Your Sales team has done its job. Operations has done its job. Finance has done its job. Somehow, the customer is still waiting.

Nobody set out to make life difficult. The difficulty appeared between the teams: an assumption that was never checked, a decision that nobody quite owned, or a promise that sounded straightforward until somebody else had to deliver it.

This is where cross-functional relationships become very practical. They influence how work changes hands, how quickly people resolve uncertainty and whether an organisation can turn a sensible strategy into something that actually happens.

Follow one piece of work

In our earlier article, we explored why relationships across functions deserve more attention. A useful next step is to follow one piece of work through the business.

Choose something that matters: bringing a customer on board, filling a critical vacancy, introducing a product or approving an investment. Follow it from the first conversation to the final result.

Where does the information go? Who makes each decision? What does the next team need to proceed? Where does somebody have to chase, translate or start again?

The organisation chart will tell you who reports to whom. It may tell you rather less about who needs to speak to whom on a Tuesday afternoon.

That everyday picture is valuable. It helps people see the pressures on colleagues they might otherwise know only as a name at the bottom of an email.

Talk about the system, and the relationships within it

A conversation about poor collaboration can quickly become a discussion about which department is being difficult.

It is more useful to ask what each group is trying to achieve, what information it receives and what happens when its priorities clash with somebody else’s.

Imagine, for example, that one team is rewarded for speed while another is expected to minimise risk. Both may be acting entirely sensibly within their own responsibilities. The problem comes when nobody has agreed how those responsibilities should work together.

Evidence helps keep this conversation grounded. Interviews, workshops and surveys can reveal how people experience the relationship. Observation and business data can help explore where delays, repeated work or inconsistent decisions occur.

There will usually be more than one explanation. A balanced view makes room for workload, unclear authority, different professional perspectives and genuine tensions between people.

It also looks for relationships that already work well. Somewhere in the business, colleagues may have found a simple way through the same difficulty. Those pockets of brilliance deserve a closer look.

Agree what a better handover looks like

Once people understand the problem, the action should be specific enough to use.

“Communicate more” is a worthy ambition. It is also an excellent way to fill everybody’s diary without changing very much.

A useful agreement answers practical questions: what information must accompany the work, who accepts responsibility for the next step, who can make the decision, and what happens when something unexpected arises?

It should also give people a way to raise concerns early. A colleague who spots a problem needs somewhere to take it before a missed assumption becomes an expensive surprise.

Facilitated conversations can help people reach these agreements. Where tensions have become personal or difficult to discuss, mediation may also help restore a workable dialogue.

The aim is shared accountability for the result, with enough clarity for each person to know what they need to do.

Check whether daily work becomes easier

A workshop can produce excellent conversation. The real test comes afterwards.

Choose a small number of measures connected to the work: the time a handover takes, repeated requests for missing information, avoidable rework, customer delays or the confidence people have in getting a decision.

Review those measures alongside people’s experience. A faster process that leaves colleagues confused or pushes difficulty into another department may need another look.

At Vibe, we bring evidence and different perspectives together so people can agree a practical starting point and act on it. Sometimes the change is substantial. Sometimes it is a clearer conversation between two teams that have been working around each other for years.

There is a useful question for your next leadership discussion: where does important work become harder when it changes hands?

Start there. It could be a very productive conversation.