As your business grows, you can often see a small gap appear and then widen as departments begin to work more and more independently. As hard as you try to bridge that gap, it’s not always easy to make sure that each department knows and is engaged in what others are doing. My marketing team recently decided to try bridging that gap with some pretty unexpected results.

Every two weeks my marketing Dream Team meets for a Working Lunch (sound familiar?) to touch base on large, ongoing projects as well as brainstorm new ideas for events, promotions and client appreciation initiatives.  It just so happened a few weeks ago there was an Operations training session going on in our conference room, so the marketing team grabbed the two trainees and had them sit in. Great ideas then started flowing from both sides of the table. Turns out that inviting the Operations trainees helped provide some interesting new insights for the marketing team, and got the Ops guys pretty excited about several upcoming initiatives.

In fact, the meeting went so well that the marketing team decided to invite any of our Operations or Customer Service staff to join them every two weeks to get involved in the planning and brainstorming meeting. So as it turns out, sometimes bridging that gap between departments is as simple as extending an invitation.