Productive collaboration across business units

What was the situation?
This client is Britain's largest mail order bookseller. To accommodate its growth it had evolved into a set of functionalised, specialised departments, where a ‘silo’ mentality often blocked collaborative efforts. New offers to the customer required a great deal of co-ordination across these sometimes competing boundaries. We were asked to devise a learning event which emphasised the benefits and skills of collaboration, and had a direct transfer back to the workplace.

What we did
We designed an experiential learning course, on which people from different departments attended, and learnt the skills of mutual influencing. Participants brought real and current work problems to the programme and worked in small groups to apply their learning. They practised skills of rapport-building, listening, questioning and giving and receiving feedback. Individuals raised their self-awareness of their preferred approach to influencing. They also learnt the benefits of a more flexible style, which emphasised personal accountability and assertiveness as well as seeking to understand another’s viewpoint and engage in creative, collaborative dialogue for a ‘win-win’ outcome.

In the final part of the course, small groups practised a problem-solving model, applying their influencing skills on current, complex and pressing work issues. These often focused on matters of great concern for the organisation’s customers.

The results:
The course became a highly popular event, and word-of-mouth news acted quickly. Over a five-year period 200 people attended the programme, from all sites and departments within the organisation.

The issue of internal competition and collaboration got more management attention, and working to improve this became accepted as a necessary part of the management role.

Communication improved greatly across departments directly involved with serving the customer. The language of the workshop became commonplace throughout the organisation helping to build collaborative relationships. New product development, marketing, distribution, and customer services soon worked together on different business process re-design projects, and which improving the customer experience.


Examples of our work:

Productive collaboration across business units

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