- People-first approach is a structural operating asset in cross-functional environments. Leaders who design teams around this strength execute faster and lose less between functions.
- Teams aligned around shared goals perform five times better. Relationship builders are the ones developing and sustaining that alignment.
When a project moves from product to sales to marketing, the strategic intent is likely to get lost.
By the time it reaches the execution team, the original thinking has been handed off, summarized, and paraphrased enough times that nobody’s quite sure what the original goal was anymore.
Executives tend to blame the process, but the research points to relationships.
What follows is a look at why LATAM professionals, specifically their relationship skills, tend to keep product and commercial outcomes connected in ways that process fixes alone can’t replicate – and what executives can do to actually build around that strength.
Where Do LATAM Professionals Hold an Advantage?
LATAM professionals bring deep relationship skills to the organization. Trust and rapport come before project goals; that’s why personal relationships directly shape how their teams interact and how work gets done.
Some leaders dismiss this as a soft cultural trait, but looking at it closely, a relationship-first mindset works more like a structural asset.
Latin American business cultures favor high-context communication, a style that is relational and interpretive. That style enables the deeper interpersonal connections that cross-functional work depends on.
When work crosses boundaries between teams, someone has to carry the context with it.
That directly responsible individual (DRI) has to make sure the commercial team understands why the product team made a tradeoff. And that the product team actually hears what customers told sales last week.
That work happens in conversations. LATAM professionals are comfortable driving those conversations, especially if that’s what the organization needs to succeed.
What Do the Numbers Show?
Teams that stay connected on the human level tend to stay connected on outcomes. The data is consistent with this:
- Collaborative teams united by a common goal perform five times better than other teams.
- Aligned cultures lift employee performance by up to 22%, and that alignment requires deliberate leadership.
- Emotional intelligence in stakeholder relationships correlates strongly with project success rates.
How Does This Affect Your Operating Model?
Cross-functional friction often looks interpersonal on the surface. Dig into it and you usually find departments staying in their own lane, optimizing for different metrics, and only considering incentives tied to departmental goals rather than shared ones.
Process fixes leave that misalignment in place, but relationship-driven culture surfaces it early because they talk across boundaries.
At Keenan Reid Strategies, we observe this in teams embedded with nearshore operators.
The person keeping product and commercial outcomes connected is typically the one who picks up the phone, builds the rapport, and finds the yes across functions.
Leaders working with LATAM teams treat this relationship-first mindset as a strong operating advantage worth designing around.
Three Moves Executives Can Make Now
Firms that execute well with cross-functional teams treat human connection as infrastructure. LATAM professionals are already used to relationship-driven environments. The opportunity is to lead in a way that actually lets them.
- Assign relationship ownership at every handoff. Make one person accountable for carrying context between functions, and reward it explicitly.
- Align metrics across teams. Shared goals give these professionals something concrete to rally people around.
- Recognize conversation drivers as strategic contributors. The people keeping product and commercial work connected are doing high-leverage work. Treat it that way.
What Executives Should Take Away From This
Cross-functional execution is where most strategies get lost. The handoffs, the gaps between teams, the moments where context should transfer but doesn’t.
Fixing that with better documentation or tighter processes only gets you so far. At some point, a person has to make the call, build the trust, and carry the strategic intent across different functions.
LATAM professionals tend to be good at that work because of how they’ve learned to build relationships before anything else. That’s worth paying attention to.
And for executives leading complex, multi-functional teams, it’s worth building around.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why do cross-functional teams fail even when the strategy is clear?
A: Research links most execution failures to people and organizational dynamics. When relationships are weak across functions, context gets lost at every handoff, and teams end up optimizing for different things.
Q: Are relationship skills actually a performance driver, or just a soft skill?
A: The data is fairly consistent. Teams aligned around a common goal perform five times better than those that aren’t. Emotional intelligence in stakeholder relationships correlates strongly with project success. Relationships plays a big part in execution.
Q: How should executives structure teams to get the most from LATAM professionals?
A: Three things move the needle: assign one person ownership of context at every handoff, align metrics across functions so shared goals replace departmental ones, and recognize the people driving conversations across teams as strategic contributors.
