As managers in today’s complex business environment, developing strong working relationships across different departments and functions is no longer just a “nice to have” but a critical necessity. Silos between teams can severely limit information sharing, alignment, and innovation. As a leader, one of the most vital things you can do is become a trusted advisor to your key stakeholders across the organisation.
The days of managers focusing narrowly on just their departmental objectives are over. Silos no longer work in most modern organisations where business issues transcend traditional boundaries and require cross-functional choreography to address effectively.
Yet many leaders still struggle to build strong links with peers beyond their immediate domain. Without relationships enabling transparency and alignment across teams, organisations suffer from a range of problems including:
- Critical information getting stuck inside internal walls between groups leading to decisions made in isolation without full context.
- Strategic priorities becoming misaligned across units, wasting resources on competing or redundant activities.
- Innovation being stifled as ideas struggle to make necessary connections across the organisation to gain traction.
- Overall lack of agility to respond quickly to changing customer needs or market conditions.
As a business leader, you have a profound opportunity to break down silos by becoming a trusted advisor to senior stakeholders across functions. Set up reciprocal partnerships based on mutual benefit. Offer to lend your expertise to help troubleshoot issues outside your area. Facilitate brainstorming sessions on organisation-wide challenges.
This level of engaged collaboration serves to calibrate strategy, spur creativity, speed coordination, and enhance transparency. As sides gain first-hand exposure to each other’s worlds, walls crumble. Over time your influence and impact accelerates substantially, unlocking exponential value creation.
In today’s intricately interlinked business environment, cross-functional relationship building needs to be one of your highest priorities. Reduce silos through trust-based partnerships and information sharing to catalyse innovation and results.
Here are some practical tips:
- Seek to understand before seeking to be understood. Make an effort to learn what matters to other leaders and teams. Ask thoughtful questions to understand their goals and challenges.
- Establish regular touch-points. Don’t just interact when you need something. Schedule regular check-ins to share updates and look for ways to add value for one another.
- Facilitate connections. Make warm introductions between colleagues across functions that can benefit from collaborating. Enable discovery of common interests.
- Demonstrate dependability. Deliver consistently on what you commit to other teams. Follow through reliably so leaders know they can count on you.
- Share information proactively. Don’t hoard information to your own team. Transparency and proactive sharing build trust and enhance working relationships.
- Find opportunities to collaborate. Brainstorm ways you could cooperate with other groups on projects, events, or initiatives to achieve shared objectives.
- Appreciate their expertise. Express genuine interest in what other functions do and value their specialised capabilities instead of only touting yours.
- Solve problems jointly. Frame issues as common challenges to solve together rather than getting caught up in blame games.
Making the effort to constructively connect with peers, managers, and employees across department lines pays off exponentially. As you become a reliable, cross-functional ally, you build influence, unlock innovation, and ultimately create more business value. The relationships themselves become some of your most valuable assets as a leader.
Get Started Now
The time is now for managers to fully embrace your role as a cross-functional relationship builder within your organisation. The business landscape grows more fast-paced and complex by the day – no one leader or team can afford to go it alone anymore. Silos lead to failure.
Begin identifying key stakeholders in other departments or units that you need to establish and strengthen working relationships with. Set up introductory meetings to understand their goals, challenges and look for common ground. Brainstorm ideas, ask thoughtful questions and articulate the value you hope to create, exchange and receive through partnership.
Move forward with consistency and reliability even on small commitments to start building trust and interdependency. Facilitate connections between colleagues when you see potential mutual benefit. Provide support and expertise generously without expecting immediate return. Actively share information, ideas and insights rather than hoarding them.
Over time, persistently invest in removing barriers between you and critical stakeholders from the wider organisation. Seek to understand first, then to be understood. Your objective is to become an invaluable ally that these leaders want to regularly collaborate with.
Strong cross-functional working relationships will pay dividends through better strategic alignment, faster innovation, increased agility and ultimately more success executing on business priorities. Break out of narrow departmental confines through bridge-building across the organisation. You’ll unlock immense value while accelerating leadership impact. The time to start is now.
Bob Bannister
Ships Captain
