Collaborating well with other teams is essential to capitalize fully on the strengths of the company. But there is nothing natural about collaborating; it is much simpler for people to concentrate on their own objectives! So how to encourage collaboration across the organization?
Bring people together
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Foster trust: create opportunities for your team to meet with other units and encourage informal discussion.
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Give meaning to collaborative efforts: emphasize common interests and objectives.
Encourage communication
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Organize mutual consultation, e.g. Before coming to a decision, ask your team members to identify and speak with people from other units who will be affected.
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Create opportunities to share experiences.
Underline complementary interests
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Underline the respective contributions that the various units can make to help one another.
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Help your team understand the roles played by their colleagues, e.g. Invite colleagues from other units to make presentations to your team.
Take action
Organize a friendly break with another department (1h)
Trust becomes easier among people who know each other.
Invite another departmental team to share a moment with your team and yourself. Organize something informal to facilitate exchanges: around fresh pastries one morning or for a buffet lunch, for example.
Use such a moment to ask all to introduce themselves in a few seconds to enable a better understanding of everyone’s roles and responsibilities. This will facilitate contacts in the future.
Offer to help another department (10 min)
It sometimes takes very little to bring together operating units that don’t know each other.
Identify how you could be useful to another department, without major impact to your own schedule. E.g.: share an information or a good practice, facilitate a referral, etc. Do not initially worry whether you will be paid in return.
Take action, and use the opportunity to set an example for your team members: underline the limited effort it required (besides thinking of it), and highlight the benefits, such as the usefulness for the organization or the stronger ties established.
Organize a cross-functional exchange (3h)
It is easier to cooperate when you understand the challenges and the constraints faced by the other person.
Suggest to one of your team members to spend a day in another team, and have one member from that team come and spend the day with your team. Be very specific about your expectations: the objective is to develop a good understanding from the inside, not to go there with a critical eye.
Conduct a short return of experience. Each of the “interns” can, for example, write a page on what surprised him/her, which will be distributed to both teams. You can also bring both teams together to share the learning experience from this exchange and consider how to work better together.
Practical Tips
> Set the stage for productive cross-unit collaboration
> How to unleash a team of teams?
Find out more
> Remove the obstacles to cooperation
> Break down organizational silos
© Managéris