Whether navigating changing market conditions, applying new technology and innovation, or changing customer preferences, companies must continually be on the lookout for ways to solve new problems or generate solutions to meet evolving business needs. To quickly move at the demands of the business, employers rely on their staff to collaborate across organizational silos—between teams, divisions, and units—to solve customer challenges or develop new solutions.

Many employees operate in roles that require a significant amount of cross-functional collaboration. They work across teams and units to achieve shared and individual goals. While leaders cannot physically be in every room to make every decision, employees across all functions and roles have a chance to work with others to come up with solutions they could not have while in a silo.

The approach enables diverse voices, or anyone in the organization with a good idea, to step up and lead. Great ideas, initiatives, and solutions can come from anywhere if people are willing to work together to achieve shared goals.

A ripe opportunity

Because they collaborate with other teams and functions as they work toward business outcomes, talent development practitioners sit at the center of many projects and initiatives. Therefore, TD staff have a unique opportunity to lead from anywhere.

Here is an invitation to practice leadership, even if you aren't formally a leader. By embracing the nature of your role and being at the epicenter of initiatives that affect many teams and functions, with the right mindset and actions, you can practice leadership from wherever you are.

Practice situational awareness

Situational awareness is the ability to understand, in context, what role you have and how you play a part among your colleagues. Different projects require embracing a different role, and knowing how you can contribute best is critical for driving impact. The practice ensures that you're not just doing your job but also proactively spotting opportunities to make a significant impact using your strengths.

To determine where you can leave the biggest imprint, start by writing down all the projects you're working on, specifically detailing your key role in them. Next, list the strengths you contribute. From there, brainstorm ideas for how to leverage those strengths in future projects, tasks, and activities.

For example, when Alex, an L&D manager, conducted an audit of his projects and roles, he realized that a common theme throughout each project was his use of his facilitation skills. Not only did his teams value his ability to facilitate in the classroom, but his participation was critical when teammates were stuck or unsure of how to proceed. Alex would step in to help facilitate a path forward. With the understanding that his value involves facilitation, Alex began leaning into that strength, which helped move several stalled, critical projects over the finish line.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find ideas. Supplement your self-reflection by turning to stakeholders and peers for feedback. Ask them for specific examples of when and where they have seen you use your strengths.

The practice of strengths spotting applies to yourself as well as your stakeholders. Just like you can ask for feedback on your strengths, you can offer feedback to others. In each project, highlighting peers' strengths as you witness them and stating how their contributions make an impact can be incredibly valuable to your teammates and to the project's success. It also demonstrates collaboration and teamwork.

Leading means working through and with others to achieve a shared outcome. When you provide people with feedback that helps them increase their ability to contribute, it can also help them know to use those strengths more often in their work. That in turn boosts their performance and contributions toward that shared goal.

Develop your organizational IQ

In many businesses, it's hard to successfully carry out projects and initiatives by yourself. You need the support, systems, and resources that other people can provide.

While it can be easy to jump in and rely on your instincts or start working to get things done quickly, it's better to step back and understand the broader system of your company to work more effectively within it.

That's where organizational IQ comes into the picture. It refers to your knowledge and insights of the norms, systems, and relationships inside your company that govern how staff collaborate and complete their work. Developing your organizational IQ means focusing time on understanding the standards, behaviors, and processes around you and then using that information to guide how you collaborate, engage, and work with colleagues on projects.

One way to think about organizational IQ is as the process of learning how to drive. When someone first learns to drive, they don't simply get into a car and get on the road. They must learn the system of driving: how to read dashboard indicators, operate a vehicle, and understand road signs. The same is true for being successful in your company.

Spend time with leaders and influential people in your organization and ask questions about critical topics such as norms, how people work together, important unspoken and implicit values, as well as key priorities and goals. A great place to start is with your most common stakeholders and teammates. Sitting with them to understand their goals, responsibilities, and success metrics can be a helpful activity for comprehending parts of the system. Making sense of those dynamics up front enables you to develop a blueprint for how to operate within the system regardless of the project on which you're working.

Consider Erica, who is a TD director for a global communications firm. She took on a set of existing learning programs that support business functions with which she hadn't previously worked. Before making changes, she met with stakeholders to understand their goals, metrics, and priorities as well as to gain insights into their preferences for how to work with her team. During each kickoff, Erica assembled the project team to develop standards for how to collaborate and give everyone a chance to transparently share their priorities and goals. Doing so improved the relationship between her team and stakeholders while removing communication and information barriers.

Intentionally invest in relationships

TD professionals often must work extensively across the company, whether with colleagues in HR, different functions or business units, or external vendors. Leading from anywhere, especially without formal authority, requires an investment in intentionally building trusting relationships.

When building trust, focus on two specific types: cognitive trust, which is based in ability, confidence, skills, and reliability, usually gained through demonstrated excellence; and affective trust, or the trust that arises out of connection and emotional closeness. Although both types are important, they don't happen without deliberate efforts. Finding intentional opportunities to earn your peers' trust before collaborating with them helps you build those relationships for when you work together.

Methods to intentionally build trust include:

• Setting up regular meetings with co-workers. Choose individuals with whom you want to strengthen your relationship, and create a regular meeting cadence with each of them. As you contribute to small wins, ensure that your stakeholders have visibility into that, which could be through a write-up or email summarizing your impact.

• Doing five-minute favors. As Adam Grant explains in his book Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, a five-minute favor is going out of your way to help a colleague in a small way that means a big difference—with no intention of receiving anything in return.

• Asking for advice. Reach out to a stakeholder or peer for their advice or guidance on their topic of expertise. Doing so helps promote collaboration and lets them know you value and respect their skills and knowledge.

• Proactively sharing feedback. Provide unprompted feedback to a stakeholder to help them work more effectively.

Jamie is a learning experience designer who understands the importance of intentionally investing in relationships. Every quarter, she meets with key stakeholders, including the business unit leader with whom she primarily works, to discuss priorities and feedback. Before each meeting, Jamie prepares insights from interviews she conducted with that business unit's employees about their work. The stakeholders appreciate that she is looking out for them, helping them get better, and working more collaboratively. Such initiative has helped Jamie earn their trust and increased her opportunities to tackle more strategic projects with the unit.

Create opportunities for others

Leadership means aligning people around a goal to achieve collective success. Chances are that there are many employees in your company who have skills that can help you achieve your goals. Find ways to encourage and inspire co-workers to tap into their talents to contribute to your goals and mission.

According to Drive author Daniel Pink, most people are motivated by three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. You'll begin to understand people's motivations through conversations with them, especially when you ask open-ended questions about why they do what they do, what motivates them, and their measures of success. Knowing their strengths and motivations enables you to create opportunities for people to make an impact.

The key is ensuring you are inviting people to participate versus telling or commanding. Strengths spotting is a valuable way to start creating opportunities. For instance, let's say you're leading a project, and in scoping out the work, you see a need for a particular skill set. You can therefore identify someone who has that strength and then invite them to take part in your project so that they can use that strength to make an impact and help you achieve your goal. Two additional methods for creating opportunities for others are:

• Connection point. Use your social capital and network to connect two people who will benefit from knowing and meeting each other.

• Co-creation. When starting a project, invite another stakeholder to participate by incorporating their ideas and feedback from the beginning, and then check in with them along the way to demonstrate that you value their ideas and opinions.

Jason, an L&D manager, wanted to improve the engagement and participation for several leadership programs. Knowing that he would need support and effort from co-workers, he created an executive sponsor role for three of his marquee programs and contacted respected leaders in the firm to ask them whether they would like to participate. As executive sponsors, the leaders contributed by sharing feedback, speaking at events, and encouraging participation in the program—ultimately serving as a win for both Jason and the executives.

Participation was a win for the executive sponsors because it enabled them to contribute positively and gave them visibility as leaders who are invested in developing others.

Be a continuous learner and teacher

This last principle revolves around the concept of learn and teach. Learning is about modeling behaviors around curiosity, being open to asking others for help, and proactively building knowledge and skills to stay at the cutting edge of your job. Teaching entails modeling behaviors, sharing your knowledge and skills, mentoring colleagues to help them build their own skills, and creating team environments where peers openly share their learning and information to help the team achieve collective outcomes.

Inspiring others to embrace learning and teaching unlocks creativity, problem solving, and innovation. A way to model being a continuous learner and teacher is by embracing ride-alongs, which are opportunities to observe and follow a key stakeholder group to learn how they work and how they do their job. The experience will give you a greater understanding of how to build better solutions.

Being a continuous learner and teacher can also come from doing, such as through presenting a back-pocket idea, which is a suggestion you have for a project or initiative that is outside your core responsibilities that would deliver significant impact. Developing new ideas for initiatives and then finding the time and space to carry them out is a great way to learn through doing and embrace a mindset of continuous learning.

Also consider organizing stakeholder briefings by bringing together stakeholders and sharing new insights, ideas, or learnings that would benefit their work. Leading a lunch & learn is another method to teach by doing.

Take Tonya, for example. She works at a healthcare organization and practices learn and teach as the lead of new-hire onboarding. With her cross-functional team, Tonya has a Slack channel dedicated explicitly to learnings that people contribute to as they go through the onboarding experiences each month. At the end of each quarter, Tonya compiles all the learnings and shares them with key stakeholders and business units who onboard new employees. She also invites other cross-functional team members to visit new-hire onboarding and to provide their perspectives and feedback from observing the experience. By modeling learn and teach, Tonya has found countless opportunities to improve the program, increasing its overall effectiveness and impact. She now has a bench of supporters she can call on to support new-hire onboarding.

The opportunity to lead from where you are

Employees who collaborate across roles and boundaries are positioned to succeed during changing times. That requires you to know how to collaborate with others, work across silos, and use your talents and skills to work toward shared and collective goals. Because of that, leadership (as a verb) has never been more critical to achieving shared goals.

As a TD professional, you are distinctly qualified to step into leadership and practice the principles to achieve personal success and elevate your team's performance.