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Keep shoppingCross-Functional Communication: Break the Silos [EN]
2,636 students
Cross-Functional Communication: Break the Silos [EN]
cross functional communication | breaking silos | team alignment | org structure | matrix | conflict | facilitation
Last updated 5/2025
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- See why silos form structurally, using the six design drivers, and stop treating them as a culture problem
- Read a matrix structure and know where power actually sits inside it
- Segment an internal audience by function and write a version of the message each one will act on
- Run a cross-functional project through PMBOK 7 with stakeholders who report to somebody else
- Build a resource matrix and see the collision before two functions discover it themselves
- Facilitate a session where functions with different targets arrive at one decision and named owners
- Handle conflict between departments where both sides are behaving rationally from where they stand
- Design team building that fixes a diagnosed problem rather than producing a pleasant afternoon
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
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Course content
15 sections • 42 lectures • 21h 2m total length
Requirements
- Work that depends on a department you do not run
- No background in organisational design or project management needed
- Willingness to find out what the other function is actually measured on
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- A spreadsheet for the structure diagnostics and the resource matrix
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Two competent teams, both doing their jobs well, can produce a bad outcome together. That is the specific problem this course is about, and it is almost never solved by asking people to communicate more.
Why silos are structural, not cultural
Every function is measured on something, and the things they are measured on were set separately. Marketing is judged on leads, sales on closed deals, support on ticket volume, engineering on delivery. Each set of targets is reasonable. Together they produce a company where doing your job well makes someone else's job harder, and nobody involved is behaving badly.
Then a matrix gets introduced without deciding how power is distributed inside it, so every cross-functional decision needs three people and gets two. The information that would resolve it exists in one department and reaches the other three weeks late. And the meeting where it could have been settled had the wrong people in it.
How the course is built
Forty-two lessons in six parts. The structure first, eight lessons of organisational design: the six design drivers, why the current shape exists, organisational archetypes, when a matrix is genuinely the answer and which of the three types you need, how power is distributed inside it, span of control, and the transition itself. Ending with five real company cases including Wargaming and ArcelorMittal.
Then communication across functions: the audit, segmenting an internal audience by function rather than seniority, message templates, channel choice, using managers as a channel, and measuring whether behaviour changed rather than whether the email went out.
Projects, meetings, conflict and connection
Then the project, which is the standard form cross-functional work takes. Ten lessons on PMBOK 7 focused on the parts that matter here: the charter, which is where your authority actually comes from, stakeholder analysis when their targets conflict with yours, the resource matrix that shows the collision early, and the matrix environment where the person you need has another manager.
Then facilitation — running the session where functions with different targets reach one decision, closing it with named owners, and doing it online. Then conflict between departments, taken as a structural phenomenon rather than a personal one: causes, escalation, prevention, negotiation, mediation.
And finally the connection itself: diagnosing a team before organising anything, uniting the work of several teams, and what works when people never share a room.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. Wargaming appears as one of the structural cases in this course, which I can discuss with unusual specificity.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
Where to start
Pick the function you have the most friction with and write down what they are measured on. Then check whether any of it conflicts with what you are measured on. If it does, you have found the real problem, and it was never about communication. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers whose results depend on two or three departments agreeing
- Project and product managers coordinating engineering, marketing, sales and support at once
- Operations and transformation leads pulling functions in one direction
- HR business partners and internal consultants working across the whole organisation
- Department heads whose team is blamed for delays caused elsewhere
- Founders whose company has grown into functions that no longer talk to each other
- Anyone who has watched two competent teams fail together