Collaborative Work Culture

someone said to me the other week, "but i'm not a ceo like you, i can't go and change the whole culture." and they're right, they can't. trying to get the people at the top to agree that the culture needs fixing when they don't think anything's wrong with it in the first place is a non-starter, and you'll burn yourself out trying. so is the only option to leave? or is there something you can try first. there is, and it's this. you build a micro culture with the team around you. you get everyone together, whether that's three of you or nine of you, and you agree how this team is going to operate, regardless of what's happening above your heads. and it doesn't have to be some big off-site with post-it notes, it can genuinely be one conversation where you all agree on the handful of things that are non-negotiable in here. it might look like nobody in this team finds out about their own workload from a rumour. it might be that every meeting has a reason and an agenda before it lands in someone's calendar, so no one's sat there all afternoon with a knot in their stomach wondering what they've done. it might be as simple as we don't do "let's take this offline" in here, if it's raised in the room then we deal with it in the room. now, i'm a realist, and i want to be straight with you about what this is. a good team inside a bad company is a fragile thing, because sooner or later someone above you makes a decision over your head and your people watch it happen. so a micro culture isn't a cure, it's shelter. it's the thing that gives you and the people around you somewhere decent to work while you work out whether the rest of the place is worth staying for. and if you're not the one who leads the team, you can still do this, it's just smaller. you can be the person who over-communicates when nobody else does, who tells their colleague what's coming before it lands on them, who doesn't send the "quick call?" with no context. people notice, and it spreads further than you'd think. in an ideal world the whole culture changes. but starting with your team could change the entire dynamic of the place you call work.

One of the clearest signals of whether a transformation is working isn’t in the plan - it’s in the conversations happening in your teams. So pay close attention to the frequency of healthy debate, constructive challenge and openness to new and divergent ideas that takes place. If the frequency is low… …there is the risk of creating the illusion of performance because people readily ‘understand’ each other, agree on everything, collaboration seems to flow smoothly and there is a collective sensation of progress. However, the opportunity cost is teams gets trapped in their own paradigms, opportunities get overlooked, risks ignored - and ultimately their output becomes derivative not innovative, performance diminishes as opposed to improving and compounding. If the frequency is high… …there is a level of psychological safety that allows for team members to be more objective, to speak up with relevant ideas, to constructively challenge each other, and bring their diverse perspectives and experiences to the table - in the knowledge it won’t be held against them. This opens up the opportunity of reframing the paradigm, and connecting different perspectives and ideas. Ingredients for creativity, innovation, resilience and performance. You see homogeneous teams might feel easier, but easy doesn’t translate into Performance. Here are a few ideas to experiment with your teams… 1. Intentionally foster a team environment that replaces scepticism with intellectual curiosity, an open and learning mindset.   2. Consider how you can create a ways of working that allows all ideas and perspectives from everyone in the room to be heard. 3. Encourage dissenting perspectives. Surrounding yourself with people who are willing to disagree with you and challenge your perspectives and each other. 4. Consider whether you may need to invite others to that creative or idea generation meeting to ensure you get a broader perspective. 5. De-stigmatise failure through sharing past mistakes and celebrating lessons learnt. 6. Institutionalise a team culture of healthy candour. Candour is one of the key attributes to improving the quality of output, levelling up creativity and enabling effective collaboration. What would you add? #transformation #culture #psychologicalsafety

A GenZ perspective on company culture... Most freshers look outside their companies instead of exploring an internal switch. Often, new hires struggle with team-culture misalignment and end up unhappy with their roles. Since, the employees are also brand ambassadors in their peer circle, the company image takes a hit. Company culture in large organisations works at two levels: the macro and the micro. The macro is shaped by the organisation as a whole. The micro climate is shaped by your immediate leadership and manager, influenced by their working style, personality, and the nature of the work itself. Since our day-to-day experience is with the local team, many people start mistaking the micro culture for the entire organisation. I recently attended a mentorship program in my organisation that paired us with leaders from different teams and entities. Programs like these help ideas flow across the organisation, but they also make it easier to recognise differences in work environments and cultures. This opens not just the possibility but also awareness of an internal switch for anyone considering a move. This also adds a layer of depth when these employees talk and feel about their organisations. Sometimes, the opportunity you’re searching for is sitting just in the next department.

Some of the most powerful breakthroughs start with a surprise. An unexpected event happens. Someone recognizes its potential. And then, someone chooses to act on it. A recent article from Harvard Business Review highlights the story of LASIK eye surgery. It wasn’t developed through a carefully planned roadmap, but instead emerged when doctors discovered that a femtosecond laser caused far less damage than a scalpel. Or take the example of the rolling suitcase, created not through a boardroom brainstorm, but because someone got tired of carrying heavy equipment on a wheeled skid. When we become open to the unexpected, we open the door to innovation. But this doesn’t happen by accident; it happens when we create the conditions for curiosity to thrive. When employees are engaged and feel safe and encouraged to explore, question, and even challenge the status quo, their intrinsic motivation and commitment soar. They become more invested not just in their tasks, but in the organization's success. Leaders play a pivotal role. By inviting your teams to share their surprising observations, encouraging experimentation, and making it okay to try things that might not work, you're not just fostering innovation; you're actively cultivating an engaged workforce. When employees see their ideas welcomed, even the "failures" as learning opportunities, they feel valued and empowered. This sense of psychological safety is a cornerstone of deep engagement. And don’t underestimate the power of bringing different minds together. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is where fresh thinking happens and where people connect the dots others don’t see. When we foster a culture of engagement, serendipity isn’t just possible — it’s inevitable. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/eX5QZk5T #EmployeeEngagement #Innovation #WorkplaceCulture #PeopleFirst #FutureOfWork

The lesson I take from so many dispersed teams I’ve worked with over the years is that great collaboration is not about shrinking the distance. It is about deepening the connection. Time zones, language barriers, and cultural nuances make working together across borders uniquely challenging. I see these dynamics regularly: smart, dedicated people who care deeply about their work but struggle to truly see and understand one another. One of the tools I often use in my work with global teams is the Harvard Business School case titled Greg James at Sun Microsystems. It tells the story of a manager leading a 45-person team spread across the U.S., France, India, and the UAE. When a major client system failed, the issue turned out not to be technical but human. Each location saw the problem differently. Misunderstandings built up across time zones. Tensions grew between teams that rarely met in person. What looked like a system failure was really a connection failure. What I find powerful about this story, and what I see mirrored in so many organizations today, is that the path forward is about rethinking how we create connection, trust, and fairness across distance. It is not where many leaders go naturally: new tools or tighter control. Here are three useful practices for dispersed teams to adopt. (1) Create shared context, not just shared goals. Misalignment often comes from not understanding how others work, not what they’re working on. Try brief “work tours,” where teams explain their daily realities and constraints. Context builds empathy, and empathy builds speed. (2) Build trust through reflection, not just reliability. Trust deepens when people feel seen and understood. After cross-site collaborations, ask: “What surprised you about how others see us?” That simple reflection can transform relationships. (3) Design fairness into the system. Uneven meeting times, visibility, or opportunities quickly erode respect. Rotate schedules, celebrate behind-the-scenes work, and make sure recognition travels across time zones. Fairness is a leadership design choice, not a nice-to-have. Distance will always be part of global work, but disconnection doesn’t have to be. When leaders intentionally design for shared understanding, reflected trust, and structural fairness, I've found, distributed teams flourish. #collaboration #global #learning #leadership #connection Case here: https://lnkd.in/eZfhxnGW

The #1 mistake I see companies make isn’t strategy. It’s collaboration. And it’s costing you more than you think. Here’s what’s happening: You’re treating performance like an individual sport. One “expert.” One “owner.” One “hero.” But here’s the problem with that approach… One study of 222 project teams found something remarkable: Groups outperformed their most proficient member 97% of the time. 97%. Let that sink in. So if your team is stuck, stop asking: “Who’s the expert?” Start asking: “How do we solve this together?” That shift changes everything. Here’s the simplest question I use with leadership teams: “What do you see that I don’t?” Then I do one thing most teams skip… I make it safe for the quiet people to speak first. Why? Because the first voices shape the whole room. If the loudest person goes first, everyone else just agrees or stays silent. Equal voice isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s how you get: • Better decisions • Faster alignment • Fewer blind spots And you have to measure it—not just outcomes, but collaboration behaviors. Try this for 30 days: Every meeting ends with: “What’s one risk we’re not naming?” “What’s one idea we didn’t hear yet?” Then assign the next step as a team— not a hero. Here’s the truth: If you fix collaboration, results follow. If you don’t, even great strategy collapses under friction. Stop building teams that depend on one genius. Build teams that compound intelligence. That’s how you turn good teams into unstoppable ones.

Most organizations want more collaboration. Fewer know specifically why and that ambiguity is usually the reason the efforts to build it do not hold. This is the starting point for any serious attempt to increase teamwork across an organization. Clarity about where collaboration is actually needed, how it creates value in that specific context, and what would be lost if it did not improve. Without that clarity, the actions taken tend to be generic culture programmes, team-building exercises, values statements and the results tend to be correspondingly shallow. When you have that clarity, the research points to a set of levers that work. All of them, not one or two. People: teams with higher average levels of agreeableness tend to be more cooperative. Hiring and developing for this matters. Leaders who support change and model learning have the power to drive team culture more effectively than almost any structural intervention. Tasks: framing work as genuinely interdependent so that each person can see how their contribution connects to the whole makes cooperative behaviour more likely and attracts more cooperative people over time. Recognition: at the point where bonuses, promotions, and assignments are decided, the behaviours that are rewarded shape the culture more directly than any stated value. If collaboration is not being actively recognised at those moments, the culture will not sustain it. And one finding from the research on multi-team systems that I find particularly important is coordination among leaders across teams matters more than coordination within individual teams for overall system performance. In other words, get the leadership layer aligned on goals and values and then give the operational teams the autonomy to execute. Trying to coordinate directly at the operational level is actually counterproductive. The collaboration challenge is a leadership challenge. It starts, and is sustained, at the top. #Collaboration #TeamPerformance #LeadershipCulture #OrganisationalBehaviour #RandallPeterson

In so many organisations, so many people have so many ideas, skills and knowledge sets that could be of incredible value but their voices so often go unheard, because they work in a team or department that isn’t leading on the challenge, or their job description is only accessing 10% of their experience, expertise and interest. It is why it is so important to get people to work across teams and to broker and to catalyse that. The U.S. military have liaison officers who facilitate communication between elements of the organisation to ensure mutual understanding and unity of purpose and action. Liaison is the most commonly employed technique for establishing and maintaining close, continuous, physical communication between commands. It ensures that leaders and teams have a real time awareness of talent and expertise, wherever it may be, so that it can be deployed quickly and with immediate impact. Maybe, create a centralised information centre, where people can see what is going on where in the organisation, and can contribute through online portals to offer support and ideas. Increasingly, organisations are holding hackathons, during working hours for people to meet in open spaces, shares ideas and challenges, in order to form working groups and focused teams. I often advise clients to build work exchanges into their professional development cycles, so that people get the chance to experience other roles and responsibilities within the organisation, not only to build empathy but to foster new relationships and opportunities for information and idea exchanges. Start to see roles as missions rather than fixed job descriptions, so that colleagues can move when appropriate but always have a home base to return to.   Make sure that leaders at all levels are not only held to account for planning, strategy, vision, culture and performance but for cross-team collaboration. It is too easy for leaders to role model the silo-ing and cross departmental blame shifting that can so easily poison an organisation’s collegiate potential.  

Most teams I have worked with struggled with teamwork and psychological safety because they didn’t have a clear system for working together. While I help teams design their own set of norms, commitments, rituals, and routines in my Team Synergy Workshop to make collaboration easier and safer, this book may be an inspiration for you. 📖 Team: Getting Things Done with Others by David Allen and Edward Lamont takes the famous GTD methodology and applies it to groups. It shows what it takes for teams, not just individuals, to actually get things done together. Here are 5 ideas from the book that I find especially relevant: 1. Separate “stuff” from commitments Most conflicts come not from workload but from unclear expectations. First agree: is this an idea, an action, or just noise? 2. Define the “next action” in team language Saying “let’s improve communication” means nothing. Saying “Anna drafts an agenda for Monday’s meeting by Friday” gives clarity. 3. Close open loops quickly Every unaddressed promise or vague task lingers in people’s heads and drains energy. Teams that regularly clear the air free up enormous capacity. 4. Use context, not just priority Not all tasks fit neatly into “urgent” or “important.” Ask instead: what can we do here and now, given who is present and what resources we have? 5. Ritualize review, don’t improvise it A weekly review is not optional. Without it, teams lose alignment, let small issues pile up, and slide into chaos. With it, they reset and refocus together. Building these simple practices will not only improve your team's productivity, but it will also help your team to create the clarity and trust that make psychological safety and high performance possible. P.S.: What book or idea has recently improved the way your team works together?

Your company doesn't have one culture. It has as many cultures as it has managers. We like to think of company culture as consistent. Ideally, every team member would receive the same experience of a healthy culture. In reality, every company culture is a collection of manager cultures (micro-cultures). The strengths and skills of each manager shape the  micro-culture your employees live in. The healthiest company cultures see managers not just as producers or middlemen but as ambassadors of the culture. When their microcultures align with the overall vision, team members feel stability and connection. When they don’t, culture feels like a bait-and-switch.