How do you build trust between teams?

At senior level, most of what your team needs sits with teams you don’t run. This post is about how trust between those teams is built, why it breaks, and how to find and fix the relationship that is costing you most.

Why is trust between teams so hard to build?

Because nobody has to give it to you. Your own team has a reporting line. A peer team has its own boss, its own targets and often a competing claim on the same budget, so every request you make is weighed against their own priorities.

The research suggests most senior leaders know this matters and few think they do it well. In a Center for Creative Leadership survey of 128 senior executives, 86% said working across boundaries was “extremely important” in their current role. Only 7% said they were “very effective” at it.

The same study asked which boundaries were hardest. The answer was the sideways ones: “horizontal boundaries (of function and expertise) proved the most frequent challenge.” Not your boss, not your team, but the leaders next to you on the org chart.

There’s a second reason it’s hard. Peer trust rarely breaks in one dramatic moment. It wears down through small, repeated things: a deadline missed without warning, a change announced in a meeting the other leader wasn’t in, a request that always arrives as urgent. Each one is easy to explain. Together they teach the other team to protect itself from yours.

What does trust between teams actually rest on?

Three things: reliability, openness and shared goals. Most weak relationships are weak on one of the three, not all of them, and knowing which one tells you what to fix.

• Reliability: do you do what you said, when you said? If you can’t, do you tell them before the deadline, not after?
• Openness: do they hear things from you early, including the bad news and the half-formed plan that might affect them?
• Shared goals: do your two teams want the same outcome, or are you quietly measured on things that pull against each other?

These line up with how trust researchers describe it. In a research report published with the Center for Creative Leadership, Dennis Reina, Michelle Reina and David Hudnut write that people build trust “when they do what they say they will do”. They also describe a kind of trust in which people “communicate openly and honestly”, and say it is what “fuels collaboration”. Reliability and openness, in other words.

Shared goals matter because without them reliability and openness can’t carry the weight. You can be perfectly reliable and open with a peer whose targets punish them for helping you. The CCL boundary spanning study defines the skill as creating “direction, alignment, and commitment across boundaries”, all aimed at a goal above any one group. If two teams have no goal in common, trust between them has nothing to hold on to.

What happens when trust between teams is missing?

Work slows down, and nobody says why. People start protecting their own team instead of solving the shared problem, and the cost shows up as delays, rework and escalations.

The Reina report puts it plainly: “When trust is absent, people jockey for position, hoard information, play it safe”. Between teams this looks familiar. Requests go through formal tickets instead of a quick message. Every handover needs a meeting. Small disagreements get escalated to the boss you share, because neither side trusts the other to be fair.

You’ll rarely hear about it directly. Your peer won’t tell you they don’t trust your team. You’ll notice it instead as slow replies, being last in their queue, or finding out about a decision after it was made. Your team notices it first, because they’re the ones waiting.

This is also why it matters more the more senior you get. In the same CCL study, 92% of senior executives said collaborating across boundaries became more important as they moved from middle to senior management. The work that crosses team lines is most of the work at this level.

How do you map trust across your peer teams?

List the teams you depend on most, then rate your relationship with each on reliability, openness and shared goals. Do it honestly, from what you’ve seen in the last few months, not from how much you like the other leader.

A few rules make the map more useful:

• Pick the teams your results depend on, not the ones you see most often. A team you rarely talk to but always wait on belongs on the list.
• Rate the relationship, not the person. Liking someone and trusting their team to deliver are different things.
• Look for the lowest of the three, not the average. A peer team that is open and shares your goals but misses every deadline is a reliability problem, and that’s the one to work on.
• Notice where you’re the weak side. Reliability and openness run both ways. If you rate a peer low on openness, ask whether they’d say the same about you.

The point of the map isn’t a score. It’s to stop spreading your effort evenly across every relationship and put it where the risk is.

What does a trust map look like in practice?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A head of product at a software company depends on five peer teams. She sits down for ten minutes and rates each relationship on the three things.

• Engineering platform: reliable, open, and measured on the same release goals. Strong. Nothing to fix, but she should keep it that way.
• Marketing: open and friendly, and they want the same launches to succeed. But their dates often slip without warning, and so do hers. Low on reliability. Mixed.
• Customer support: reliable on the work, but they hear about product changes last, usually from customers. Low on openness, and mostly on her side. Mixed.
• Finance: reliable and clear, but targeted on cutting spend while she is targeted on growth. Their goals pull against hers. Mixed.
• Sales: promises made to customers she hears about after they’re made, roadmap changes they hear about late, and targets that reward closing deals whatever the product can do. Low on all three. At risk.

Before the map, she would have said her problem was finance, because budget meetings are the most uncomfortable part of her month. The map shows something different. Finance is awkward but predictable. Sales is where her team actually loses time, in rework, surprise commitments and escalations.

So that’s where she starts. Her repair move is small and specific: a standing 20-minute call with the head of sales every fortnight, with one rule. Neither side commits the other’s team to anything without raising it on that call first. She sends the first invite herself, and she brings the next quarter’s roadmap changes before they’re final.

How do you repair the weakest relationship?

Start with the leader, not their team. Pick one repair move that matches the weak area, make it visible, and keep it up for at least a month before you judge whether it’s working.

The move depends on what’s weak:

• If reliability is low, make one promise you’re sure you can keep, and keep it early. If you can’t meet a date, tell them before it passes and give a new one. A small kept promise does more than a big one you might miss.
• If openness is low, tell them something before they need to ask. “This might change, but here’s where we’re heading” is worth far more to a peer than silence until it’s final.
• If shared goals are weak, name the conflict out loud. Say what you’re measured on, ask what they’re measured on, and look for one outcome you both need. If there isn’t one, take that to your shared boss together, not separately.

Two things make repair harder than it needs to be. The first is going round the other leader, to their team or their boss, because it feels faster. It confirms the distrust. The second is the big gesture, such as an offsite or a joint charter, without the small behaviour change underneath it. Teams believe what you do on an ordinary Tuesday, not what you agree at an away day.

If the relationship has gone badly wrong, start with a plain conversation. Say what you think happened from their side, what you’ll do differently, and one thing you’ll do this week. Then do it. For more on how to make a case to someone who doesn’t report to you, read how do you lead without being in charge?.

How do you keep trust between teams once you have it?

Keep doing the boring things after the problem goes away. Trust between teams fades when leaders only talk during a crisis, so keep a regular, low-stakes reason to talk.

A few habits help:

• Talk when nothing is wrong. If the only time you call a peer is when something has broken, every call starts on the back foot.
• Turn requests down kindly and early. Trust survives a clear no much better than a slow yes that never arrives.
• Disagree in the room, not afterwards. Peers notice when your objections surface later through your team.
• Give their team credit in public. When a joint piece of work lands, name the other team first.

It also helps to watch for decisions that sit between two teams with no clear owner. Those are where trust quietly erodes, because each side assumes the other is handling it. If that sounds familiar, our glossary entry on Decision Debt explains how those unmade calls pile up.

How strong are your peer relationships right now?

Most senior leaders have one peer relationship that costs their team far more than the rest, and it’s often not the one they’d guess. A map shows you which one it is, so you can put your effort there first.

Cross-Team Trust is a free test built for exactly this. It takes about 5 minutes and needs no sign-up. You list up to six peer teams, and the team names stay in your browser. You rate each relationship on reliability, openness and shared goals, and you get a trust map showing which relationships are strong, mixed or at risk, plus one repair move for the weakest one.

For now, you rate each relationship yourself. A peer version, where the other leaders rate the relationship anonymously, is coming, and that will usually be the more honest view. Either way, the map isn’t a verdict on you or on any of your peers. It’s a way to see where your team is paying for a relationship nobody has looked after, so you can decide what to do about it.

If you want a wider read on how you lead, including how you handle requests from other teams when yours is stretched, try The 42 Test. You’ll find more tests and posts for this level on the senior leaders page.

Trust between teams isn’t built in a workshop. It’s built in small, repeated moments between leaders: a heads-up before a change, a promise kept, a request turned down early and kindly. Start with the peer you only call when something has already gone wrong.