How To Improve Cross-team Collaboration?

'The Tower of Babel’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted around 1560.

'The Tower of Babel' is a biblical story where humanity tries to build a tower reaching the heavens. God, seeing this as an act of hubris, confuses their languages, and the project fails. It is an origin myth for the diversity of human languages and cultures. We can land rovers on Mars, yet modern organizations face the same fundamental challenge: when teams can't speak the same language about goals, processes, and success, even the most ambitious projects crumble under miscommunication and misaligned effort. Reorgs don’t solve it; they just redraw boundaries and invent new dialects. What works is an operating system leaders can apply weekly: clarify purpose, codify interfaces, and invest in relationships. Here’s the practical version I’ve used to move complex orgs from friction to flow:

1. Understand your team's goal.

   Work with your manager to understand your team's purpose within the company. Get clarity on what success looks like for your team and how you're expected to collaborate with other teams. Senior leaders may need to reach out beyond their direct manager—conducting stakeholder interviews with peer directors or executives to fully understand expectations.

   
   

   In fast-changing organizations—whether experiencing high growth, decline, or operating in volatile markets—team purpose can shift frequently. Build regular alignment check-ins into your management rhythm rather than treating this as a one-time exercise.

   
   

2. Make sure your team understands the goal

   Once you have clarity, communicate it effectively to every team member. Document the goal on a persistent internal wiki page, then discuss it individually with each person during 1-on-1s. Ask them to explain their understanding back to you—this reveals gaps between what you think you've communicated and what they've actually absorbed.

   
   

   Many managers assume that writing something down equals understanding. This leads to mismatched expectations and frustrated team members down the line. Even clear documentation requires active confirmation that people have read it, understood your intent, and know what's expected of them.

   
   

3. Define how your team fits in the whole picture

   Your team's goal exists within the broader organizational context. Think through and articulate this positioning both to your team and to external stakeholders. Analogies help non-technical colleagues grasp complex relationships—for example, describing a data team as "the grocery store for data," with engineering teams as "farmers" producing raw data and end users as "shoppers" selecting ingredients for their data products.

   Use multiple communication channels and repeat the message frequently. Your manager can amplify this by sharing the framework with their peers and asking them to cascade it to their teams.

   
   

   Examples trump theory every time. One particularly effective approach: ask other teams to explain how your team contributed to their recent projects. Their explanations often provide the clearest picture of your actual value and role in the organization.

   
   

4. Define what your team is not responsible for

   Clearly documenting what your team doesn't do is one of the most effective ways to clarify what you actually do. This prevents work duplication and ensures critical tasks don't fall through organizational cracks.

   Create a Team API one-pager that includes: services offered, request processes, expected inputs/outputs, SLAs, decision rights, escalation paths, and meeting cadences. This living document becomes your team's interface specification—as essential for organizational coordination as technical APIs are for system integration.

   
   

5. Reach out to other team leaders to connect

   As your team's chief diplomat, allocate time to meet with peer managers whose teams intersect with yours. Understand their goals, frustrations, and constraints before you need their help.

   
   

   Since teams are made of people, and people inevitably have conflicts, building relationships proactively is far easier than doing so during a heated escalation. Use these conversations to explain what your team does, identify where you need their support, and explore opportunities for mutual assistance. The investment pays dividends when challenges arise. It's much harder to argue with someone you already know and trust.

   
   

6. Motivate teams to connect

   Once you've established relationships with peer leaders, work together to facilitate team-level interactions. This might mean introducing senior team members to each other, creating shared projects, or simply opening a common Slack channel for distributed teams.

   
   

   Sometimes the simplest approaches have the biggest impact. During a company acquisition, I created a "Data-Collaboration-Discussion" Slack channel and launched a weekly open Google Meet where people could simply introduce themselves. Over 100 people connected in the first session alone. These relationships became the foundation for accelerated integration, proving that removing friction from human connection often matters more than elaborate team-building programs.

   
   

7. Celebrate collaborative wins

   What gets celebrated becomes culture. Consistently highlighting collaboration success stories signals that cross-team partnership is valued and rewarded. When people see that working with other teams advances their careers, "Babelian" language disparities dissolve—they find common ground naturally.

   
   

   Since cross-organizational impact drives promotions in most tech companies, creating collaborative win opportunities with peer managers becomes one of your highest-leverage activities for developing your team members.

   
   

8. Walk in each other's shoes

   Create opportunities for team members to work temporarily in other teams through programs like tours of duty. When I noticed organizational friction persisting despite multiple opportunities for collaboration, I launched an engineer rotation program designed to accelerate learning across teams.

   
   

   The side effects were even more valuable than the primary goal: people developed deep understanding of other teams' challenges, discovered shared struggles, and built empathy through shared experience. The friendships formed during these rotations outlasted people's tenure at the company.

   
   

9. Meet in person and have lunch

   There's remarkable power in sharing a meal with colleagues. As a previous manager told me: "It's hard to argue with someone you just had lunch with." Whenever I travel for business, I make it a priority to meet local colleagues over meals. The investment in relationship-building pays dividends far beyond the immediate conversation.

   
   

   One of my most meaningful professional relationships began when I connected on Slack with someone who shared my uncommon last name. During an overseas business trip, I made the effort to meet him for lunch at his office. He showed me around the city, gave me organizational insights, and introduced me to key people. Years after we both left the company, we still keep in touch.

   
   

10. Generosity in crises accelerates connection

    Nothing builds bonds like shared adversity. Crisis Bonding is the social phenomenon where people unite during challenges like natural disasters—happens regularly in organizations operating in our volatile business environment.

    
    

    Technical outages become unexpected opportunities to build trust. As a data team leader, I proactively joined critical production incident channels to offer help: analyzing data for root cause clues, quantifying outage impact, or preparing lists of affected customers. By anticipating needs rather than waiting to be asked, we prevented delays during recovery. People remember who showed up during their crisis. Help others without expecting anything in return. When your team faces challenges, that generosity will come back to you.

Summary

Unlike the builders of Babel, we don't need divine intervention to scatter our efforts. We scatter them ourselves with unclear purposes, undefined boundaries, and underinvested relationships. But when we get these right, we build towers that actually reach their intended heights. Silos don’t disappear with slogans. They yield to simple mechanisms applied consistently: clarify purpose and boundaries, codify interfaces and decisions, and invest in relationships that make hard work feel easier. I have seen success in investing in cross-team collaboration manifest in improved project outcomes, increased employee satisfaction, and faster decision-making. In our increasingly interconnected yet divided world, individuals skilled in bridging these gaps are more valuable than ever.

What are you waiting for? Reach out and schedule that lunch!