Quick answer: Cross-team trust grows when people understand each other’s pressures, feel safe to speak honestly, and have habits that support real collaboration rather than formal coordination. A strengths-based lens, shared check-ins, cross-team recognition and manager modelling all help. In 2026, this is harder than usual: global research shows trust is becoming more insular, which makes deliberate, relationship-based trust-building more important, not less.
In higher education and across the wider public sector, cross-team working is now part of everyday life. Shared services, workstreams, functional alignment, programme delivery, student support, digital change. On paper, collaboration makes sense.
In practice, it can still feel hard.
Teams join the meetings. Updates are shared. Everyone says the right things. But underneath, there may still be tension, confusion or quiet frustration. Progress slows. Ownership gets blurred. People start protecting their own patch.
This is why trust matters so much. Not just trust within teams, but trust between them, and 2026’s global trust research suggests this is getting harder rather than easier. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, based on interviews with nearly 34,000 people across 28 countries, found that 70% of people are now unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values, background or approach to problem-solving differs from their own. Inside organisations, that shows up directly: 42% of employees say they’d rather switch departments than report to a manager with different values, and 34% say they’d put less effort into helping a project team leader succeed if that leader held different political views. The same research found “My Employer” remains the most trusted institution measured, at 78% trust among employees, which means the workplace is one of the few places left where cross-difference trust can still be actively built.
Trust inside a team can take time to build. Across teams, it can feel even more fragile.
That is because people are often working with different pressures, different priorities, different ways of communicating, different histories and assumptions, and different levels of influence.
When the pressure is high, it is easy to default to “our work” and “their work.” That can create patterns such as updates without real collaboration, meetings that feel polite but unproductive, delays caused by unclear ownership, decisions being revisited because teams are not aligned, and frustration that grows quietly instead of being addressed.
The challenge is not usually a lack of goodwill. More often, it is that teams have not been given enough support to understand each other well enough to work together with confidence.
One of the biggest barriers to cross-team trust is what might be called performative collaboration.
This is when collaboration looks active from the outside, but does not feel genuine day to day. It can look like regular meetings with little real co-creation, shared plans that do not translate into shared momentum, people attending but not speaking openly, or work being coordinated through process rather than relationship.
This is where trust starts to weaken. If teams do not feel safe enough to ask awkward questions, challenge assumptions, or admit where things are getting stuck, collaboration becomes shallow. People stay courteous, but not fully open. They cooperate, but do not really connect.
That is why trust across teams depends on more than structure. It depends on psychological safety, stronger relationships, and a more human understanding of what each team brings. The Edelman research points to the same conclusion at a larger scale: 74% of people globally say bringing people into contact with those who differ from them is an effective way to build trust, and 81% say building teams that require people with different values to work together is a useful organisational strategy.
When teams are under strain, it is easy to notice only what is difficult.
Who is slowing things down. Who is not responding. Who is asking for too much. Who seems to be making things more complicated.
A strengths-based approach helps interrupt that pattern. Instead of defining other teams by friction, it encourages people to notice what is valuable in the way others work. For example, the team that asks difficult questions may be protecting quality, the colleague who seems cautious may be helping others manage risk, the person who keeps bringing people together may be holding the wider picture in view, and the team that focuses on detail may be preventing avoidable problems later on.
This does not remove disagreement. But it helps teams move from blame to understanding, and from defensiveness to respect. That matters because trust builds faster when people feel recognised for what they contribute, not just judged for what they delay.
Cross-team frustration often grows out of assumption. “We always have to chase them.” “They do not understand our pressures.” “They are blocking progress.” “They never see the full picture.”
Strengths-based reflection creates a pause in that cycle. It invites teams to ask what this team is trying to protect or achieve, what strengths they’re using when they approach the work this way, what might be missed about their pressures, and where they’ve helped more than is usually acknowledged.
These are not soft questions. They are practical ones. They help teams see each other as partners rather than obstacles, which is essential if collaboration is going to last.
At the University of Liverpool, the Service Delivery Programme Team, working under heavy transformation pressure and cross-functional collaboration demands, brought their Chief Financial Officer into a Discovery Workshop alongside the team itself, reinforcing senior-level buy-in for a more people-first way of working. The response was strong: 91% rated the session very or extremely valuable, and participants specifically named cross-team understanding as a takeaway, with one noting, “I can see how different strengths add value, even the ones I don’t have.” Read the full story: Enhancing Team Collaboration and Confidence at University of Liverpool.
In another setting, work was reorganised into cross-functional workstreams focused on different parts of the student journey. The intention was sensible: more joined-up working, clearer responsibilities, better coordination. But once the workstreams were in place, new tensions surfaced. People were not always clear where ownership sat. Some teams felt their pressures were not fully understood by others. What helped was not more meetings. It was creating space for teams to reflect on how they worked best, where overlaps were creating friction, and what strengths were already helping the work move forward. Those conversations uncovered hidden confusion, but also hidden value.
That is often the turning point. Trust grows when teams are given the chance to make sense of each other, not just work around each other.
1. Create shared check-ins, not just status updates. When cross-team meetings focus only on progress reports, they often miss the real issues. Make space for questions like: what is helping us work well together right now, where is the handover feeling unclear, what is creating drag we haven’t named yet, and what do we need more of from each other. These questions surface the working relationship, not just the workload.
2. Use peer recognition across team boundaries. One of the quickest ways to strengthen trust is to help teams notice each other’s value. This might sound like “that input helped us avoid a bigger problem later” or “the clarity from your team made the next step much easier.” Recognition across teams shifts the tone from transactional to relational.
3. Build reflection into cross-team work. When projects become busy, reflection is often the first thing to disappear. But without it, teams repeat the same misunderstandings. Simple prompts help: what has worked well between us so far, what has been harder than expected, what strengths have helped us keep moving, and what should we carry forward. This is where appreciative inquiry can be especially useful, because it helps teams explore what is working without ignoring what is hard. Explore more: Appreciative Inquiry Workshops.
4. Support managers to model trust across boundaries. Cross-team trust is shaped by the behaviour of managers. If managers speak respectfully about other teams, stay curious rather than defensive, encourage honest questions, acknowledge different pressures, and share ownership instead of escalating blame, their teams are more likely to do the same. Trust does not spread through instructions. It spreads through modelling. This is one reason our Team Development Workshops are so effective. They help managers and teams create a shared language for collaboration, empathy and contribution that can be carried back into everyday work.
In many public sector organisations, teams are being asked to collaborate more closely while also dealing with rising demand, tighter resources and growing complexity, at the same time as global trust research shows people are retreating into more insular, familiar circles. That combination means trust can no longer be treated as a nice extra. It is part of the infrastructure that helps teams adapt, deliver and stay connected when the pressure is high.
When trust is strong across teams, work moves more smoothly, friction is addressed earlier, teams are more open about what is not working, people feel less isolated in shared challenges, and collaboration becomes more sustainable.
And that is what makes cross-team working more than a structure on paper. It becomes something people can actually do well together.
At Strengthify, we help organisations strengthen collaboration by focusing on the human side of cross-team working. Our work helps teams understand each other’s strengths, build trust through better conversations, surface friction early and productively, and create habits that support real collaboration rather than just formal coordination.
Useful places to start include Team Development Workshops, Appreciative Inquiry Workshops, and Discovery Workshops.
If trust between teams feels weaker than it should, the answer is rarely just another structure or another meeting. More often, it starts with helping teams understand each other better.
Because when people can see what other teams bring, speak more honestly about what is hard, and reflect together on what works, collaboration becomes easier to sustain. And that is how trust grows across teams at work.
Why is trust between teams harder to build than trust within a team? Cross-team relationships usually involve less shared history, less regular contact and more competing priorities, which makes it easier for assumptions and friction to build up unchecked.
What is performative collaboration? It’s when collaboration looks active on the surface, regular meetings, shared plans, coordinated updates, but doesn’t translate into genuine trust, openness or shared momentum in practice.
Can a strengths-based approach really fix cross-team conflict? It won’t remove disagreement, and it isn’t meant to. What it does is shift the starting point from blame to understanding, helping teams see what colleagues are protecting or trying to achieve rather than only what’s frustrating about their approach.
How does the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer relate to workplace trust specifically? It found that global trust is becoming more insular, with people less willing to trust those who differ from them in values or approach. Inside organisations, that translates into real friction between teams and departments, which is exactly why deliberate trust-building work matters more now than it used to.