What We Don’t Talk About: Unspoken Obstacles to Cross-Functional Content Efforts, and How to Overcome Them
It’s now accepted wisdom that companies benefit from providing “unified content experiences” that allow users to easily access and navigate between different types of content. Creating such unified experiences requires us to work effectively across traditional functional boundaries. Understanding the roots of why cross-functional collaboration is difficult can empower us to be more successful at crossing the chasm between silos. Drawing on recent research about diversity, inclusion, and unconscious bias, as well as the presenter’s experience advocating for and leading cross-functional and enterprise content initiatives, this session will examine–and provide strategies for countering–some of the ways in which our behavior and even our language can unintentionally handicap our efforts to partner effectively.
What can the audience expect to learn?
This session aims to:
1. Help participants understand the roots of why cross-functional collaboration is hard
2. Raise participants’ self-awareness of their own behaviors, language, and mindsets that might be helping or hindering such collaboration
3. Provide some antidotes to some common root challenges
Meet the presenter
Toni Mantych is Senior Director of Product Content at ServiceNow, where she leads a large, globally distributed technical content group and drives product and cross-functional content experience initiatives. Before joining ServiceNow, she was Director of Content Strategy and Architecture at ADP and taught numerous graduate courses in the Technical and Professional Writing program at Portland State University. She frequently speaks and leads workshops on content strategy and content experience topics. In September 2017, she was recognized as a Top 200 Content Experience Strategist.