Every leader runs on the same instrument. You direct the people who report to you, and it works right up until the work crosses into someone else’s territory. A vice president commands their own organization and holds no standing whatsoever over a peer’s, so the moment a transformation requires product and compliance to move together, the tool stops reaching.
Change programs respond by cascading buy-in downward through structures that were never built to travel sideways. “If you’ve ever watched a relay race go wrong, you know the issue isn’t usually speed,” says John J. McNamara. “It’s the handoff.”
McNamara, Chief Growth Officer at Avtal, has led large-scale transformation across government agencies and high-growth companies, and one finding has held every time. Alignment is a requirement for change, not a byproduct of it. The difficulty sharpens during a reorganization (reorg), since the reporting structure is being rebuilt. Leaders reach for their authority at the very moment nobody is certain who holds it.
The Narrative Coordinates People You Cannot Command
McNamara puts the story ahead of the strategy. “People don’t follow PowerPoints,” he says. “They follow narratives.” Before any reorg or technology shift launches, every team needs to understand the reasoning behind it. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), he learned to align departments by anchoring them to a shared mission first rather than to a structure, and the setting is worth noting.
Government agencies are where command relationships reach least far, so anyone who succeeds at coordination there has been forced to find ways to move people forward without relying on reporting lines. A shared purpose crosses boundaries that instructions cannot, and it survives a restructuring intact while every other coordinating mechanism is temporarily in pieces. The story becomes the rallying point for everything after it.
Charters Are Treaties, Goals Are Instructions
Calling for collaboration is easy, and McNamara identifies the difficult part as making it actionable. That requires clarity about who owns what, where the overlaps sit, and how teams are expected to work together. Goals travel downward, with each function receiving its own set, leaving the territory between functions belonging to nobody by default. That unclaimed ground is exactly where the baton drops, and no amount of goal-setting inside a function ever reaches it.
When McNamara joined Avtal, one of the first moves was building functional charters, which removed ambiguity and quickly built trust. A charter is negotiated between parties who cannot compel each other, and the act of negotiating it forces the conversation nobody makes time for once a transition is already underway.
Feedback That Travels Sideways
Most change management structures prioritize executive buy-in. Sustainable change arrives when the horizontal voices carry weight. He builds forums for peer-to-peer feedback across product, operations, sales, and compliance, and locates the decisive point plainly. That is where alignment lives or dies.
Upward reporting carries a blind spot built into its geometry, since it tells a leader how each function is performing against its own targets while revealing nothing about the space between them. Every function can report green in the same week the handoffs are failing, and the first honest signal arrives quarters later when the results do not appear. Peer forums surface friction at the level where it actually happens, among the people who feel it first.
Change is hard, and alignment is harder, in McNamara’s account, and building it deliberately lets an organization accelerate through a transition rather than merely survive one. What connects his three mechanisms is that none of them runs on authority, since the places where change fails are the places authority was never able to go. As he puts it, keep the baton moving, and make sure everyone knows who they are handing it to.
To learn more about building cross-functional alignment, connect with John J. McNamara on LinkedIn.
