Cross-functional team

In business, a "cross functional team" is a group of people with different functional expertise working toward a common goal. It may include people from finance, marketing, operations, and human resources departments. Typically, it includes employees from all levels of an organization. Members may also come from outside an organization (in particular, from suppliers, key customers, or consultants).

Cross-functional teams often function as self-directed teams responding to broad, but not specific directives. Decision-making within a team may depend on consensus, but often is led by a manager/coach/team leader.

A non-business, yet good example of cross-functional teams are music bands, where each element plays a different instrument (or has a different role). Songs are the result of collaboration and participation, and the goals are decided by consensus. Skills to play all the instruments involved are not required since music provides a standard language that everybody in the team can understand. In short, music bands are clear examples of how these teams work. The Movie maker is the best example to show the relation between the team members from different experiences, The director actually is the team leader but if he said action and at the same time the the sound manager found some distortion or noise or any thing which he is not convinced within his job he can take the decision to stop until this problem is solved, So In every expert is the leader or the manager of the whole operation when there is a problem related to his speciality.

Cross-functional teams require information from all levels of management. The teams may have their origins in the perceived need to make primarily strategic decisions, tactical decisions, or operational decisions, but they will require all three types of information. Almost all self-directed teams will need information traditionally used in strategic, tactical, and operational decisions. For example, new product development traditionally ranks as a tactical procedure. It gets strategic direction from top management, and uses operational departments like engineering and marketing to perform its task. But a new product development team would consist of people from the operational departments and often someone from top management.