Tips for creating collaborative processes across teams
When teams work in silos, projects slow down, decisions get fuzzy, and brilliant ideas never make it past the meeting room. But with the right collaborative processes, teams can move faster, think smarter, and deliver work that feels genuinely joined‑up.
Siloed working was one of the main barriers identified in Natasha Milsted’s MBA Research, where she was looking at what would enable marketing teams to anticipate and respond to customer needs. So, we wanted to take some time to explore why collaboration breaks down and what effective cross-team collaboration looks like. We will share some practical steps to build collaborative processes and rituals or behaviours to make it stick.
Start with a shared understanding
Misalignment is the biggest block to collaboration. Teams need a shared picture of goals, constraints and success measures, rather than competing objectives and goals. This requires more work upfront, but irons out tensions, ambiguity and misunderstandings from day one. This can be as simple as holding a cross-department workshop where you define:
Project brief: Create a single-page project brief everyone contributes to and agrees to. This includes setting joint vision and objectives.
Create your “shared language”: Run a “shared language” session to define key terms and acronyms. This cuts out confusion and those pesky acronyms that aren’t universally understood.
Clarify roles and responsibilities: The biggest cause of confusion we see is people not taking the time to map out roles, responsibilities and who has decision rights. This can slow down projects but also create ill-feelings on the project team.
Pro tip: We personally love to use a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted and informed) matrix, as it is a really simple way to help people understand their role and remit.
Build rituals that encourage collaboration
Collaboration isn’t a one-off event. It’s a rhythm. What we found during our discussions with marketing leaders is that they often use a project/shared challenge as a way to start the conversation. But to create a collaborative culture you need to create the opportunities for collaboration to become repeatable.
Here are some simple ways to build rituals to encourage collaboration:
Weekly cross-team meetings
Monthly retrospectives
Joint away days
Co-creation workshops at key project milestones
Pro tip: Keep rituals lightweight. The moment they feel like admin, people disengage.
Choose tools that reduce friction
Tools should make collaboration easier, not more complicated. Make good use of shared workspaces, like Miro and Teams to encourage engagement and collaboration. Standardise templates for brief, feedback and reporting, making it more efficient to work together and reduce any tension in the briefing process. And finally, create a “single source of the truth” for project updates. One of the common pitfalls we see is people using multiple tools to track or communicate process and this creating confusion between stakeholder groups.
Pro tip: Agree on tool etiquette — where updates go, how often, and who owns what.
Create clear communication pathways
Unclear communication leads to duplicated work, delays and frustration. Again, some of this is about defining upfront the intent. One of the questions we always ask when we kick-off a new project is how we are going to use each channel. For example, teams for quick updates and emails for decisions. This creates clarity around the purpose of different communications.
Use structured update formats, so it is consistent and people can easily find the content that is more relevant to you. This could be as simple as:
What’s new?
What’s next?
What’s blocked?
Our final tip is to encourage collaboration outside of meetings to reduce meeting overload. The defined roles and responsibilities should help with this, as that should provide clarity around who they need to speak with at different points in the project.
Build psychological safety
Teams collaborate better when they feel safe to share ideas, ask questions, and challenge assumptions. As marketing leaders, you have a role to play in creating this and here are three ways you can build psychological safety:
Model curiosity and asking open questions
Celebrate experimentation, not just outcomes
Make feedback a normal, expected part of the process
Collaboration is a skill, not a personality trait. And like any skill it takes time to develop and be good at it. We think that small process changes can unlock big improvements and it all starts with creating shared goals before going on to build rituals, processes and psychological safety needed to make collaboration possible.
Did you know?
We can support your organisation with building a collaborative culture that enables your marketing team to thrive. Get in touch today to discuss your challenges, aims and hopes. We will then develop a bespoke proposal to support your organisation.
