Someone in another department Slacks you: “Hey, quick favor . . . any chance you could get this to me by Friday?” No context on why it matters, no acknowledgment of what’s already on your plate, just an ask. You’ve probably sent a version of that message yourself, and you’ve almost certainly seen your own request sliding to the bottom of someone else’s list, with nothing you could structurally do about it.
That’s the wall almost every professional eventually hits: The work requires people across the organization to move together, and some of those people you don’t manage, can’t direct, and have no real leverage over. Nobody puts that in a job description, and almost nothing in a typical career prepares you for it. The people who figure it out have learned a distinct skill: leading across.
Leading across is building trust and creating alignment with people outside your chain of command. The good news is that leading across isn’t a personality trait that some people are born with, and others aren’t. It’s a set of habits, and most of them start well before you ever need a favor.
Build the relationship before you need it
The biggest mistake we see is treating a cross-functional relationship as something to activate at the moment of need. By the time you’re messaging someone you’ve never really talked to and asking them to drop what they’re doing, you’re negotiating from nothing. The people who move work forward without formal authority have usually already put in the time: coffee with someone in finance before there’s a budget question, a real conversation with someone in legal before there’s a contract on fire.
What you’re really building is trust, and the researchers Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman break it into three parts:
Can people count on you to do what you say you’ll do?
Are you actually capable, and do you know what you’re doing?
Do you genuinely care about the other person to the point that they believe you have their back?
Most professionals are strong on one or two of these and weak on the third. Be reliably strong on all three, and people start prioritizing your requests before you’ve even finished making them.
Make the ask about their world, not yours
When you do need something, the instinct is to sell it: to explain why your project matters, why your deadline is real, why this is urgent for you. That framing is exactly backward for someone who doesn’t report to you and has no obligation to care about your priorities. The more effective move is to connect what you’re asking for to something bigger than either of you: the team’s goals, the company’s goals, what’s best for the client. The “why” behind a request should almost never be about you.
That reframe works only if you’ve done the homework. Anyone can make a case for the importance of their project. The harder, more valuable move is understanding what the other person is already carrying—their goals, their deadlines, the fires they’re putting out—so you can show them exactly where your ask intersects with what they’re already trying to accomplish. If you can’t articulate why this matters to them, not just to you, you haven’t done enough homework yet.
It also helps to flip the question: Instead of starting with what you need, start with what you can do for them. What would make this person’s week easier? What problem of theirs have you noticed that you’re actually positioned to help with? People remember who showed up for them, and they prioritize accordingly the next time you ask for something. Give credit generously and publicly while you’re at it. Being known as someone who shares credit rather than hoards it is one of the fastest, lowest-cost ways to build a reputation that makes people want to help you.
Protect the ask once you’ve gotten it
Here’s the part people most often get wrong after the hard work of building trust and framing the ask well: They win the favor and then stop paying attention to it. Priorities shift fast inside any organization, and if someone spends real time on something for you only to discover, weeks later, that it stopped mattering, they will remember that the next time you come knocking. Once someone agrees to help, treat that commitment as something you actively manage, not a box you’ve checked. Keep it visible. Keep it a priority. Follow up before they have to wonder if it still matters.
We saw this play out with a leader at a fast-growing cybersecurity company who’d been put in charge of a new cross-functional “pod,” a small group pulled from sales, marketing, and engineering, tasked with moving one product line faster. The leader was accountable for the whole outcome, but not one person on the pod reported to them. Everyone still had their own manager and their own list of things that mattered more.
Months of relationship-building and good intentions weren’t fixing it. What did work was ditching status updates—who did what this week—for a shared scoreboard tracking outcomes: green, yellow, red, plus a name for the trap that had been sinking them for months, a “watermelon”: a status marked green on the outside while it was red underneath. Once the group could see what was actually stalled versus what only looked fine, nobody could let something slide without everyone noticing. That kind of visibility is what keeps a request alive after the goodwill of the initial yes wears off.
None of this shows up in a performance review as “leading across,” and no org chart will ever draw the lines that make this work visible. But it’s the actual mechanism behind the projects that ship, the reorgs that land, and the teams that manage to pull in the same direction despite reporting to different bosses. The leaders who get things done aren’t the ones with the most authority. They’re the ones who built enough trust in advance that authority stopped being what they needed.
