Business organizations increasingly understand the benefits of forming cross-functional teams, which include collaborative efforts on new initiatives and solving for current issues in the organization. Putting together a group of people from different disciplines, however, is not enough to obtain the results businesses are looking to achieve. To be effective, groups must form into a team. There are two distinct differences between a group and a team. To build a team, a group must coalesce around a unifying mission, understanding, and agreement on the purpose of the team and what they need to accomplish to be successful. The second qualifying factor in the formation of a team is members of the group must trust each other. I created an intervention based on developing communication techniques in a small group to build trust in a cross-functional workgroup. The purpose of this study was to (a) examine the potential effectiveness of an intervention I created using specifically designed communication techniques to build trust in a cross-functional workgroup, (b) determine which techniques were useful, and (c) assess where improvements could be made. What the study revealed is that a cross-functional workgroup can increase the level of trust group members have with each other and the group by enhanced communication training, including empathic listening and sharing experiences
