Building Effective Interfunctional Relationships

Overview/Description
 Whom did you talk with at work this week? To accomplish your goals in today's workplace, you not only have to interact with personnel in other departments, you often have to coordinate or even rely on them. Tasks are fluid and flow across functional boundaries. The products or services your company offers require a cooperative effort to produce. But by nature, most companies are structured territorially. Every department head and manager has his or her own troops on call and a personal domain to defend. Protecting your turf may be instinctual, but it's also counterproductive. By not cooperating openly with other sections or departments, you not only interfere with their ability to accomplish their tasks, you undermine your own efforts as well. In this course you'll discover how you may be inadvertently sabotaging yourself when you let your territorial instincts guide your interactions. Once you understand how interfunctional relationships benefit you and your work goals, you'll be ready to learn some communication skills that will help you develop stronger, more productive work alliances across functional boundaries.

Target Audience
 Department heads, supervisors, managers

Expected Duration
2.5 hours

Lesson Objectives:

Territorial Instincts at Work

  • recognize the value of understanding how territorial instincts function in the workplace.
  • match territorial defense strategies with types of defensive behavior.
  • match the three types of workplace territories with examples.
  • apply the steps for the successful negotiation of workplace territory in a business scenario.

    • Creating Interfunctional Alliances

  • recognize the importance of interfunctional alliances.
  • choose examples of results that one can attain through forming interfunctional alliances.
  • identify strategies that can help improve interfunctional relationships.
  • apply strategies for effectively improving interfunctional relationships in an interdepartmental scenario.
  • match helping behaviors that strengthen work alliances with examples.

    • Strengthening Communication across Boundaries

  • recognize benefits of improving interfunctional communication skills.
  • match ways to establish commonality with co-workers with examples.
  • predict whether someone's efforts to change communication patterns between himself or herself and someone else will be successful.
  • determine whether the interfunctional communications model was effectively applied to improve an interfunctional work relationship in a given business scenario.

    • Course Number: COMM0191