Season 3 Episode 11
Susan Finerty’s Guide to Managing Cross-Functional Partnerships

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RESOURCES   ❯   The Marketing Rapport Podcast

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Marketing Rapport, Tim Finnigan hosts Susan Finerty, president of Finerty Consulting, to discuss why most organizations struggle to get things done across departments. Matrix organizations try to break down silos through cross-functional teams and shared services. Still, they often fail at medium-sized decisions—the everyday choices that fall between major strategic moves and quick daily calls.

The core problem is simple: talking isn’t deciding. Teams get trapped in endless discussions without structured decision-making processes. Susan identifies this as the most prominent mistake organizations make, creating frustration and inefficiency that damages cross-functional culture.

The solution centers on trust, not more bureaucracy. Every organizational challenge has a partnership element that requires examining human relationships first. Susan argues that working cross-functionally demands confidence that “often takes your breath away.” Still, this foundation enables the agility and enterprise-wide thinking that matrix organizations promise to deliver.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Key Insights

• Talking Is Not Deciding: The Medium-Sized Decision Problem
  Organizations excel at handling major strategic decisions and quick daily choices, but consistently fail at medium-sized decisions. These middle-ground choices lack clear decision-makers and structured processes, causing teams to get stuck in endless discussions without resolution.
  The absence of defined criteria and options turns collaborative conversations into unproductive swirling. This breakdown creates frustration across departments and damages cross-functional culture, as decisions either stall indefinitely or get implemented poorly without proper stakeholder involvement.

• Trust Beats Process in Cross-Functional Success
  Every organizational challenge that feels clunky has an underlying partnership and trust issue, not a structural problem. When cross-functional work breaks down, leaders typically respond by adding more processes, spreadsheets, and bureaucratic controls. However, the real solution requires examining human relationships first.

  Cross-functional collaboration demands extraordinary trust levels because team members must rely on others’ expertise, competence, and agendas. Building this trust foundation enables the agility and enterprise-wide thinking that matrix organizations promise to deliver.

• Matrix Organizations Require Different Influence Skills
  Working across functions demands sophisticated influence capabilities that go beyond traditional expertise-based persuasion. In functional roles, deep knowledge, passion, and data usually convince others effectively. However, cross-functional environments require advanced relationship-building and communication skills because team members come from different backgrounds, priorities, and perspectives.

  The ambiguity inherent in matrix structures—overlapping roles, unclear decision rights, and multiple reporting relationships—means professionals must develop new competencies to navigate complex organizational dynamics and drive results through influence rather than authority.

• Ambiguity Fuels Agility When Properly Managed
  The confusion and unclear roles that challenge matrix organizations enable their greatest strength: organizational agility. Rather than viewing ambiguity as dysfunction, successful matrix organizations embrace it as a feature that allows rapid response to customer needs and market changes. This requires deliberate partnership-building and transparent goal-setting processes that provide direction without rigid structure. When teams understand that ambiguity is intentional and learn to work within flexible frameworks, they can leverage knowledge across the organization and think enterprise-wide rather than in functional silos.

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Episode Highlights

The Personal Journey: From Small Company Success to Large Organization Failure
[00:05:50] – [00:08:20]

Susan shares her career transition from thriving in smaller organizations to struggling dramatically in a large global company. This personal failure became the foundation for understanding why so many talented individuals struggle when moving between organizational types, as different structures require fundamentally different collaboration approaches.

“My first two jobs outta grad school were with smaller companies, right? And I was getting things done. I was on fire, and then I took a job at a very large global organization, and I bombed. So I am making everybody frustrated ’cause I’m just going in there. Previously, my role was in training. And so if it was training related, I made the decision, it was all me.”

Remote Work Amplifies Transactional Partnerships
[00:09:10] – [00:10:30]

The shift to remote work has pushed teams toward more transactional relationships. Digital communication tools naturally encourage information handoffs rather than true collaboration. This proximity loss mirrors challenges that global organizations have faced for years, but now affects every company.

“With COVID, and with our much more remote organizations, what we’re feeling is exactly what I would feel in my global organizations I would work with — in that we don’t see each other. And so we don’t have proximity. And so we rely on digital communication — email, Teams, messaging, whatever that is — and those are very transactional communication mechanisms. So they’re building, encouraging, and reinforcing very transactional ways of working.”

The Overwhelmed Employee Dilemma: Being Pulled in Multiple Directions
[00:21:20] – [00:22:50]

Employees in matrix organizations often find themselves caught between competing priorities from different managers. Rather than trying to satisfy everyone, employees should bring conflicting parties together to resolve the tension. This requires organizational permission and individual skills to facilitate difficult conversations.

“They can feel like Stretch Armstrong. Right? Like that rubbery, doll thing where you can stretch that all the way out — like eight feet — and you’re being pulled in one direction, you’re being pulled in another direction. I encourage people who are in there, whether it’s pulling at priorities or, you know, ‘We want you to do it this way,’ or whatever that is — I recommend the mindset is: do not let yourself be pulled. Pull it back in. Your job is to bring those two people together and let them figure it out.”

Goals as Living Documents, Not Annual Events
[00:23:20] – [00:24:10]

Most organizations treat goal-setting as a once-yearly activity that gets filed away until performance review time. Effective matrix organizations use goals as ongoing filters for decision-making and priority-setting. This transforms goals from static documents into dynamic tools that help teams navigate ambiguity.

“Most organizations I work with do a great job setting goals at the beginning of the year. And then it just kind of goes poof into the sky. Then, we just go along with our work for the rest of the year. When we set those goals, we’ve got to use them, make them visible, use them as a filter for our priorities, use them every time you have a one-on-one. Every time you have a town hall, like we have, you’ve got to get beyond seeing goal setting as an event that we do at the beginning of the fiscal year and see it as a process that happens throughout the year.”

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Top Quotes

[00:15:40] Susan Finerty: “We have this band of medium-sized decisions that organizations are stumbling over, and they’re stumbling over them because they just talk them through. What I’m really fond of saying is talking is not deciding. Talking just gets you swirling when you are deciding.”

[00:03:25] Susan Finerty: “A matrix organization tries to help people work across through structural form. They’ll have a person have two bosses, joining two silos together through that person’s reporting relationship. They will do it through cross-functional teams from different parts of the organization.”

[00:11:20] Susan Finerty: “In matrix organizations, we have so much ambiguity in terms of who does what. We’ve got people with the same or similar titles. We’ve got overlapping roles. Decision-making is really ambiguous because, when you’re in your groove, if the decision’s hard, it kind of floats to the top, and the leader makes it.”

[00:13:30] Susan Finerty: “You can see that ambiguity as dysfunction. That ambiguity is what fuels the agility. It’s supposed to be there. Onboarding in these organizations can be challenging if you don’t have someone right by your side that you can ask questions of.”

[00:25:49] Susan Finerty: “Every clunky spot you feel has a partnership and trust element to it. But I believe we are hesitant to fix the trust piece because that’s hard and we throw more process at it. So matrix organizations take a hit because they say that they’re overly bureaucratic.”

[00:26:13] Susan Finerty: “People are bureaucratic, and we’re bureaucratic because we don’t trust. So we add all kinds of process and SOPs and this and that, and we don’t fix the human side of it. Long story short: view every clunky spot through the lens of trust and partnership. Ask yourself the human question before you jump to non-human solutions.”

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