7 best practices to improve cross-team alignment

1. Lead with clear communication

When bringing together different teams for one project, great communication is crucial for keeping everyone moving toward the same goal. How crucial? 80% of employees report feeling stressed because of ineffective communication at work.  

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If you’ve ever taken a business communications course, you might have come across the 5 Cs of communication. Keep these qualities in mind throughout the project—for written communication, conversations, and meetings—to keep communication flowing smoothly:

• Clear: Don’t muddy the waters. It should always be obvious what you are trying to convey and why.
• Concise: Keep things short and sweet. Don’t use 100 words when 50 would suffice.
• Concrete: Be specific. What do you want to be done, how do you want it done, and when?
• Complete: Don’t leave anything out. Be sure you include everything necessary to understand your point.
• Courteous: Kindness wins, always. Use a polite, gentle tone in every situation.

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Preventing misunderstandings and miscommunication 

We’re all human, so it’s easy for misunderstandings and broken communications to create conflict and generate unintended consequences. Here are some strategies for setting up an environment for communication success:

Schedule regular project meetings so team members know they have a time to ask questions and get answers.

Set up easy-to-use communication channels for use between meetings to align everyone involved. 

Keep communication jargon-free. When working with different groups, sometimes jargon doesn’t translate. Remind everyone to spell things out when reaching beyond their department. 

Practice active listening. Communication isn’t just talking. Active listening helps you understand what people are missing and how you can help them fill in the gaps.

Be open-minded. As a team leader, remain open to new ideas and perspectives, and let them impact the project when it’s a good fit. 

Encourage an open environment. To foster effective project communication, everyone needs to feel their voice is being heard. Set a good example by asking for and offering feedback — both good and bad — regularly. 

2. Get aligned on the business strategy and team goals 

Creating alignment is essential for establishing a framework to enable cross-team collaboration. To achieve this, team leaders need to share goals, strategies, and KPIs and agree on the priorities and path forward. Once team leaders become transparent about their goals and needs, it becomes much easier to identify opportunities for collaboration.

You can use these questions as a guide to create that alignment:

• What is each team’s role in fulfilling the overall business strategy?
• What are each team’s core goals and KPIs?
• Is there an opportunity to work together on certain goals?
• How can our teams better support each other?
• Which processes can we borrow?
• Where can resources be shared?
• Are any teams sitting on data that could benefit others?
• Are any teams suffering from bottlenecks, and can another team help?
• Have any team leaders found success in certain management apps that other managers could try?

With these answers in place, you can set a clear vision for the team that highlights short-term and long-term goals for the project, which will help keep everyone on the team focused and efficient.  

3. Explicitly define roles and responsibilities

When you set up a cross-functional project, make sure to state clearly which individual team members are responsible for which tasks, deliverables, and outcomes. Otherwise, your teams may fall back into their usual reporting structures or tasks may fall through the cracks.

Within each team, every individual will have different roles and responsibilities. The exact make-up of your team will depend on your preferred project management approach. For instance, a Waterfall-style project will have a different project team than an Agile team. However, a general breakdown of a project team will look something like this:

Project Manager (you!): This person owns the project, defines the scope, and supervises the rest of the project team.

Responsibilities include:

• Planning and scoping the project
• Supervising the project team
• Monitoring the budget
• Tracking the progress of deliverables
• Reporting project status to stakeholders

In an Agile team, you’re the Team Lead or Scrum Master, and it is less top-down than more traditional project management set-ups. However, the core responsibility of the Team Lead is the same as that of a conventional project manager – to keep the project moving toward successful, timely delivery.

Integrator: If multiple teams are involved on a project, then you may also need an Integrator to help things go smoothly.

Responsibilities:

• Managing cross-team collaboration
• Maximizing operational efficiency across multiple teams
• Identifying and fixing siloes, bottlenecks, and duplicated tasks

Project Planner/Administrator: For longer or larger-scale projects, the project manager may be supported by a planner or administrator.

Responsibilities:

• Monitoring daily tasks
• Supervising task status
• Troubleshooting issues and bottlenecks
• Handling administrative tasks such as project documentation
• Supporting the Project Manager

Project Team Members: These are the people responsible for the delivery of the project itself. They tend to have technical expertise (designers, engineers, programmers, creatives, and so on).

Responsibilities:

• Building and optimizing the project deliverables
• Responding to customer feedback with project iterations and improvements

Product Owner: In Agile and Scrum teams, there will also be an additional team member called the Product Owner. This is often someone from the Product Management or Product Marketing functions who has specialist knowledge of the end user and their pain points and preferences. This person: 

• Represents the “voice of the customer” during team meetings
• Provides advice and consultancy on customer needs and preferences
• Keeps the project focused on key customer priorities

Testers: This is a role most common in software development, but may also exist in other types of projects, such as product development.

Responsibilities:

• Testing the project deliverables to identify bugs (if applicable)
• Spotting and alerting the project team about quality issues
• Playing the role of the end user to ensure maximum customer satisfaction

Project Sponsor: The Project Sponsor is usually a member of the company’s leadership team. Their role is to oversee the whole project from a level above the project manager, and to secure buy-in for the project at an executive level.

Once you’ve assembled your project team, then the focus turns to optimizing their performance by managing the team and the project workflow.

4. Emphasize accountability and ownership

Accountability is a public form of responsibility within the project that allows team members to count and rely on each other, knowing that each person fully accepts and can execute their assigned duties. Without accountability, a project can unravel and team members can become bitter and frustrated. 

Team members who feel a strong sense of accountability over their work will be more proactive and engaged in collaborative projects. You can encourage your team to adopt this mindset in a few key ways:

Define accountability expectations (and document them). By documenting your expectations and sharing them with the group, you provide a point of reference that can help realign things should they fall off track.

Increase transparency on individual duties. We all step up our game when we know others can see. With the right cross-collaboration tools, each team member’s tasks and statuses are visible to all other participants. This increases clarity and communication effectiveness and encourages accountability.

Routinely monitor KPIs or other metrics. When each team member is responsible for reporting their results or progress regularly, they will gain the insights required to improve performance and become more motivated to raise the bar.

Keep the conversation going. Regular communication between everyone involved in a cross-team initiative helps each person take accountability for their part and generates interest in others’ areas. It is also essential for maintaining standardization, resolving problems quickly, and optimizing processes.

5. Provide collaborative software tools

We can all agree though that cross-functional collaboration is pretty much impossible if your teams are working from separate Excel sheets or project management solutions. To boost collaboration, project managers can turn to collaboration software. The right software can transform your workflow management approach by introducing clarity and speed to traditionally cumbersome processes. 

In fact, using technology for collaborative projects is almost expected; most workers say they want managers to problem-solve with technology, and this includes all of the tools needed to complete tasks and projects.

Platforms with a customizable project tracking template can help project managers set up project spaces where everyone involved can track tasks and deadlines and make changes quickly. 

With so many solutions available in the market, we recommend you prioritize the following features:

• Visualization: Top of the list is the ability to view your workflow in various ways so you can analyze, tweak, and monitor its success. For example, it’s helpful to switch between a simple to-do list as part of a linear workflow or visualize complex task dependencies in a Gantt chart format. 
• Automation: Workflow management is about efficiency. Today, you don’t need to press every button manually. Instead, you need the ability to set up automation recipes based on trigger conditions. For example, when you finish the first task in a workflow, you can check a box that sends an automated email to your teammate to begin her part.
• Integrations: The best work management platforms will seamlessly integrate with other tools in your tech stack so there’s no need to hop from one system to another. For example, you might integrate your workflow management tool with a time-tracking app to understand time spent on specific tasks. 
• Collaboration: Workflow management is rarely a solo activity. Invite key stakeholders from your team to see, discuss, approve, and collaborate on workflow items. Ensure you choose a platform that allows communication in the app to keep discussions organized and relevant. 

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6. Encourage transparency and ask for feedback

The best way to encourage an open team environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing feedback, constructive criticism, and new ideas? Model the behavior you want to see.

Ask for and offer feedback. Both good and bad — regularly. Host brainstorming sessions or project meetings where everyone can have their say.

Respond to feedback. Ensure you listen and respond to the comments, ideas, and feedback. Think active listening and responsiveness.

Be transparent. Share your thought process on key decisions, and give people access to project information. A shared calendar or project management platform can help your team feel like they are in an open environment where everyone clearly communicates.

Provide anonymous feedback options. While meetings and one-on-one chats are important spaces to embed regular feedback, allowing team members to offer input through an anonymous survey may elicit constructive, honest feedback. 

Say thank you. When team members know you appreciate their feedback and really plan to utilize it, they’ll be way more open to sharing going forward. After an employee offers feedback, try to start your response with something like, “first of all, thanks for bringing this to my attention – this is really helpful.” 

7. Celebrate achievements and milestones

Taking time to celebrate wins and recognize team members is a relatively low-effort but worthwhile practice. It lets team members know that their contributions are impactful, increases engagement, reduces burnout, and encourages higher performance. 

Thoughtful and genuine applications of employee recognition can be achieved in many ways. Here are some tips:

Schedule time into regular meetings or feedback sessions. Saving a few minutes at all-team meetings for recognition builds it into your existing processes and gives everyone something to look forward to. 

Use it when times get tough: If your team has been working through a big challenge or experiencing a setback, appreciation can give a much-needed morale boost, while a lack of recognition can lead to burnout.

Encourage peer-to-peer recognition: Recognition from fellow team members can be even more meaningful than kudos from above. With monday.com, it’s easy to @everyone in a comment to give shout-outs for a job well done.

Use a tracker: Scheduling feedback sessions while handling many other responsibilities can be challenging. One tool managers can utilize for easy feedback scheduling and managing is a feedback tracker.