How to actually build a bridger

On Tuesday, we made the case that organizations need bridgers—leaders with the emotional and contextual intelligence to drive collaboration across organizational boundaries. Hill, Tedards, and Wild identified the problem clearly in their Harvard Business Review piece: structural fixes like cross-functional teams and project owners don’t create the trust that makes people take risks together voluntarily. We agreed with their diagnosis. Where we pushed back was on the development side. Identifying what bridgers do is the easy part. Building them is where most organizations fall short.

The wrong problem

Most organizations treat cross-functional leadership as an accountability problem. Amazon’s single-threaded leader model is the clearest example: assign one person clear ownership and remove competing priorities. It’s clean. It’s logical. And it solves the wrong problem.

Accountability without capability is just a title. The real barrier isn’t that nobody owns the cross-functional work. It’s that the people we put in bridging roles haven’t developed the practiced ability to lead without authority when things get difficult. Translating across hostile boundaries, maintaining trust when budgets get cut, listening deeply when every instinct says to push your agenda — this is among the most complex interpersonal work in organizational life. And we’re developing it through role rotations and good intentions, which is a bit like preparing someone for combat with a classroom lecture.

We’ve tracked this pattern across dozens of organizations and it almost always comes back to the same root cause: a cultural problem with structural reinforcement. Companies say they value collaboration while promoting leaders who hoard resources and deliver quarterly results. That theory-in-use gap makes bridging behavior irrational. Why would anyone spend 18 months building cross-boundary trust when the person who ships fast by working around people gets the promotion?

Until systems reward bridging, development alone won’t stick.

Why exposure isn’t development

Cross-functional rotations, executive sponsorship, zigzag career paths. The standard playbook follows what we call the “experience and hope” model. Give potential bridgers exposure and hope they figure it out. McKinsey has documented that 70% of organizational change initiatives fail to achieve intended objectives. Only 11% of executives believe leadership development programs produce sustained results, according to the Corporate Leadership Council. The experience-and-hope model is a big reason why.

Neuroscience tells us what’s happening underneath. Under stress, the prefrontal cortex (responsible for exactly the kind of flexible, empathetic thinking bridgers need) degrades. Arnsten’s research in Nature Reviews Neuroscience showed that stress can cause a return to habitual, rigid patterns. A leader who understands bridging intellectually will default to command-and-control the moment a cross-functional partner misses a deadline, and the CFO starts asking questions.

That knowing-doing gap is where bridger development programs go to die.

Lincoln didn’t develop the capacity to hold a fracturing nation together by reading about leadership. He spent 25 years riding the judicial circuit — eight months each year building relationships across diverse constituencies with real stakes and real consequences. His emotional regulation under pressure was forged through decades of practice, not a rotation through three departments.

We need to build bridgers the same way. Compressed timeline, but the same underlying logic: deliberate practice under progressively increasing pressure.

A realistic development path

We break bridger development into two stages. Not because organizational change is simple, but because overcomplicating the timeline is one of the fastest ways to kill a program before it starts.

Stage one is foundation and practice. Start with a theory-in-use audit — map the gap between “we value collaboration” and what actually gets rewarded in promotions, performance reviews, and resource allocation. If bridging behavior isn’t reflected in those systems, fix that first. Development without system alignment is pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.

Simultaneously, introduce two bridger-specific micro-habits designed to be so small they can’t fail. The first: one genuine inquiry per week. Before proposing a solution in any cross-functional interaction, ask one real question about the partner’s constraints. Not a performative question. A genuine attempt to understand what keeps them up at night. Al Mazrouei spent months doing exactly this before launching DIFC’s Fintech Hive, and it’s why financial competitors ended up openly sharing strategy at the same table.

The second: a three-second pause in cross-functional tension. When a partner pushes back, count to three before responding. Lally’s research at University College London found that even simple habits require an average of 66 days to become automatic. Complex interpersonal behaviors take six months or more. Start early and measure weekly. Target 80% execution before layering in anything else.

As those habits take hold, layer in progressive stress exposure. Practice bridging behaviors in low-stakes simulations first, then in real cross-functional conflicts with coaching support. Pair candidates across functions, not within them. A supply chain leader paired with a product manager learns more about perspective-taking than any training module can teach.

Stage two is autonomous execution. Reduce coaching support and focus on whether bridging behaviors hold under the conditions where they matter most — compressed timelines, competing priorities, partner resistance. By month 18, Cohort 1 members should be mentoring Cohort 2 candidates. Teaching is the final test of whether someone has actually internalized bridging or is still performing it.

What to measure and what to watch

Track leading indicators, not satisfaction surveys. Cross-boundary connection quality: Are candidates having genuine conversations with partners weekly, or have things gone transactional? Disagreement frequency in cross-functional meetings: healthy bridging produces more productive conflict, not polite silence. And the one question that cuts through everything — ask cross-functional partners quarterly: “Would you voluntarily collaborate with this person again?”

The failure modes are predictable. Selection bias is the most insidious. Organizations tend to choose bridger candidates who are already well-networked and high-visibility, which skews toward demographics already overrepresented in leadership. Bridge-building capability exists across the entire organization. The question is who gets the opportunity to develop it formally. If your bridger cohort doesn’t reflect your full talent base, you’re reinforcing the barriers you’re trying to dismantle.

System misalignment is the most common. Developing bridger skills while the reward system quietly punishes bridger behavior will kill the program every time. And premature complexity, adding too many behaviors too fast, is the most tempting. Two micro-habits mastered under pressure outperform ten practiced casually.

Where to start

Pull your last two rounds of promotions. Ask honestly: did any of those leaders advance specifically because they built cross-functional trust? If the answer is no, that’s the first problem to solve. No development program will compensate for a system that rewards the opposite of what you’re trying to build.

The simple fact is that organizations don’t lack people with bridging potential. They lack the development infrastructure and system alignment to turn that potential into a practiced, pressure-tested capability. Building that takes 18 to 24 months of deliberate work, not a role rotation and good intentions. And it starts with an honest look at whether your systems support bridging — or quietly punish it.

This work synthesizes research from cognitive neuroscience (Arnsten’s work on stress-induced prefrontal cortex degradation), behavioral psychology (Lally et al.’s empirical studies on habit formation timelines), implementation science (Pfeffer and Sutton’s knowing-doing gap research; Argyris and Schön’s theory-in-use framework), organizational change management (McKinsey; Corporate Leadership Council), and field research on cross-functional leadership (Hill, Tedards, and Wild’s bridger concept from Genius at Scale, Harvard Business Review Press, 2026).

Contact us for a full list of works cited.