The launch slipped two weeks because nobody on your team knew who owned the billing integration. Someone eventually found the right engineer in a Slack thread from last spring, and she fixed the problem in an afternoon. She had been two floors away the whole time. Most advice on relationship building at work focuses on your own team and your boss. The relationships that decide whether things actually get done usually sit one or two org-chart boxes over.
Relationship building at work is the deliberate habit of creating trust with the people whose work touches yours, especially those outside your own team, before you need anything from them.
You see your teammates every day. You share standups, deadlines and complaints about the same tools. Those relationships form whether you try or not.
Cross-team relationships do not form on their own. The finance analyst who approves your budget, the designer on the adjacent product, the support lead who hears every customer complaint first: you meet them in a crowded meeting once a quarter, if at all. And yet they are the people who can unblock you, warn you or bring you into something new.
The asymmetry is the point. Because these ties take effort, most people do not have many of them. That makes each one more valuable.
A large study of Microsoft employees gave this a number. Longqi Yang, David Holtz and colleagues analyzed anonymized email, calendar, chat and call data for 61,182 U.S. employees in the first half of 2020, when the company moved to firm-wide remote work. Their paper in Nature Human Behaviour, "The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers", found that the collaboration network became more static and siloed.
Berkeley Haas's summary of the research puts the size of the shift plainly: time spent collaborating with colleagues across groups dropped by about 25 percent compared with pre-pandemic levels. People leaned harder on their inner circle, added fewer new collaborators and shifted toward asynchronous messages.
None of that is surprising if you have worked remotely. The hallway conversation with someone from another department simply stopped happening. What the study shows is that it does not come back by default. If you work hybrid or remote, cross-team relationships now depend almost entirely on intent.
Ray Reagans and Bill McEvily studied how know-how travels inside a contract R&D firm. Their 2003 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, "Network Structure and Knowledge Transfer: The Effects of Cohesion and Range", looked at what made it easier for one colleague to pass knowledge to another.
Two things helped. The first was cohesion: when the people around a relationship were also connected to each other, transfer got easier. The second was range, meaning ties that reached into different pools of knowledge across the firm. People with range found it easier to get what they knew across to others. Both effects held even after accounting for how close the two colleagues were.
Range is the part most people neglect. If you only talk to your own team, you learn to explain things in your team's language. Someone who regularly works with finance, legal and support learns several languages, which makes them better at carrying an idea across a boundary and having it land.
Range is not the same as popularity. It is about having real working ties in more than one part of the company.
The common advice is to schedule coffee chats with people across the company. Sometimes that works. Often it produces a pleasant thirty minutes and no lasting connection, because there was no reason to talk again.
Cross-team relationships stick when they are anchored in shared work. A few ways in:
A conversation that starts with a work question has a natural next step. You will need to follow up, which means you will talk again, which is how the relationship forms.
Every team at a company is graded on something different. Sales has a quarterly number. Legal is measured on risk avoided. Engineering is judged on reliability and velocity. Finance is accountable for forecasts that hold.
When you understand what another team is under pressure to deliver, two things change. First, their behavior stops looking unreasonable. The legal review that slowed your launch was not obstruction; it was someone doing their job. Second, you can make requests that fit their incentives instead of fighting them.
A useful habit after any cross-team conversation is to note one thing: what this person is being held accountable for right now. That note is the most useful context you can carry into the next interaction. Goodword lets you capture that note on your phone right after the meeting, so next quarter's conversation starts where this one ended. Start your free trial.
Some people avoid cross-team relationships because they feel political. It can look like networking for advantage, or picking allies.
The difference between politics and relationship building is mostly about what you do with access. Politics treats relationships as ammunition for internal battles. Relationship building treats them as a way to make shared work go better. In practice, a few behaviors keep you clearly on the right side:
You cannot maintain a close relationship with everyone in a company of a few hundred people, and you should not try. Every working relationship needs regular time to stay warm, and the hours you have for that are already claimed by your team, your manager and your life outside work.
A better approach is to identify the handful of teams your work depends on most and make sure you have at least one person in each you could message without an introduction. For most roles, we would put that somewhere between five and ten people. Review the list every few months as projects shift.
Some of those people will become more than useful contacts. A cross-team colleague who sees your work regularly is often the person who later recommends you for something. Peer advocates and senior sponsors play different roles, and it helps to know how sponsors and mentors differ as those relationships grow.
Early in a career, your work is judged mostly on what you produce. Later, it is judged on what you can get done through other people, many of whom do not report to you. Senior roles are cross-functional by nature.
People who have spent years building ties across teams arrive in those roles with a working map of the company: who decides what, who knows what and who will pick up the phone. People who stayed inside their own team have to build that map under pressure.
Familiarity is a big part of why some work bonds hold and others drift. Trust builds through repeated, reliable interaction. Across teams, you just have to create the repetitions on purpose.
Think back to the billing integration. The fix was easy. Finding the person was hard, because nobody had a relationship with her.
Every company has dozens of people like that, holding knowledge your work depends on. Getting to know a few of them before the next crisis is one of the cheapest investments you can make in your own effectiveness.
Goodword brings the colleagues from every team into one searchable place, with the context of each conversation attached. Start a 14-day trial.
Find a small point of overlap in the work, such as a handoff, a shared customer or an upcoming project, and start there. A specific work question gives you a reason to talk and a reason to follow up. Social invitations work better after a working relationship already exists.
Cross-functional relationships are working ties between people in different departments or disciplines, such as product and finance or engineering and support. They matter because most significant projects require several functions to cooperate. Research by Reagans and McEvily found that ties reaching into different parts of a firm make it easier to transfer knowledge.
Research on Microsoft employees during the 2020 shift to remote work found that collaboration became more siloed and cross-group time fell by about a quarter. Relationships within teams held up better than relationships across them. Remote workers usually need to create cross-team contact deliberately.
For most people, a focused list of five to ten cross-team contacts in the areas your work depends on is more useful than a broad, shallow network. Revisit the list when your projects change. Quality and recency of contact matter more than total numbers.
No. Office politics uses relationships to gain advantage in internal competition, while relationship building aims to make shared work go better. Consistency, crediting others and keeping confidences are the clearest signals of which one you are doing.
