Organizations are asked to do a lot of cross-functional work, and for good reason. At associations, the meetings department inevitably touches on what the marketing department is doing, and both have a lot to do with goals established by the membership and education departments.

So it’s sensible that all of these groups connect. But it’s also not entirely surprising if sometimes the connections fray and chaos reigns. Everybody has a different—and likely inflated—idea about the importance of their own work, and meaningful communication may not be happening. Congratulations, you’ve “broken down silos.” But what have you built in their place?

Writing at the MIT Sloan Management Review, author and organizational consultant Melissa Swift acknowledges that, too often, chaos reigns in cross-functional arrangements. Some of her advice is straightforward emotional-safety stuff—disorder isn’t an excuse for people to be jerks to each other, ever—but she also pinpoints a couple of specific areas where chaos festers if left unattended.

For one, it’s valuable for a leader to know where and how different teams are connecting. That’s where groups are being “cross-functional,” but if certain details are being neglected and the right people aren’t interacting, it’s not surprising that problems emerge. 

Successful leaders, Swift writes, “got to know who their teams were teaming with, and they stayed in contact with those teams’ leaders… Once leaders engage in regular, everyday dialogue about the work their teams are doing together, chaos levels begin to modulate [and teams] minimize collisions between people doing the same or conflicting work.”

At relatively small associations, it shouldn’t be hard for an executive to identify who the key point people are. But even small associations can have a hidden org chart, and grasping how and when different teams are really interacting can go some way toward stemming the chaos.

Another valuable piece of advice Swift offers: Get rid of the time-killing, emotionally draining standing meeting. It’s not just that those allegedly valuable cross-functional meetups are time sucks. The problem is also that they’re a kind of performative cross-functionality, where participants are so busy discussing what they’re doing that they don’t leave space to talk about immediate challenges.

In Swift’s experience, putting more air into everybody’s schedule made a substantial difference, allowing space for people to voice concerns and address pressing matters without creating calendaring chaos. 

Swift doesn’t suggest that doing these things will eradicate dysfunction in organizations. And a little tension can be meaningful, she notes. It’s in those messy moments where organizations discover who’s capable of stepping up to lead, who has skills that everyone was previously unaware of, and who’s willing to learn.

“Challenge equals growth,” she writes. “Many executives I’ve worked with have cited chaotic times as the crucible for the growth of some of their strongest skills. The chaos didn’t feel good at the time, but they were learning at exponential speed.”

But if chaos is inevitable, a leader is better off being the person who led through the storm than the person who created it.