Senior leaders face a unique challenge: no one assigns you the most important work. You must identify, design, and execute it yourself.

This critical work emerges from the spaces between functions. The magic happens when leaders collaborate across silos to solve problems that no single department can tackle alone.

Recently, I listened to two podcasts from Renegade Marketers Unite, hosted by Drew Neisser that talked about combining the lead marketer with another function (Sales with April Dunford and Finance with Chris Burggraeve). These podcasts were compelling calls to nuanced action at the senior table.

Collaboration Creates Unique Value

True senior leader collaboration produces something impossible to achieve separately. When done right, you create solutions that transcend what any individual function could deliver.

This isn’t about coordination or communication. It’s about deep partnership that generates entirely new capabilities.

Two Essential Skills Enable Success

Multi-discipline fluency serves as your universal translator. You need enough depth in other functions to speak their language, understand their constraints, and see opportunities they might miss.

This fluency creates information flow. When marketing understands finance’s concerns about customer acquisition costs, and finance grasps marketing’s brand-building timeline, real problem-solving begins.

Negotiation powers the partnership itself. But forget the adversarial model. This isn’t about winning against each other.

Instead, you’re negotiating how to work together. You’re establishing trust, setting boundaries, and modeling collaboration for your teams. Each leader brings legitimate needs and constraints. The negotiation creates a framework where everyone wins.

The Stakes Are High

When senior leaders fail to collaborate, organizations stagnate. Functions optimize for themselves rather than the whole. Customer experience fragments. Innovation slows.

But when you master cross-functional partnership, you unlock your organization’s full potential. You solve problems others can’t see. You move faster than competitors stuck in silos.

Your Move

Look around your leadership team. What critical work exists in the spaces between functions? Where could your combined expertise create breakthrough solutions?

That work won’t assign itself to you. But it’s waiting for leaders brave enough to step into the ambiguous, collaborative space where real value gets created.

The best senior leaders don’t just run their functions well. They create new value by working together in ways that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Your organization needs you to find that work and make it happen.