How Developing Allies in Other Departments at Work Can Help Both You and Your Company 

There’s a lot of talk about ”breaking down silos” and creating partnerships in organizations – it’s become a mantra touted across the commercial spectrum, from big business to nonprofits. But more often than not, turning this idea into action means reforming years, or even decades, of culture and structure, making the task daunting. And, of course, if you are someone in “middle management,” it can feel impossible to influence such a massive systemic issue.

But creating partnerships across an organization has value at all levels, and in fact, it can sometimes be easier when you are a little farther down the food chain.  What you are doing may go unnoticed at first, but if your cross-departmental collaboration starts to bear fruit, people will pay attention, and you and your colleagues can help set a new tone that may end up accelerating organizational change.

Why Create Cross-Departmental Collaborations?

The idea of breaking down silos has resonated so widely because people inside siloed organizations recognize that opportunities are being lost and resources wasted due to poor internal communication and coordination.

Silos form for many reasons: they often occur out of the necessity to group people by work function to keep them focused on certain tasks, and thus leverage their talents toward a specific area. However, the result can be that subcultures take shape, as people within different organizational units create a bond and feeling of “sameness” that consequently leads to those outside of the group to be seen as “other.” These attitudes then make it hard for people to relate across functions, disrupting the chance for cross-departmental collaboration. At its worst, it creates turf wars and cause disorder in the flow of information. When this happens, real change must come from the top, but that doesn’t mean that those without a senior management title have no influence.  Following are some ways to exert that influence.

Identify the Problem
The first step is to identify the problem you think you can impact most by working more closely with one or more departments. Quick tip: look at where you see inefficiencies or lost opportunities that affect both your team’s objectives and the objectives of the overall organization. The problem should be one on which you can reasonably have an impact, given your position.

Determine Your Targets
Once you have picked a problem, you’ll need to build relationships with those who can help you solve it. Figure out which of your colleagues it would be most beneficial to contact. Be strategic in your choice. It is not enough to pick someone with whom you already have a good relationship; you also have to make sure they hold a position where they can influence the issue at hand.

Build Trust
In order to create effective cross-departmental collaboration, you need to establish trust. Building trust involves finding common ground: maybe you can start a conversation on something related to work, or perhaps you share an interest outside of the office, such as a mutual love of a sports franchise or a shared interest in fashion. Whatever it is, start building a rapport around the topic.

Once a relationship has been established, start discussing the issues or opportunities you see that could be addressed through collaboration. Your job is to not only talk, but listen. Although ideally everyone within an organization is striving for the same overall goals, different departments have different immediate objectives. So it’s important to understand where another department is coming from and the pressures they face — both to build trust and to create collaboration that will truly benefit the organization.

Make a Plan
Next, work together to make a plan for how you can impact the issue. Perhaps you want to build a small, inter-departmental working group. Or, if your organization uses an interoffice communication system, such Lync or Salesforce Chatter, you could possibly create a new discussion group focused on keeping one another up-to-date on important developments. Or maybe something less formal is more reasonable, such as scheduling a lunch once or twice a month with your counterpart(s) to discuss projects and identify opportunities for collaboration.

These small cross-departmental collaborations can have a big impact. By demonstrating the success of creating a new line of communication, you set an example within the organization of the kinds of things that can be accomplished if more departments are working together. The best result: your success will help senior management recognize the benefits, and push them to follow your lead by institutionalizing more opportunities for collaboration.

A Few Quick Dos and Don’ts

Here are some things to keep in mind to help make sure your efforts are successful:

• Do set an example for others by rising above office politics and pettiness to get things done. A lot of missed opportunities arise because people refuse to work on something for reasons having nothing to do with the work, and everything to do with personal conflict. This situation is common in very siloed organizations, and often very strongest at the high levels of an organization. It’s great if your position lower down the totem pole has kept you out of this, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate what can be done when personal politics are put aside.

• Do start your work together by coming to a baseline you can both agree on. Remember, your colleagues may not see the problem exactly as you do, and they may have different immediate objectives and pressures. So work the problem back until you can get to a place where you both agree, then start to work forward toward a solution together.

• Do focus on what is within your control. Similar to just complaining about everything that is wrong, worrying about things that are outside of your control won’t get you anywhere. Pick out the piece of the problem that you are in a position to influence, and start there.

• Don’t create a bond with your coworkers by ganging up on someone else in the office. When looking for shared interests in an office environment, sometimes the easiest way can be to gripe about a pain-in-the-neck colleague. This just reinforces other silos, and is a bad way to go.

• Don’t sacrifice your department’s core needs to get things done. All relationships require compromise — but you need to be clear on which things you can let go of for the greater good, and which things are non-negotiable because they would damage your ability to meet an important departmental goal.
• Don’t use this as an opportunity to just complain about everything that is wrong with your organization. Venting can be great and it definitely has its place when people are feeling at the end of their rope. But you also have to move toward a solution. If you allow yourselves to get stuck in what is wrong, you will never find the ways you can influence making things right.