More Collaborative Work Culture: 5 Ways to Break Down Barriers

Many Leaders Aspire to Build a More Collaborative Work Culture
Yet most organizations are still designed around functional silos. When success is measured by isolated departmental goals, collaboration becomes optional rather than part of how work gets done. If you want a truly collaborative culture — one driven by shared outcomes and enterprise-wide priorities — you must intentionally dismantle the structures, incentives, and habits that keep teams separated.

When departments operate in isolation, efficiency suffers, innovation slows, and well-intended efforts often work at cross-purposes. Collaboration doesn’t fail because people don’t want it; it fails because the system was never built to support it.

Overcoming Silos Is Mission-Critical to Building a More Collaborative Work Culture

The data is clear.

• Accenture research found that 93 percent of leaders view functional silos as the single greatest barrier to growth, yet only 25 percent believe their operating model has evolved fast enough to align to their strategy. Even more telling, organizations with de-siloed, fluid teams are 28 percent more likely to achieve the highest levels of revenue growth.
• A survey by the American Management Association revealed that 83 percent of executives report silos still exist in their organizations. Nearly all of them — 97 percent — agree those silos damage organizational health, business performance, and the customer experience.

In other words, leaders know silos are a problem. What continues to lag is the willingness to redesign how work actually gets done.

Timely Information Flow Matters Across Teams
An organization’s ability to innovate, grow, and remain competitive increasingly depends on how effectively it shares what people know, what they can do, and how they can help — across boundaries, not just within them.

Organizational Alignment Research shows that timely information flow across the company ranks as the fourth strongest differentiator between high- and low-performing organizations. The impact is not marginal. Faster, more transparent information sharing correlates directly with higher profitable revenue growth, stronger customer retention, greater leadership effectiveness, and deeper employee engagement.

When information moves freely, teams make better decisions, problems surface earlier, and opportunities are acted on faster. When it doesn’t, collaboration becomes performative and execution slows.

A more collaborative culture is not a “soft” aspiration. It is a practical, measurable way to unlock your organization’s full potential.

Five Ways to Break Barriers and Build a More Collaborative Work Culture
Beyond assessing your current culture to understand where collaboration breaks down, leaders must take deliberate action to remove the barriers that reinforce silos. Here are five practical ways to dismantle the organizational obstacles that limit effective, enterprise-wide collaboration:

1. Get Your Senior Leadership Team on the Same Page
   A more collaborative culture starts — or stalls — at the top. When the executive team is aligned, collaboration becomes the standard — not the exception.  Senior leaders must clearly understand and own their role in shaping how work gets done across the organization. Employees watch what leaders prioritize, reward, and tolerate. Those signals define the real norms, not the stated values.

   Leadership sets the conditions for collaboration by:

   • Identifying and aligning on the critical few strategic priorities that genuinely require cross-functional effort to succeed.
   • Modeling the behaviors they expect to see, while making it clear that siloed decision-making and back-channeling are unacceptable.
   • Establishing shared, enterprise-level goals that cut across functions and replace silo-based success metrics.
2. Clearly Define the Behaviors You Expect
   Collaboration does not improve through slogans or good intentions. Employees need a clear, shared understanding of what collaboration actually looks like in daily work. That means translating the idea of collaboration into specific, observable behaviors that define your desired culture.

   Be explicit about how people are expected to share information, make decisions, solve problems, and support colleagues across functions. When employees can see how their day-to-day actions either reinforce or undermine collaboration, expectations stop being abstract and start becoming actionable.

   Clarity creates consistency. And consistency is what turns collaboration from an aspiration into a habit.

3. Reinforce Desired Behaviors Through Accountability and Transparency
   Sustainable change does not happen through messaging alone. Decades of change management capability building research show that behavior shifts only when organizations consistently reinforce what matters — by measuring and rewarding desired behaviors and by addressing actions that undermine them.

   If collaboration is truly expected, employees at every level must experience it as a requirement for success, not an option. That means making collaboration visible in performance discussions, promotion decisions, and recognition — and applying consequences when silo-building behaviors persist.

   Nothing erodes credibility faster than exceptions. When high performers or senior leaders are allowed to prioritize individual goals at the expense of team outcomes, collaboration initiatives collapse. Accountability must be universal, or the culture will default back to silos.

4. Hire and Promote with Your Desired Culture in Mind
   Talent and technical expertise are necessary, but they are not sufficient. Hiring, promotion, and succession planning decisions should also reflect the workplace culture you are intentionally building. Who you elevate sends a powerful signal about what the organization truly values.

   Our after action review data consistently shows that leaders in highly collaborative organizations select and advance people who actively contribute to collective success. These individuals create psychological team safety, share information and resources freely, and invite diverse perspectives rather than protect turf.

   When collaboration is a prerequisite for advancement, culture stops being aspirational and starts becoming self-reinforcing.

5. Foster Open Communication that Strengthens Relationships
   Collaboration depends on how well people communicate, especially when perspectives differ. Teams need the skills — and the permission — to speak honestly, listen actively, and challenge ideas without damaging relationships.

   That means developing communicators who can encourage constructive debate, build trust quickly, seek and respond to feedback, and stay focused on working through issues productively. Open communication is not about being agreeable; it is about being respectful, direct, and committed to better outcomes.

   When communication is strong, relationships deepen — and collaboration becomes faster, not harder.

The Bottom Line
Organizational culture accounts for 40% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing companies. If your strategy depends on cross-functional collaboration, you cannot leave culture to chance. Be deliberate about building the conditions, behaviors, and accountability that enable collaboration to thrive — because when culture and strategy are aligned, both your people and your business perform at their peak.

To learn about the steps required to create a more collaborative work culture, download The 3 Levels of a High Performance Culture that You Must Get Right

Tristam Brown

Tristam Brown is a seasoned business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.