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It was a Friday afternoon when my email dinged with a new message. I was expecting an email from the admissions team with any needed edits to a small print booklet. Our team had worked hard on the book and was excited to see how close we were to having a great product. My excitement turned to anguish when I opened the attachment. On a 12-page book, there were 84 edits. Everything from copy to font to photos and design.

Our team, with much frustration, worked through the edits and eventually completed this project. The team moved on, but I struggled to put the situation behind me. In my continued reflection, I realized the situation was a manifestation of a deeper problem: The marcomm team and the admissions team were not aligned. I realized that the situation I experienced would continue happening until this root cause was addressed.

To remedy it, would require proactive measures to bridge the gap that existed, which had resulted in silos, frustration, mistrust and territoriality. I made a personal commitment to fix this problem and began working over two years on building trust and developing a working relationship. In that process, I found myself employing these seven strategies as part of the work. It took time, but the teams eventually got past differences, learned to positively work together and achieved shared success of enrollment and marketing objectives.

Here are the seven strategies I used to build this critical collaboration, and I find they work well even in situations where trust may be low.

  1. Develop a regular meeting cadence. The first step in building collaboration is scheduling a regular meeting between the teams. I would suggest weekly, but bimonthly may be adequate. The goal is to ensure consistent interaction between the teams and that all projects are worked on collaboratively. This also allows the teams to map out projects each semester and work through them in a systematic nature. Work may happen outside the meetings, but this is an important opportunity for the full group to receive status updates, align on priorities and discuss upcoming projects.
  2. Bring multiple people to the meetings. One of the biggest lessons I learned is the importance of having both teams include multiple team members in the meeting. This signals the meeting is important for both teams and should prioritized on the calendar. Second, it ensures continuity of operations if a leader of one team is out. If multiple people have been in the meeting each week, it is much easier to keep projects moving and prevents progress from stalling until a key decision-maker returns.
  3. Set relationship norms. If the collaboration is new and trust is lacking, it is important to set relationship norms. Possible norms could be assuming good intent, using polite terminology in meetings and sharing feedback where appropriate. The two teams should work together to decide on the norms in the relationship, but these would be a good place to start to ensure misunderstandings about what is important do not undermine the relationship.
  1. Focus on small changes. As a marcomm leader, I can say that most marcomm team members are ideas people. Often, we have many ideas and are eager to implement many of them. When working to first build collaboration, this can create unrest or frustration. A strategy I have used to mitigate this is to focus on two degrees of change each time a project is implemented. This helps prevent panic and is much easier for others to support. The premise is that each time a project is completed, a small change is implemented, which over time yields substantial change. For example, the first time the viewbook is updated the team might focus on updating copy, the second iteration could be to address photos, while the third time might work on the layout.
  2. Critique with caution. Critique is challenging in a low-trust environment, but it is critical that both groups give feedback on the work to continually improve. There are two strategies that I have used to help with this. The first is start/stop/continue, which offers an objective way to review a project or process. In this, the teams review what should be stopped, what should be started and what should be continued. This creates a myriad of feedback without being aimed at any one person. Another strategy is to critique the work of the marcomm team first. If the admission team sees the marcomm team can handle critique, it creates a safer environment to offer feedback.
  3. Share data first. In higher education, we often talk about the importance of data-driven decisions. A great way to demonstrate this is sharing marcomm data. Showcasing advertising impressions, click-through rates and email open rates can help build collaboration with admissions partners. This approach can also provide opportunities to further the conversation about how the two teams might collaborate to enhance the work. This also offers an olive branch to help the marcomm team gain access to critical data from admissions.
  1. Celebrate success. A final way to build collaboration is celebrating the wins. At Arkansas Tech University, our team sent a meal, signed cards or delivered flowers to celebrate the admissions team after key events (visit days, census day, etc.). These all showed that the marcomm team was rooting for the admissions team, was aware of key milestones and preplanned a way to celebrate. In my experiences, these small gestures paid significant dividends in building the collaboration.

Collaboration Takes Work

This work of building collaboration between these teams does not happen instantaneously. The teams must commit to the work and staying the course. Especially in a low-trust environment, I have found that it takes more than a year of this effort before both the fruits of the collaboration are realized. However, when it really begins to happen, both teams tend to agree it was worth the effort to get there.

Carrie Phillips, Ed.D., is chief communications and marketing officer at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

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