How to Build a Company Culture of Collaboration

Why Build A Company Culture of Collaboration
A culture of collaboration may sound appealing, but what tangible impact can it have on your business? change management consulting experts point to clear benefits:

• A recent study by at Babson College found that companies that promoted collaborative ways of working were 5 times more likely to be high performing.  Yet, research by DDI found that only 48% of employees work across organizational boundaries to accomplish goals.
• Harvard Business School found that an effective culture can account for up to half of the differential in performance between organizations in the same business.
• Our own organizational alignment research found that workplace culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

Here’s How We see it

• The Problem
  Customers expect a seamless, unified experience from companies — a single face representing the organization. At the same time, businesses face unprecedented strategic complexity and ambiguity. Leaders report bigger goals, tighter budgets, and accelerated timelines, while employees are navigating higher expectations, faster change, and the pressure to do more with less.Compounding this, many leadership teams fail to operate as true teams with interdependent, shared goals. Executives often manage their own domains like fiefdoms, lacking collective commitment to a coherent, aligned strategy. This siloed mentality frequently stems from insufficient strategic clarity, believability, trust, motivation, or cross-functional processes.

  The consequences are clear: fragmented responsibilities, guarded processes, hoarded information, and parochial structures. The result is unnecessary duplication, increased complexity, and internal workplace politics that drain focus from what truly matters — delivering value to the business and customers.

• The Opportunity
  This disconnect, however, presents a significant opportunity for performance improvement. Research from Accenture shows that de-siloed teams are 28% more likely to meet high-growth targets. Organizations that align leadership, teams, and culture around a common strategy unlock the potential to achieve more collectively than any single unit could on its own.
• The Solution: An Aligned, Collaborative Culture
  For many organizations, the path to thriving lies in building a culture of collaboration — one where employees work seamlessly across boundaries to advance shared goals. Achieving this may require a substantial transformation in how business is done. Cross-functional initiatives, strategic priorities, and collective accountability all hinge on establishing a collaborative culture that aligns behaviors, processes, and leadership with the organization’s overarching strategy.

Changing Culture is About Changing Minds: 4 Steps to Build a Company Culture of Collaboration
The process is not easy.  It requires clarity of purpose combined with high levels of alignment, patience and perseverance.  And it needs to start at the top.

1. Engage Senior Leadership
   How ready are top leaders to recognize and embrace the need for change? More importantly, how committed and capable are they of transforming their own behaviors, success metrics, and reward systems to enable true cross-functional collaboration?This is the critical first step toward driving real, organization-wide cultural change — aligning on strategic priorities that can only be achieved through genuine collaboration across functions.
2. Develop the Rationale
   It’s essential to evaluate not only whether leaders are ready to invest in change, but also whether they fully grasp the initiative’s motivation, vision, scope, and purpose:
   • • What will it achieve, and how vital is it to the organization’s future success?
     • Where is resistance likely to arise, and from whom?

   You’ll know you’re on the right track when all key stakeholders share a clear understanding of the current situation, the problem at hand, and the consequences of both success and failure.

3. Get Specific
   Now it’s time to take a closer look at what it will truly take to achieve the desired change. Begin by assessing your corporate culture to pinpoint the concrete first steps on the path to success and to answer critical questions:
   • How will a more collaborative culture manifest in day-to-day operations?
   • Which specific behaviors must shift?
   • What is the strategy for cascading this change throughout the organization?
4. Actively Engage Others
   Once senior leaders have fully understood, embraced, and internalized the desired changes — reaching alignment at the top — the next step is to actively engage the broader workforce. Just as with leadership, this process begins with ensuring willingness, readiness, understanding, and commitment across all levels.

The Bottom Line
Before tackling culture change, leaders must fully embrace its necessity, understand the challenges ahead, and hold a clear vision of success. They need to be convinced that fostering a culture of collaboration is essential for driving their teams toward shared strategic goals.

To learn more about how to build a company culture of collaboration, download Changing Corporate Culture: 4 Do’s and 3 Don’ts