Do teams in your organization plan and manage their work separately? Unifying efforts is easier than you think. It’s possible to initiate better cross-functional communication with just a few simple steps.

“What we have here is failure to communicate.”

Every large or mid-sized company has found themselves in this situation. They have a corporate strategy that they feel comfortable with, they may have developed a nice niche in the market, and they are building products and services that drive revenue. Things are progressing well. Then they have that realization that they could be accomplishing so much more if they were more focused and aligned in their efforts.

By more focused and aligned, I mean, everyone in the company is working on the right things. They aren’t slowing each other down or duplicating efforts. They aren’t solving problems that have already been solved by someone else. They aren’t making bad assumptions that simple conversations could address. They aren’t wasting time in lengthy, unproductive meetings. Everyone has the information and tools they require to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. 

If your organization has teams that work in silos, or teams that operate separately from other teams in the organization, then your company’s overall performance is being negatively impacted by those silos. 

But, before we offer practical tips on addressing the issue in the workplace, we can start by assuming positive intent. Siloed teams are not necessarily a bad thing. They were established in the first place to take advantage of the benefits of specialization. It allows us to manage our organizations more effectively by modularizing complex problems. Through specialization, we are able to build greater expertise in each area, thus producing superior products and services faster.  

However, by separating into cross-functional teams, we are also insulating our employees from valuable knowledge and resources that could be, or should be, regularly available.

Gillian Tett examined the phenomenon in her book in detail in “The Silo Effect”. She points out that humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that can seem stupid. By doing so, they fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious. 

These silos have contributed to some disastrous events in history, including the 2008 Financial Crisis, Boeing’s Max 737 manufacturing failures, and, of course, the current US political stalemate in Congress.

While most experts will agree that improved cross-functional collaboration is the key to breaking down the silos, in order for teams to collaborate effectively, they have to be able to converse in the first place. Since each team uses a totally different set of beliefs, assumptions, acronyms, and terminologies in their day-to-day discussions, cross-functional communication can be a challenge.

Some companies have developed unique methods for encouraging better cross-functional collaboration, from requiring that all employees go through the same basic training sessions to build common knowledge, to team-building sessions, or cross-functional hackathons.

These are all great ideas, but most companies can’t afford to stop what they’re doing and generate extensive training sessions or hold large-scale team-building events. 

Sports all-star teams are faced with this dilemma all the time. Every player on the team was selected because they are very talented – the best in their game. They each have different habits, assumptions, plays, fundamentals, terminology and behaviors that they use subconsciously based on how they operate with their own team. They are then brought together for a short amount of time and are expected to win. 

Herb Brooks, the famed United States Olympics Hockey coach, described it well. “All-star teams fail because they rely solely on the individual’s talent.” They’re more likely to win when they “take that talent and use it inside a system that’s designed for the betterment of the team.”

Brooks recognized that if he could help his players begin to identify with the all-star team, in addition to their own team, then their chances of collective success increased dramatically. The key, as a leader, is to give people the tools and knowledge they need to start identifying with the larger organization.

A good first step is creating a common set of priorities. This is a list of high-level priorities that span the entire organization. By including justification for those priorities – business benefit, number of resources, risks – along with key features and terms, we can provide a mapping of terminologies and acronyms. This information provides people in siloed groups a foundation for productive conversation.

The second step is to encourage everyone to start cross-functional conversations with the right mindset. So many opportunities are passed up because people are afraid to ask basic questions. They assume that others already know the answer and they’ll look stupid if they ask, so they don’t. The odds are pretty good that other people in the same meeting are wondering the same thing they are. When kicking off cross-functional discussions, we should agree that asking basic questions is acceptable, to clarify meaning, ask for context, or understand background. 

These common priorities should be updated collaboratively by middle management at the beginning of every planning session. All work should relate back to the common priorities, and the information should be easily accessible and understandable by everyone. This allows every member of the team to make more informed decisions during their planning exercises.

When you create an environment that allows people to specialize, but also facilitates effective cross-functional communication, that is when you’ll see increased growth and innovation, not only in what you work on, but in how you operate together. 

Put it in Practice

• Give teams information and tools to begin to identify with the larger organization.
• Collaboratively create a simple Common Priorities Portfolio with a full view of corporate priorities with justification, so everyone in the company can understand why major decisions are made. 
• Assume positive intent. Specialization is good, but so is communication.
• Collaboratively add key features and common terminology to the portfolio so all teams can see how their work rolls up to the corporate priorities. 
• Encourage everyone involved in the cross-functional conversations to go into them with a curious mind.

By D. E. Richards