How to build cross-functional collaboration between departments

Silos form for reasons: competing incentives, unclear decision rights, physical separation, different tools/processes, historical conflicts, or misaligned goals. Diagnose what's actually preventing collaboration in your organization. Survey employees, observe interactions, review conflict patterns. Don't just mandate collaboration—remove the structural barriers that prevent it. Fix misaligned KPIs, clarify decision frameworks, address toxic dynamics.

Teams optimize for what they're measured on. If sales is measured on deals closed and product on features shipped, they'll conflict. Create shared metrics: revenue growth, customer satisfaction, retention. Give each team a stake in the others' success. Use OKRs that require cross-functional work to achieve. When everyone shares accountability for outcomes, collaboration becomes necessity, not nice-to-have.

Form project teams with members from different functions working together toward shared deliverables. Squad models (product, engineering, design, marketing together) break down barriers. Rotate people through different departments for temporary assignments. Embed liaisons between teams. These structural integrations force collaboration and build relationships that outlast individual projects.

Institute rituals that bring departments together: monthly cross-functional showcases where teams demo their work, quarterly planning sessions with all functions, weekly leadership standups across departments, joint retrospectives on company-wide initiatives. Regular interaction builds familiarity, trust, and shared context that makes collaboration easier when challenges arise.

Different tools and terminologies create friction. Adopt common platforms for communication (Slack), documentation (Notion/Confluence), project management (Asana/Jira). Create glossaries so engineering and marketing use same terms. Standardize processes for hand-offs between functions. Shared infrastructure reduces transaction costs of collaboration and creates common ground.

You can't collaborate well with people whose work you don't understand. Create shadowing programs where people spend a day with another department. Implement rotation programs where people temporarily work in different functions. Have teams present "what we do and our challenges" to each other. Understanding builds empathy; empathy enables collaboration and reduces conflict.

What gets recognized gets repeated. Celebrate examples of cross-functional collaboration in all-hands. Include collaboration in performance reviews. Create awards for teams that worked together effectively. Share stories of collaboration solving problems. When collaboration is visibly valued, people prioritize it. When only individual or department achievement is recognized, silos persist.

Executives who fight turf battles create warring departments below them. Leadership team must model collaboration: make decisions together, support each other publicly, avoid blaming other functions, celebrate joint wins. When employees see exec team collaborating well, they mirror that behavior. Executive dysfunction cascades downward; executive collaboration does too.