How do you approach building successful partnerships across multiple functions?

Building successful partnerships across multiple functions is key for progress and collaboration. You can’t do everything by yourself. Working in partnership with other teams is how you will ultimately reach your business goals. Meeting the team’s KPIs isn’t as impactful if they do not support the overarching business goals. There are several meaningful steps to go about this, but I’m going to highlight the top three as they build upon each other.

• Communication. The act of communicating sounds so straightforward in theory, but often can be difficult if you are trying to move fast, were not aware of all of the stakeholders or thought you were communicating, as a few examples. Err on the side of over-communicating. When you think you are over-communicating, there is most likely still plenty of information to communicate.
• Trust. With communication comes the opportunity to build trust. I see trust as built via several compounding micro-moments. It takes time to build trust, but it starts with communication and transparency.
• Transparency. Communication, trust and transparency does not mean that everyone is in agreement. Part of building successful partnerships is to have healthy debates and differences in opinions as you’ll find this levels up communication as a team. Transparency is important because it signals where you are coming from.