Summary. Today the most promising innovation and business opportunities require collaboration among functions, offices, and organizations. To realize them, companies must break down silos and get people working together across boundaries. But that’s a challenge for many leaders. Employees naturally default to focusing on vertical relationships, and formal restructuring is costly, confusing, and slow. What, then, is the solution? Engaging in four activities that promote horizontal teamwork: (1) developing cultural brokers, or employees who excel at connecting across divides; (2) encouraging people to ask questions in an open-ended, unbiased way that genuinely explores others’ thinking; (3) getting people to actively take other points of view; and (4) broadening employees’ vision to include more-distant networks. By supporting these activities, leaders can help employees connect with new pools of expertise and learn from and relate to people who think very differently from them. And when that happens, interface collaboration will become second nature.
Idea in Brief
The Challenge
Innovation initiatives, globalization, and digitalization increasingly require people to collaborate across functional and national boundaries. But breaking down silos remains frustratingly difficult.
The Cause
Employees don’t know how to identify expertise outside their own work domains and struggle to understand the perspectives of colleagues who think very differently from them.
The Solution
Leaders can help employees connect with and relate to people across organizational divides by doing four things: developing and deploying “cultural brokers,” who help groups overcome differences; encouraging and training workers to ask the right questions; getting people to see things through others’ eyes; and broadening everyone’s vision of networks of expertise inside and outside the company.
Though most executives recognize the importance of breaking down silos to help people collaborate across boundaries, they struggle to make it happen. That’s understandable: It is devilishly difficult. Think about your own relationships at work—the people you report to and those who report to you, for starters. Now consider the people in other functions, units, or geographies whose work touches yours in some way. Which relationships get prioritized in your day-to-day job?
A version of this article appeared in the May–June 2019 issue (pp.130–139) of Harvard Business Review.
Read more on Cross-functional management or related topics Collaboration and teams, Interpersonal skills and Leadership qualities
