Managing across becomes exponentially more challenging when you're leading a group of colleagues who don't report to you. You might be their project leader, but you're certainly not their boss—and that creates a unique tension. How do you get marketing, sales, service, and product representatives to prioritize your team's work when they're simultaneously juggling their own departmental fires and answering to their actual managers?

The answer lies in the HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across and what Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith call the discipline of high performing teams. This is a powerful framework that transforms loose collections of individuals into genuine teams with shared ownership and mutual accountability.

Most teams begin their journey responding to an initial corporate mandate. While these mandates provide direction, they rarely inspire genuine commitment. For your team to truly succeed, especially when you lack formal authority over its members, the team must own this purpose by developing its own unique spin on the corporate priority.

Your role in shaping meaningful common purpose involves facilitating a transformation to genuine ownership. This requires helping teams move away from negative behaviors like finger-pointing and discover how the corporate priority connects to what each member personally cares about. Let's see how this might play out in a real conversation:

• Jessica: Look, I don't have time for another retention initiative. My marketing targets are about new customer acquisition—that's what my boss measures me on.
• Ryan: But Jessica, what's your cost per acquisition right now?
• Jessica: About $127, why?
• Ryan: And what's the lifetime value of those customers you're bringing in?
• Jessica: I don't know, maybe $400 on average?
• Ryan: For customers who stay three years or more, it's $1,200. If we improve retention, your acquisition efforts become three times more valuable.
• Jessica: I never thought about it that way. So better retention actually makes my marketing metrics look better?
• Ryan: Exactly. And here's another thing—retained customers refer 2.5 times more new customers than those who leave. That's essentially free acquisition for you.
• Jessica: Okay, now I'm interested. This isn't just about helping service or sales—this directly impacts my goals.

Notice how Ryan doesn't try to force Jessica to care about retention as an abstract corporate mandate. Instead, he helps her discover how retention connects to what she already cares about—her marketing metrics and acquisition costs. This is the essence of developing common purpose that the team truly owns.

Once your team has developed its meaningful common purpose, the next critical element of team discipline involves translating that purpose into specific, measurable performance goals. These goals must be compelling enough to inspire and challenge your team while creating the urgency needed for action. Most importantly, these goals must require collective effort—they cannot be achievable by any single department working alone.

These specific performance goals also create a leveling effect—they help team members focus on collective effort rather than dwelling on differences in titles, status, or departmental power. For example, when everyone's success depends on achieving "50% more first-time visitors" the marketing director and the junior product analyst become equally invested partners. The goals become the great equalizer, making everyone's contribution essential regardless of their position in the organizational hierarchy.

The final element of team discipline—and perhaps the most challenging when you lack formal authority—involves building genuine mutual accountability among team members. You cannot force this accountability; it must emerge from the team's process of creating shared purpose and goals. Nevertheless, you can facilitate its development by helping the team establish three critical agreements:

1. How work gets distributed: Your team must agree on who will do what jobs, how you'll establish and honor schedules, and how decisions will be made and modified. Everyone, regardless of rank or function, contributes in concrete ways to the team's collective work.

2. What rules of conduct everyone will follow: Rules of conduct, developed at the outset, prevent the dysfunction that can derail teams lacking hierarchical structure. When team members establish these rules together, they're far more likely to follow them than if you tried to impose them unilaterally.

3. How expertise will be shared voluntarily across functional boundaries: The voluntary sharing of expertise represents the highest form of mutual accountability. As your team makes progress toward its goals, members begin volunteering their unique capabilities for the collective good. This isn't about job descriptions or formal assignments—it's about team members recognizing what the team needs and stepping up because they feel accountable to each other.

Now you'll have the opportunity to practice these essential elements of team discipline in realistic scenarios. These interactive exercises will help you master the delicate art of creating genuine teams from groups of individuals who don't report to you.