puts the plant’s numbers at risk so the supervisor asks if the first day of the new month would work instead.

It doesn’t. The R&D person is only at the plant for the last two days of the month, for a separate meeting, and they want to be there in person when the trial runs. The date the supervisor needs to avoid is the only date that actually works for them.

The options that made sense to the supervisor were off the table now.

To sum up this exchange, the supervisor and their R&D colleague put their needs and constraints on the table, but now they were stuck. Both sides understood one another, but neither side had a workable answer yet, so they agreed to look at their options and talk again. They set up a meeting for the next day.

The key takeaway here is to open from cooperation, not resistance, and to assume positive intent going in.

To prepare for the next meeting, the supervisor started with what their R&D colleague said: they want to be there in person when the trial runs, and the only days they’re at the plant are the last two days of the month. That’s not a wall, it’s a preference with a real scheduling limit behind it, and it changes what’s worth pushing on. This wasn’t resistance to overcome but a legitimate problem to work out.

At the next meeting, the supervisor asked a question to dig deeper into what their R&D colleague really needed here.

So they opened with this question: “What do you actually need to do during this trial?”

The R&D person said they wanted to watch it run and take measurements. The supervisor asked if their team could take the measurements instead, and run it Wednesday, the first day of the new month. R&D could come down Tuesday, before they left, and walk the team through exactly what they needed.

R&D said they’d rather be there Tuesday while it ran, but Wednesday would work if the team followed their instructions closely.

The supervisor told them the truth: there might be capacity Tuesday, but they wouldn’t know for sure until that day. So they landed on a plan. If the line had capacity Tuesday, they’d run it while R&D was there. If not, Wednesday, with R&D’s instructions already in hand. Either way, the supervisor would call them Monday, while they were still at the plant for their meetings, with an answer.

The key here is to respond to what they actually did, not to what they expected or feared they’d do.

This worked out well enough for both parties because they were both assuming positive intent and were willing to talk about what they actually needed and why.

So far this story has a good ending, but like all complicated interdependent relationships, that will not always be the case.

I have been in this exact position before in my career many times. More than once I have made the mistake of not assuming positive intent, pushing back saying I needed more lead time, and just saying no outright. They went to my boss, and it became a fight that didn’t need to happen. That took a lot of time to heal, since we still had to work together. I had to learn this the hard way myself. It was my thought process that caused me the biggest issue.

Instead of starting with positive intent, I started with “that’s stupid.”

When you start that way, instead of helping to solve the issue, you shut them down and stop trying to help. It is easy to hide behind rules and procedures here, but repeated interconnected relationships usually end up with “you treat me that way and I will treat you that way”. It doesn’t make it right, but it doesn’t get the work done either.

No matter where you are on these steps, once you realize you are in “that’s stupid,” or the even worse version of “they’re stupid,” you can start back at the top and run these steps again. It will be an uphill road, but it is what needs to happen if your work is suffering and you need it to get better.

This model assumes good faith on both sides at the start. If you’re dealing with someone who genuinely isn’t operating in good faith, these steps won’t fix that, and nothing else will either. If that’s the case, you will likely need to move to this step in the next section: repeated defection gets progressively escalated.

This isn’t a one-time trade. The supervisor and R&D will need each other again, and how this goes shapes how the next ask goes too.

Cooperation gets continued cooperation.

Since both the supervisor and the R&D rep came to a mutually beneficial solution, the next interaction of interdependence from either of them will at least start on positive terms.

Defection gets a consequence.

Imagine instead that the supervisor had told R&D no. They didn’t follow the process, there wasn’t time, and that was the end of it. No attempt to help, no options offered, just “you’ll get it Wednesday.” To R&D, that reads as defection, the opposite of cooperation, and they won’t be inclined to help much in return. The next time the supervisor needs something from R&D: a spec, a review, anything, R&D will likely treat them the same way they were treated. They’ll quote procedure and offer the minimum help they can get away with. The supervisor will probably still get what they need eventually, but likely not on the timetable the supervisor needs.

A return to cooperation gets forgiven. You reset, you don’t keep score forever.

Either one of them can try a reset, which really just means burying the hatchet and trying to get back to cooperating. If neither does, they end up in an echo chamber, blaming each other, each convinced they’re right and the other one is wrong. When you get here, your next move is likely organizational escalation because it may be the only option left

Repeated defection gets progressively escalated.

If neither of them resets, and the work still has to move, it will likely come down to formal authority, getting managers involved to force a resolution. That comes at a cost. There is a real risk of losing credibility with your boss in the process, and the relationship that needed to work over years is now something a manager has to referee.

This is where you end up in a meeting with the two of you and your bosses. I call this “learning to play nice,” and yes, earlier in my career I was in a few of those. This is not where you want to be.

This model comes from years of failure, and a lot of study, reading books from Kotter and from Cohen and Bradford, along with some good mentorship sprinkled in. There is also a little game theory in step 4, specifically the prisoner’s dilemma, which shaped the fourth move on managing the repeated engagement.

This is not some magic formula or a fancy framework. Just a set of four simple steps that, taken in order, can help you with cross-functional relationships and hopefully keep you out of the learning to play nice meeting.