One of the issues that I hear business leader’s face within their company is that the teams consider themselves separate from each other.
Within the company, we commonly hear from that “we’re the executive team. We’re a product team. We’re a marketing team.”
Holding True to Team Identities
This creates a separation between all teams. As we know, when teams get identified with their titles, then they stop communicating with each other. They may not understand how their deliverables can affect others in the company.
They feel their work has little relation to other teams in the company and their curiosity becomes stagnant in regards to what other key teams are creating.
Benefits of Team Collaboration
When a company (or a product with the company) is in a ramp-up phase, the need to move forward quickly takes precedent over communication with other employees. Broad organizational consensus is forgotten. The fact is that teams outside of product development could make a critical feedback on the product that is being developed.
For example, in Google, it is common for the executive team to visit the product development team to stay in the loop of what’s being created. Members from both teams share experience and feedback to build a better product overall.
This also happens when the organization is in a stable mode, although many would argue that stability is a thing of the past. Normally, teams have deliverables that are known, and all chains of creation, marketing and management are developed and fine-tuned for a certain sales level. But positive upgrades on products could be communicated from the sales people who spend time with customers to give valuable feedback to the development team.
Strengthen Company Culture
When teams are communicating, it strengthens the company culture. In fact, you may want to pair up two members from different teams to solve a problem. When this happens, employees understand the skills and experience of other workers so that problems may get fixed faster in the future.
To learn more about how coaching executives and teams can be beneficial to your business and your bottom line.
To get suggestions on how to ease tensions in meeting to increase collaboration, read easing tension and easing communications in meetings.