Guidelines To Establish Relations With Other Departments

Building bridges are powerful and fulfilling activity. It typically would be a 20% effort with an 80% return in productivity and performance, but even more so. It is a 20% investment in relationships that almost guarantees an 80% return in staff morale and enthusiasm.

Building bridges and establishing meaningful relations across team is not a difficult action. It is however challenging personal perceptions, ability and willingness to trust and a philosophy of given in order to receive.

• Encourage good relations, active cooperation and participation between your own team and other teams – talk positive about other teams, do not over criticise and be known for creating unity.
• Facilitate discussions about the formation of cross-functional solutions which solve more than one problem amongst peers and your team. Stimulate your team to think about how other teams impact on their success, and vice versa. Encourage them regularly to think about how we could improve our services to enable other teams to improve theirs and vice versa. Establish practices in your team where other teams are invited to give input into matters that could possibly affect their work processes, prior to making decisions.
• Follow a collaborative approach within your team and encourage them to expand the collaboration to other teams. Help them to see that the whole is bigger and more meaningful than the single puzzle pieces.
• Integrate initiatives across functional teams to create a high level of understanding of various roles, responsibilities and activities. One example could be to build a culture in which team members from different disciplines add new or improved value to customers; another example could be to provide opportunities for team members to work across boundaries in the formulation of strategy.
• Continuously review your team’s interaction and cooperation with other teams. Identify strengths and areas for improvement. Develop and implement basic plans that sets out to improve team working across your area.
• Build a network throughout the organisation (and externally where applicable) and work informally with these people to get information from them and give them information on your function (refer to Learning unit 5).
• Identify a highly effective team within or outside the organisation. Visit the team and it’s leader; invite them to visit you and find out how they operate and what processes may be of benefit to your team.
• Arrange work sessions and team discussions between your own team and other functional teams where problems or concerns exist, e.g. between finance and procurement or between marketing and credit management. Let the teams brainstorm and find consensus on how to improve productivity, how to better work flow and processes and implementing new ideas.