Managers often feel a strong pull to spread their best people across as many projects as possible. On a planning sheet it looks efficient. The same experienced engineer or versatile designer touches three different initiatives at once, headcount looks lean and stakeholders feel that their work is getting attention. Yet the moment a person belongs to multiple teams, you are not just shifting boxes on an org chart. You are changing how that person experiences work, who they feel accountable to and how much mental load they carry every week. If those shifts are not carefully designed, the result is quietly damaging for both performance and morale.
The first misconception is that people can be treated as neat units of capacity that can be sliced and reallocated without friction. In reality, human attention does not break apart as cleanly as a time sheet. One full day a week on a single team is not equal to a few hours spread across several teams. Each new team brings its own rituals, communication style, priorities and unspoken rules. Every time someone switches context, they pay a cognitive tax. They need to remember where a discussion left off, who the key influencers are and what success looks like in that specific setting. If managers pretend this cost does not exist, they will still pay it later through slower progress and more rework.
A second misunderstanding is around accountability. Many multi team arrangements are set up with the assumption that if everyone knows their tasks, accountability will naturally follow. In reality, what matters most for a person in multiple teams is not a long task list. What matters is clarity about whose priorities truly win when everything becomes urgent at once. If three managers all ask for something by the end of the week, which team gets disappointed first, and who stands beside the employee when that decision is challenged. When this is not clear, managers push prioritisation down to the individual but call it empowerment. The employee is left alone to mediate conflicts that exist between leaders, and every choice they make feels like it will upset someone important.
Most messy multi team situations emerge gradually rather than through a single bold decision. A capable engineer is asked to help another squad for a sprint. A customer success lead joins a cross functional initiative. A manager covers a second market while hiring is delayed. Each move can be reasonable in isolation. The problem arises when these temporary arrangements slowly turn permanent without anyone rethinking the overall structure. The organisation drifts into a new reality, but the expectations, reporting lines and evaluation criteria still belong to the old one.
The symptoms of this drift are often misread. Delivery velocity starts to fall, but it is easy to blame motivation or skill rather than fragmentation. In truth, people are spending more time aligning with different teams, attending overlapping meetings and mentally tracking several roadmaps at once. Tensions between teams increase, and each team feels as if their work is always treated as a lower priority. Good people begin to feel they are constantly in no win situations, and some quietly look for more stable roles elsewhere. Leaders then conclude that they have a retention issue or a culture problem, without realising how much of it is structural.
Before assigning people to multiple teams, managers should first define a clear home base for each person. A home base is not just the team name listed in the HR system. It is the team whose goals the person is primarily evaluated against, whose rituals they attend by default and whose leader ultimately protects their time. The person may support other teams, but they should know where they truly belong, where they grow and where difficult trade offs will be discussed. Without this anchor, employees end up feeling like permanent guests everywhere and full members nowhere.
Once home base is clear, managers need to be precise about capacity. Casual phrases like “half on this project and half on that one” are dangerous if they never translate into concrete hours, outputs and meeting commitments. For most knowledge workers, it is wise to treat more than two major responsibility areas as a warning sign rather than a normal condition. That does not mean multi team work is impossible. It means the steady state should remain simple enough that the person can describe their week in one or two sentences without hesitation. When someone stumbles trying to explain what they do and who they do it for, it is usually a sign of hidden overload.
Capacity is not only a question of total hours. It is also a question of meeting load and decision load. A person might technically have spare hours on paper yet still feel fully saturated because they sit in many status calls, standups and coordination sessions across different teams. Every meeting requires context, interpretation and follow up. Before assigning someone to an additional team, managers should sit with that person’s calendar and ask what will be removed to make the new arrangement sustainable. If nothing can be removed, then the new assignment is not a clever stretch. It is a quiet step toward burnout.
Another critical design choice is ownership of sequencing. People who work across several teams easily become bottlenecks, not because they are slow, but because each team assumes their work will be done first. Requests are often framed as small and reasonable. One team needs a quick review, another needs a short consult, a third wants help just for one sprint. Standing alone, each request appears modest. Together, they create a week where everything is urgent for everyone. To avoid this, managers should help multi team employees maintain a visible queue of work that covers all the teams they support. It might be a shared board or a simple timeline, but the important rule is that any new request must be accompanied by a discussion about what moves later. This shifts the language from “just squeeze it in” to “if we take this on now, we delay something else”, and it keeps managers responsible for priority calls instead of pushing them onto the individual.
Clear escalation paths also matter. In healthy arrangements, there is always one manager with legitimate authority to resolve conflicts. That person can say, “This week, our work comes second because their launch is critical.” Without this, the employee becomes a human shield standing between competing promises. They are the one explaining delays to frustrated stakeholders while leaders attempt to keep everyone happy at a surface level. Over time, this erodes trust in leadership far more than a few honest, early trade offs would have.
Beyond structure and process, there is a cultural meaning attached to multi team assignments. Some employees interpret it as a sign of trust and recognition. They are seen as experts whose skills matter across the organisation. Others quietly interpret it as proof that they are a spare part, useful but not valued enough to be given a stable home. Managers should not leave this interpretation to chance. When assigning someone to multiple teams, it helps to say out loud why this is happening, what it means for their growth and how long it is expected to last. If the move is truly temporary, say so and set a review date. If the person is being positioned as a bridge role, explain what success will look like in that position.
It is also important to distinguish between roles that are naturally shared and roles that have been stretched out of convenience. Functions like security, data, legal or finance often need to support many teams by design. These roles work best when they are treated as central services with clear intake processes and service level expectations, rather than as individuals loosely attached to every project. Other multi team arrangements can be framed as temporary solutions tied to hiring, restructuring or specific initiatives. Without that framing, multi team work quickly becomes the silent default, even when circumstances have changed.
People who operate across multiple teams are uniquely positioned to spot systemic issues. They notice where processes conflict, where definitions differ and where power dynamics create friction. If managers only view them as extra hands to spread around, they miss valuable insight about how the organisation actually functions. Creating space to listen to these employees, act on their observations and involve them in refining structures turns their complex role into a source of learning instead of a quiet drain.
No organisation can avoid multi team setups entirely, especially in early stages or during periods of rapid change. Budgets are finite, and opportunities often move faster than headcount. The goal is not to eliminate overlap, but to keep it intentional. When managers treat multi team work as a deliberate design choice, supported by clear homes, realistic capacity planning and explicit decision paths, people can carry the extra complexity for a while without losing trust. When it is treated as a casual shortcut, the cost shows up later in missed deadlines, simmering frustration and preventable turnover.
Ultimately, assigning people to multiple teams is a test of managerial clarity and courage. It forces leaders to answer hard questions about who truly owns a person’s time, which goals matter most when everything feels urgent and how honest they are willing to be about trade offs. The person sitting in the middle of those teams will feel the outcome long before any metric changes. If they feel backed by the system, they will navigate the complexity with resilience. If they feel abandoned inside it, no amount of motivational talk will repair the damage. Managers who understand this before stretching people across the organisation will design work that is ambitious, but still humane.
WhatsApp
Instagram
Threads
