Project Leadership: Lead Cross-Functional Teams [EN]

What you'll learn

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• Lead a team where nobody reports to you, using influence, clarity and structure instead of authority you do not have

• Delegate through six distinct levels rather than one, and recognise micromanagement and seagull management in your own behaviour

• Connect the parts of an organisation that do not naturally cooperate: strategy, culture, OKR, processes and structure

• Build a team from a job profile through onboarding to the point where it works without you in the room

• Diagnose a team before organising anything for it, using GRPI and the five dysfunctions

• Handle conflict between functions, where both sides are behaving rationally and pulling in opposite directions

• Run performance conversations that end in a plan, including the improvement plan and the exit

• Read an organisational structure and know which links have to be built by hand because the chart does not create them

• Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries

• Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank

Who this course is for:

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• Project and programme managers responsible for delivery and in charge of nobody
• Product managers coordinating engineering, design, marketing and support at once
• Team leads whose work now depends on three other departments
• Consultants and contractors delivering inside organisations where they have no standing
• Operations and transformation leads pulling functions in the same direction
• Founders and functional heads who need the parts of the company to actually connect
• Anyone who has run a project that failed because a department they had no power over said no

Description

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This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

You are accountable for the result and nobody involved reports to you. That is not an unfortunate arrangement you have ended up in. It is the normal condition of the job.

Most project training treats it as a footnote and spends the time on Gantt charts.

What actually decides whether it works

The engineering lead has three other priorities, all of which came from their own manager. The marketing team agreed in the meeting and did nothing, because agreeing was cheaper than arguing. You escalate once and become the person who escalates. You delegate a task and take it back a week later because it was done differently, and after that nobody offers. And a conflict between two departments continues for months while both sides behave completely rationally from where they are standing.

None of this is fixed by a better plan. It is fixed by understanding how organisations actually connect, and by a set of leadership behaviours that work without formal power.

What the course covers

Forty lessons in three parts. The organisation first, ten lessons from the operations leadership perspective: how strategy, culture, OKR, processes and organisational structure fit together, why a matrix structure creates the exact situation you are in, how projects, finance and infrastructure interact, and where the horizontal links have to be built by hand because the org chart does not create them.

Then leadership itself. Eight lessons on developing leaders — the ten competencies from the Gallup and Google research, the six levels of delegation and how to tell micromanagement from seagull management in your own behaviour, situational leadership, coaching, engagement, and communicating in a way that survives being passed on second-hand.

Teams, delegation and the conflict nobody owns

Then six lessons on people management as a discipline: the five levels, the twenty core tools, building a team from a job profile, the five dysfunctions, development plans, motivation, performance and the conversations at both ends of it.

Then team building — but treated as diagnosis before activity. The GRPI model, working out which of several teams actually needs it, and what works with people who never share a room. Then delegation in depth, including RACI, which is the mechanism for assigning responsibility to someone who does not work for you.

And finally six lessons on conflict, which in a cross-functional setting is structural rather than personal: causes, escalation, prevention, negotiation and mediation.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. Every function I have ever needed something from had its own priorities and no obligation to me, which is where the practical parts of this course come from.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Before you start

Name the one person outside your reporting line whose cooperation your current project most depends on. Then write what they are measured on. If you cannot, that is the gap, and it is a bigger risk to your project than anything on your risk register. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.