Four guidelines for effective interteam cooperation
First principle: Create trustworthiness
Finish your assignments. Know your field well to be regarded as a thought leader. Gather proof to change your perspective from what you believe to be true to what you know to be true. Introducing concepts to other groups can cause a wide range of responses: When you aim for passionate (or at least engaged) responses, the best you can hope for is modest attention. How then do you create credibility? by expressing your well-informed opinion and providing evidence for it. For the simple reason that you operate in a restricted area, nobody will take what you say seriously. Your writing needs to be independent.
Your ability to establish credibility is what allows you to join the table. Even if you grasp the subject matter and complete your homework with excellence, you won't receive credit for it if you don't turn in the necessary materials. Consider this: You want them to lean in with curiosity rather than boredom, contempt, or apathy.
Principle 2: Establish Confidence
It is one thing to be taken seriously by others. Building and preserving trust with a different team is another. The author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni, discusses how trust is essential to a team's ability to function as a unit. He characterizes trust as having faith in the goodness of the intentions of our peers. Furthermore, there's no need for people to exercise caution or protection when it comes to their thoughts. It should be clear how to develop trust: be trustworthy, honest, and transparent with others. Nothing erodes trust more quickly than the perception of having been excluded from important conversations or decisions. How does that manifest itself in a collaboration across teams?
Consider two distinct teams that created and owned two different online experiences. Despite sharing a robust design system and navigation elements, each site has its own distinct URL and distinct long-term goals. Bringing these disparate experiences together under a single URL is the aim. Initially, two teams were working together without knowing each other's work (bureaucracy). Today, they are collaborating to identify and address shared issues and actively creating spaces for ideas to be shared and integrated into new ideas. In the spirit of no surprises, success demands not only that partners be informed about each other's progress (doing trials without sharing insights doesn't benefit a partnership), but also that they have a clear operating model for how to collaborate to develop.
A single team may seem to have an easier time handling this kind of job. However, in large, complicated organizations, it is unrealistic to believe that one team can comprehend or resolve all of the problems facing the company. A forest's subterranean root system communicates nutrients and distress signals amongst plants, aiding in the forest's survival. Similar to trees in a forest, teams must continually struggle to establish trust. However, by connecting with one another, they can form a network that promotes growth.
Third principle: Give people room
You have to give your partner room to engage if you're meant to be working together. They must feel secure enough to participate and voice their ideas. What is the ideal space ratio? One approach is what I refer to as "passive collaboration," which is a tactless gesture akin to tossing a design sheet over the fence without any further explanation. Someone needs to be highly motivated and have some ideas on how to participate in working on the document. It's similar to putting a bunch of ingredients without a recipe on a counter. Someone has to figure out how to cook a dinner out of the components, even if they find inspiration in them.
This could manifest as someone joining a conversation with deeply held beliefs. It's easy to merely operate in your silos and generate answers if you don't allow room for the thoughts and criticism of other teams. Good controversy is the idea of having difficult talks in public that lead to advancement, as discussed by Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. B-ad controversy can undermine team trust and cause delays in decision-making. According to her, the ideal host—or, in this instance, the designer facilitating the discussion—knows how to make gatherings productively contentious.
Recently, there was a disagreement between two teams on the optimal way to manage a specific workflow. What started out as a few (too many) private Slack messages came to an end when the design team led a workshop where everyone could voice their concerns and establish a common understanding of definitions and goals for each team. Documentation—a readily distributable artifact—that clearly illustrated the locations and reasons for experience discrepancies resulting from that conversation.
Principle 4: Strengthen your colleagues' humanity
Working together is essentially human. It can be uncomfortable to discuss early concepts or engage in productively contentious discussions. People must feel connected to others and that their perspectives are respected for them to participate completely. When you can't rely on the same impulses to drive you in the same way, that becomes really important. When basic needs like value and belonging are satisfied, varied collaboration can produce amazing results. If these conditions aren't met, cooperation becomes performative at best or, worse, results in disagreements and stagnant work that eventually detracts from the client experience.
This is especially possible for centralized companies, such as Adobe Design, as they have an incentive to provide the greatest possible user experience for all of their products.
Given how much we designers care about highlighting the humanity of our users, I would like to know what it looks like to extend the humanity we extend to product users to those we work with on a collaborative basis. Even if it may seem apparent, let's remind ourselves to have the best of intentions, extend forgiveness to one another, and accept that we won't always be at our best. Unexpected events will still occur despite clear operating models, and no matter how many channels of communication are established, someone may still unintentionally miss a meeting invitation.
It is up to each person to decide how to apply these ideas. The next time you work with people from other teams, consider how you present yourself. How are you creating credibility and trust? Are you creating the ideal environment for others to work together? Above all, how are you fostering the humanity of those you collaborate with? Our clients will suffer if we are unable to capitalize on the distinct value that can only be brought about by establishing alignment in the white space.
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