5 Steps to Cross Organizational Collaboration and Teamwork

Teamwork and collaboration make an important contribution to the success of business initiatives.  To create effective teamwork, you need to break down any departmental barriers to collaboration so that you can draw on the best people. Set clear objectives and define working relationships so that members can work as a cohesive team.

Here are the five Steps to cross organizational collaboration and Teamwork:

Overcome barriers: One among the major barriers to effective collaboration is the conflicting needs and priorities of the team and the individual departments in your company. All department managers have their own targets to meet and may be reluctant to release key staff for external projects. So, you need to convince departmental heads of the importance and benefits of the team project and persuade them to cooperate.

Agree Direction: Project teams need a clear sense of direction to turn members into a team. You can encourage shared ownership by asking team members to agree the key objectives and define the benefits to the organization.

Recruit Members: Cross-functional teams bring together people with the skills and experience to deal with all aspects of a project. Ask your human resources department to maintain an up-to-date skills profile to find the right people. The profile should include personal skills, important achievements, work experience and involvement in other team projects.

Clarify Responsibilities: A balanced team includes all the skills your team needs to complete its work at different stages of the project. For example, projects like new product development will require different contributions at each stage.  So, it is important for each member to understand their role and responsibility at each stage.

Support Collaboration: Your team will work more effectively if it has the tools to support easy collaboration, like email and instant messaging simplifies communication between members and makes it easy to share documents, project updates and other essential information. Also, accessing information from a single source helps to eliminate the risk of duplication or working on out-of-date information.