How to Build Collaboration Between Departments Without Blurring Role Clarity

I ring your call centre and I get on to you, and I have a particular problem and you say, “Sorry I can’t help you, and I’ve got to pass you on to someone else.” And that someone else I talk to can’t solve my problem, so I’ve got to get passed on to someone else. What happens eventually to the client? We get frustrated and we don’t want to do business with you.

Doing business requires departments to work together, but what can happen if we don’t do it well is that the individual people that work for you get bored about what’s important. If you want your people to know about what’s important, but also collaborate with those around you, I’m going to share with you how you can do that as a leader.

The Problem

When you get over about $5 million revenue, your organisation should start to specialise. And you build up these things called silos, which are your departments. And they make sense to you, but to your client, they don’t really care. They just want what they want.

So, when a client demands a service to be delivered, or their expectations or needs to be met, they require different departments to work with one another. And one of the problems is in how you lead your team. You need to set an expectation that that’s part of the job.

Now, if we get this wrong, what happens is that everything ends up as a mess, because we say to people, “You know what? You need to work with everyone. You need to work with all these departments to make this happen,” and they are all over the place doing this, and doing that, and there is no structure to their job.

Get It Right

If we get this right, what happens is we give them as a leader enough guidance about when to collaborate and when not to collaborate, so that it’s clear to the client how they get their problem solved.

So, here’s how we do it. We’re going to clearly articulate, firstly to the people that work with us. With the activity, say it was the call centre that we talked about before in the individual activity, what’s the result you want? Let’s say the result was within 24 hours, we need any issue resolved. That’s our resolve that we are going to promise every single client.

Your job is to answer every single phone call promptly, and with a smile on your face. In doing that, you need to work with our IT department and our Product department, and build relationships with X person and Y person. Can you see how what that does is make collaboration clear? And not at the cost of individual role clarity.

Summary

Our clients require collaboration, different departments to work together. When we get this right, we back that into our team, and we give everyone in our team the guidance around how to do it. When we get this wrong, people just go in multiple directions, and form relationships everywhere, and the client suffers.

So the framework is to really be clear about what the clear accountability in the role, but to delineate the difference between the part that they control and where they need to work with others. One of the challenges with this is how you get this happening at a team level.

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch 

If you’ve got some of this stuff right, but you need to tweak it a little bit, let’s have a chat about a strategy for driving collaboration in your team, and how you can get the different departments working together.

I hope this idea has been really useful for you. The next step is to start to implement it with some of your people in your team. Talk to you soon on The Reason And The Road.