The short answer
You can't manage your way across teams you don't own. You lead them by making their work easier, showing you understand their constraints, and building enough trust that they want to help you. That's a skill, not a title — and it's learnable.
You need people to move, but you can't tell them to. Research on cross-functional engineering teams shows that coordination across boundaries breaks down when people rely on formal authority instead of shared goals and mutual understanding. When you treat peers on other teams like your own direct reports, they feel managed — and they push back or go quiet. The gap isn't a people problem. It's a method problem.
Marcus Aurelius points to something useful here. He noticed that skilled craftsmen stick close to the logic of their trade — they don't drift from what actually works. Your trade right now is influence, not command. That means learning what the other team cares about, what slows them down, and how your ask fits their world. When you speak their language and respect their constraints, you stop being an outsider making demands and start being someone worth helping.
This week, pick one team you need to work with. Before your next ask, spend fifteen minutes learning one real pressure they're under right now — a deadline, a dependency, a gap in resources. Then frame your request around how it fits with their goal, not just yours. That one shift — from 'here's what I need' to 'here's how this helps both of us' — is where cross-team leadership actually starts.