Effective fostering of teamwork and collaboration is critical to succeed in today’s world. While many companies claim to value and thrive at it, in our experience collaborative cultures are hard to build and sustain.  

This blog will explore what we mean by collaboration, why it’s such a challenge in the workplace, the business benefits it brings, ways to improve team collaboration, and how you can put teamwork at the heart of your culture.

What do we mean by collaboration?

Collaboration, particularly in a corporate culture context, is a much-misunderstood concept. For us in the Culture Practice at ZRG Consulting Solutions, it means every employee is working towards the collective goals of the whole organization, not simply for their team, department, or function. That means they put the interests of their organization at large ahead of those of the part of it in which they work.  

People in truly collaborative companies believe in the purpose of the organization and trust that working together towards that purpose sometimes means prioritizing actions that may not be those of their team. This is not about giving up individual results to have good relationships with each other; it means giving up individual results because that is necessary to achieve the collective result.

What’s the difference between team and organization-wide collaboration?

This is an important distinction to make. When people think of collaboration, they are often referring to team collaborations. That is, members of a team working together towards their common goals. However, they are rarely, if ever, collaborating with anyone outside their team.  

Organization-wide collaboration is where people are only thinking about the company’s goals, and will proactively and naturally reach across corporate structures (should they need) to deliver.  

For example, if a core objective of the company’s strategy is to accelerate financial performance through being more customer-centric, and everyone understands this, you would expect to see people looking for ways to work together to make it happen. They would not be waiting for others to move first, or refuse to get involved. There would be total commitment from everyone to working together towards the organization’s overarching goals.

What are the benefits of fostering teamwork and collaboration?

For all the loose talk these days about collaboration, it can be easy to forget the business benefits to fostering teamwork and collaboration. These include:  

1. Better financial results. Companies with collaborative cultures score higher than those without on pretty much every metric, including profitability, efficiency, and employee engagement and retention.

2. Increased likelihood of strategic delivery. Companies that work together on their shared goals have a much higher chance of achieving them because everyone plays their part in delivering on them.  

3. Greater innovation. When people have the opportunity to work broadly across an organization, they are exposed to different perspectives, ideas, and feedback. Such environments breed innovation, which is a powerful differentiator.  

Learn why employee experience is important for culture in our guide.

What are the challenges when looking to improve team collaboration?

In our experience with clients trying to create cultures of collaboration, many are struggling with it for a number of reasons:

Huge shift in thinking

If you want to improve team collaboration, it’s essential that every one of your people can see the bigger picture, is enabled by your organizational structure, and is rewarded for contributing to the whole. For many companies, it will require radically different behaviors, systems, and symbols (the three components of culture) for them to be more collaborative.

Cultures that place too much value on relationships and friendships

A highly relational culture can make it difficult to shift from ‘cooperation’ to genuine ‘collaboration’. Many people believe that having good relationships in a company is the most important thing. In this type of culture, the difficulty in collaborating is related to the difficulty in challenging ideas, having crucial conversations, and giving clear and honest feedback. This can lead to reduced organizational performance, innovation, and even customer centricity.

Busyness

Employees are heads down and working so hard on their individual or team deliverables that they don’t have time to raise their heads, look around, and think outside their own parameters.

Lack of clear direction

If the organization has not articulated a clear, unifying, and engaging purpose, vision, and mission, it can be hard for people to see what, why, and how they should contribute.

Systemic barriers

Systems such as reward and recognition can encourage individualistic behaviors at the expense of fostering teamwork and collaboration.

Long game

Culture change takes time, and while there are ways to improve team collaboration,  building sustainable collaboration needs intentional effort over a lengthy period. In the modern business environment, where speed seems to be everything, this isn’t always understood or popular.

Growing individualism

Even before the pandemic, the world was becoming more individualistic, and this trend has only exacerbated since. It is harder than ever for companies to forge enduring connections with their people as work becomes more transactional and transitory.

Tips to improve team collaboration and communication skills

The following need to be in place if you want to improve team collaboration and communication across your organization:

1. Build trust

Trust is the foundation of collaboration, so your leaders need to spend quality time building relationships with each other. This should include being open, honest, and vulnerable, as increased intimacy will generate trust, because if your leaders don’t trust each other, nobody else will, and collaboration will not flourish.

2. Set a vision

Get your leadership team to work together to clarify your purpose as an organization, and to set an inspirational vision. Collaborating on this will help to solidify the trust the leaders have in one another, and enable them to develop trust within and between their teams.

3. Engage your people

How can you create the time and space in your organization to bring your people on this journey with you? That means thinking about what collaboration needs to look and feel like for your people, the type of behaviors you expect, and how your leaders are going to role model and communicate them?

4. Be accountable

Talk openly about expectations, and agree how you will be accountable, and hold others to the same. Delivering on your promises is a shortcut to people feeling confident to trust you, which will lead to greater collaboration.

5. Equip your people

If you want your people to improve team collaboration, they must be armed with the knowledge and tools to be able to do so. Whether it is formal training, knowledge-sharing platforms, or communication channels, you need to have the infrastructure in place to enable seamless collaboration. When people know their colleagues are knowledgeable, they are more credible, and credibility leads to trust, which in turn leads to improved team collaboration.

Learn more about how to increase collaboration at work in our blog.

How do you demonstrate good examples of team collaboration?

Leadership role modelling is incredibly important when it comes to culture change, and with good reason. It’s the single biggest influence on its success. So, when it comes to fostering teamwork and collaboration, we’ll start there.  

• Vulnerability. Leaders need to feel confident enough to share with their people that they don’t have all the answers, and ask for help from all levels of the organization.  

• Curiosity. Have a growth mindset and be open to hearing from others with different views. Cultivating a diverse and inclusive culture will fuel collaboration.  

• Explain your decision-making processes. Collaboration is not about including all employees in every decision, but you need to help your people understand your processes so they know when they are expected to be involved, and how?  

• Show you are making decisions for the whole organization. Leaders need to share stories about how the executive team is taking decisions collectively for the good of the enterprise, over and above their respective domains.  

• Review your systems. For example, performance management. Does your system support a collaborative culture, or undermine it? Your systems have to reward and reinforce collaboration behaviors in some way (while still recognising individual performance), otherwise you will create a say-do gap that is fatal for culture change.

How we can help you to improve team collaboration and communication skills

1. Many companies don’t believe they have to improve team collaboration. Our experience tells us otherwise, so we would start with a culture diagnostic to get a clear assessment from employees about what the current culture is, how that manifests itself in behaviors, and the beliefs driving them (the ‘why’ behind fostering teamwork and collaboration.)

2. Leadership role modelling is incredibly important when looking to improve team collaboration, and our Leading by Example program accelerates the building of trust, reiterates the importance of walking your talk on collaboration, and focuses on rapidly shifting leadership behaviors as the precursor to changing the culture of your whole organization.

3. Change is not a process to be managed or a system to change. It’s about leading and inspiring people, developing in them the mindset, behaviors, and resilience that will make any change stick. This is what our Leading Through Change program is all about, helping your organization to build and maintain the collaboration you need to succeed.  

Collaborative cultures may be rare, but with clear intention, leadership focus, and collective effort, they can be created and sustained. In fact, its rarity and the widespread illusion it is happening, is exactly what should make trying to improve team collaboration such an appealing way forward for organizations. Crack it, and you give your business a competitive advantage in a world where it’s harder than ever to stand out. Who wouldn’t want that?  

We can now support you with fostering teamwork and collaboration in more ways than simply culture transformation – we partner in business transformation, leadership acceleration, assessment & succession planning, executive and leadership coaching, and talent acquisition.
Get in touch to learn more about how you could improve team collaboration and get started.