How to improve communication between departments

Communication between departments breaks down for structural reasons. Two teams are measured on different numbers, nobody owns the point where work passes from one to the other and each function has built a vocabulary the other one only half understands.

The symptoms are familiar to anyone running a mid-sized business. Sales commits to something operations was never asked about. Finance finds out about a project when the invoice arrives. A piece of work goes round twice because two people each assumed the other had it.

This piece covers what cross-department communication is, the three reasons it fails, four changes that move it, what leaders have to do differently and where cross-team initiatives tend to collapse.

Inner Leader has run cross-functional team work in UK and global businesses since 2014. The client example below is from a division where seventeen nationalities were working together for the first time.

What cross-department communication means in practice

Cross-department communication is the flow of information, context and feedback between functions that depend on each other to finish a piece of work. It covers the formal channels such as handovers, meetings and reporting lines, and the informal ones such as whether somebody in operations feels able to ring somebody in sales without booking it first.

Most organisations measure the formal half and ignore the informal half. The informal half is usually where the failure is. When two functions have not spoken outside of an escalation for six months, every conversation they do have starts from a position of suspicion.

The phrase people use for the failure state is silos. A silo is a team that has optimised for its own targets to the point where the wider outcome has stopped being anybody's job.

Why communication breaks down between departments

Departments are measured on different things

This is the root cause in most businesses we go into. Sales is paid on closed revenue. Delivery is judged on margin and on-time completion. Both teams are behaving perfectly rationally, and the behaviour that is rational for each of them produces a fight at the handover point every quarter.

Nothing you do about tone or meeting cadence will fix a genuine conflict in the measures. Look at the scorecards before you look at the people.

Nobody owns the handover

Work that sits inside one department has an owner. Work that crosses a boundary often has two half-owners and no agreement about where responsibility transfers. That gap is where context gets dropped, and it is also where blame lands afterwards, because both sides can point at the other with a straight face.

Each function speaks its own dialect

Finance, engineering, marketing and operations each use words the others think they understand. Urgent means this afternoon in one function and this fortnight in another. A commitment in a sales conversation and a commitment in a delivery plan are two different levels of promise.

The dangerous version of this is the one nobody notices. Two people leave a meeting agreeing, and they are agreeing to different things. The problem surfaces three weeks later when the work arrives in a shape one of them did not expect.

Four changes that improve communication between departments

Agreeing one shared outcome

Find a number both departments can be held to together and put it on both scorecards. On-time delivery of what sales sold. Total cost of a customer complaint, shared between the team that caused it and the team that fielded it. The measure matters less than the fact that it belongs to both of them.

This is a leadership decision and it usually has to be made above both departments. It is also the change with the largest effect, because it removes the reason the two teams were pulling apart.

Naming an owner at every handover

Map the points where work crosses between the two functions. For each one, name the person responsible for the handover, what information travels with it and what the receiving team is entitled to ask for before accepting it. This takes an afternoon and it removes most of the recurring arguments.

Building a shared language for style

Departments attract different behavioural profiles. Fast, direct people gravitate to functions that reward decisiveness. Careful, precise people gravitate to functions that reward accuracy. When those two groups meet, each reads the other as difficult.

Giving both teams a common vocabulary for behaviour stops that reading. We use Everything DiSC profiling, a personality profiling tool, for this because people keep using the language months later, which is the only test that matters. It converts a complaint about somebody being obstructive into a statement about what that person needs before they can commit.

Putting the two teams in the same room

Cross-department relationships decay without contact. A session where both teams hear what the other one is dealing with does more than a year of copied-in emails, and the effect is strongest when people who have only exchanged messages meet each other for the first time.

Keep it regular and keep it small. A standing thirty-minute cross-team check-in with the people who do the work beats a quarterly all-hands with the people who manage it.

What leaders have to do differently

Communication between departments copies communication between their leaders. If two directors avoid each other, their teams will inherit the avoidance within a quarter and nobody will ever say why.

Raising an issue with a peer directly

The most common leadership failure here is routing a complaint about another department upwards instead of sideways. Every time that happens, the two teams learn that the way to deal with each other is through a third party. Leaders who raise it directly, early and without an audience change the pattern faster than any training will.

Making it safe to flag a problem early

People hide cross-team problems when raising one has cost somebody before. The work is rewarding the person who flags the issue while it is still small, in public, so that the rest of the organisation sees what happens. There is more on the conditions this depends on in our piece on psychological safety in high-performing teams.

Protecting the time for cross-team contact

Under pressure, the first thing a manager cancels is the meeting with the other department, because it is the one with no immediate deliverable attached. It is worth protecting. Our team development work usually starts by looking at what has quietly been dropped.

What we see when departments start talking

BAT product development team, thirty-four people who had never worked together

When BAT moved product development R&D for one of its product categories to Southampton it brought together thirty-four people from seventeen countries. The technical capability was strong and the group had no shared working habits. In some of the cultures represented, questioning a manager was expected. In others it was avoided. The result was silence where the work needed challenge.

We ran two days of development for the whole group, with DiSC profiling to give them a common language and work on psychological safety so people could speak without worrying about hierarchy. Their category lead, Chris Keller, described the change afterwards: before, everyone stayed in their own lane, and afterwards helping each other became instinctive. Over the following two years the category grew by more than 250% with no increase in headcount. The full account is in the BAT case study.

What we see in the room

This is observation from our own delivery, with no measured figures behind it. When two departments who have been arguing are put in a room and each asked to describe their week, the argument almost always turns out to be about a constraint neither side knew the other had.

The second thing we see is how fast it comes back. A cross-team session with no change to the measures or the handovers holds for about six weeks. The goodwill is real and it has nothing to hold on to.

Where cross-department initiatives fail

Three patterns account for most of the failures we are called in to repair.

The first is adding process to a relationship problem. A new form, a new stage gate and a new weekly report get introduced, everybody complies for a month and the underlying unwillingness to pick up the phone survives intact. Process is useful once two teams trust each other. On its own it becomes another thing to be annoyed about.

The second is running the session without the leaders in it. Teams that spend a day agreeing new ways of working then return to two managers who were never in the conversation. Within a fortnight the old behaviour is back, because that is what is being rewarded.

The third is treating a measurement conflict as a communication problem. If sales is paid to sell things operations cannot deliver, no amount of listening training will help. Sort out the measures first, then do the communication work. Doing it the other way round wastes the budget and teaches everyone that training does not work.

Questions people ask about communication between departments

How do you improve communication between departments?

Start with one outcome both departments are measured on, then name an owner for every handover between them, give both teams a shared language for behavioural style and put them in the same room regularly. The measurement change is the one that makes the other three stick.

What causes silos between departments?

Competing targets, unclear ownership at the boundaries and a lack of contact outside of escalations. Silos are usually the predictable result of how an organisation measures and structures itself. They form even when everybody involved is capable and well-intentioned.

What is interdepartmental communication?

It is the exchange of information, context and feedback between functions that depend on each other, covering both formal channels such as handovers and reporting and informal ones such as whether people feel able to contact each other directly. The informal half is where most of the value sits.

How do you improve collaboration between departments?

Collaboration between departments follows from shared accountability. Give two departments a joint outcome, make the handovers explicit and remove the incentive to protect their own numbers at the other's expense. Then invest in the relationships, because people collaborate with colleagues they have met.

What are the signs of poor communication between departments?

Work being duplicated, decisions being revisited, meetings where one function is surprised by something another has known for weeks and complaints about a department being routed to a senior manager instead of to that department. Rising escalation volume is the clearest early indicator.

Who is responsible for communication between departments?

The leader above both of them owns the measures and the structure. The two department heads own the working relationship. Nobody further down can fix a genuine conflict in the targets, which is why cross-team initiatives that start at team level tend to stall.

Do more meetings improve communication between teams?

Rarely. Adding meetings to a relationship that is already strained usually increases the irritation. What helps is a small number of the right conversations: a short regular check-in between the people doing the work and a direct route for raising a problem early.

How long does it take to fix a silo?

A measurement change shows up within a quarter because behaviour follows the scorecard quickly. The relationship side takes longer, usually two or three months of regular contact before people start ringing each other by default. A single workshop with nothing behind it holds for around six weeks.

Can software fix communication between departments?

A shared system removes the excuse of not having the information. It does nothing about whether people want to share it. Organisations that buy a collaboration platform and see no change have usually bought a tool for a problem that was about incentives and trust.

What training helps departments work together?

Sessions that put both teams in the room together and work on what is happening between them, supported by a shared model for behavioural style. Training delivered to one department on its own tends to produce a group that is better at describing the other side's failings. Our work on communication skills training covers the individual half, and the piece on overcoming communication barriers covers what gets in the way one to one.