How Teams Can Collaborate Better

Welcome back to Work Smarter, your guide to reclaiming your time, restoring your well-being, and succeeding in work and life.

If you are beginning your journey with me to individual, team, and organizational success, you can learn a little more about what I do here .

In my last newsletter, we played with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon and learned How to Activate a Purpose-Built Network .

So let’s say you have a team that you love, but you want to be more efficient. 60% of teams fail to meet their strategic objectives, yet teams remain the primary structure organizations use to get work done.

We conducted network surveys of more than 30,000 employees. Then we interviewed 100 leaders of collaborative efforts in 20 organizations.

We identified 6 network traps that undermined performance in 88% of the organizations that we’ve studied, but don’t worry! We also identified steps teams can take to fix or prevent collaboration from derailing their success.

6 Types of Collaborative Dysfunction:

1. Hub and Spoke

When excessive reliance on one or a small number of leaders or experts slows decision making, blocks innovation, alienates team members, and overloads leaders.

What drives this pattern: A strict adherence to a command-and-control mindset, ego needs, and fear of failure can drive leaders to behave in ways that impede collaboration. Team members can be overly dependent on leaders or experts, making them hesitant to act without approval or eager to seek validation. Fear-driven cultures amplify these behaviors. The structural elements of teams and organizations—the way in which roles, decision-rights and work processes are defined—drive this pattern as well.

What you can do: Reduce the information the central person is sought for, decisions they are pulled into, and/or work they are responsible for. Solutions include leadership coaching that focuses on what not how; distributing knowledge; integrating expertise through joint work; and revising decision-rights allocations, roles and/or incentives to shift the burden and engage the team more fluidly. Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton write about why Managers Can’t Do It All in the Harvard Business Review, expanding on how the role is shifting from manager to people leader.

2. Disenfranchised Nodes

When some team members are marginalized and their ability to access resources and contribute to the team is stunted, negatively affecting group and individual performance.

What drives this pattern: Leaders elevate some group members and marginalize others, often by leaning on certain familiar people more. Favored team members begin to coordinate with each other, fueling a lack of trust by others in the group. Overload or onerous processes or decisions cause some members to become disillusioned and withdraw. Others are disconnected by virtue of status or physical location, for example remote workers are left out of the serendipitous ways that groups work when they are located together. 

What you can do: Create a process or role for recognizing and rescuing the disenfranchised. Embed inclusion as a group value. Add touchpoints to give individuals a greater voice in or more opportunity to participate in the group. Use technology support (such as video) to overcome geographic disconnection. Ravin Jesuthasan speaks on the importance of improving diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, preventing historically marginalized groups from remaining marginalized here .

3. Misaligned Nodes

When individuals and factions within a group don’t cohere, creating tears in the collaborative fabric that slow down work, create toxic environments, and undermine project success.

What drives this pattern: Distrust, disagreements or competition among leaders, functions or business units may be created by structural drivers, such as decision rights, or conflicting incentives. People may work at cross purposes due to goals external to the group. Over-focus on one’s expertise or adherence to personal/occupational values can block awareness around the importance of the capabilities that other factions provide and the value that might come from integrating them.

What you can do: Create and emphasize shared goals and priorities, reinforced by metrics and accountability. Establish forums to create value of group goals and facilitate trust-building. Set explicit processes to identify and address misalignments. Use exercises that enable members to connect outside the group context and re-set relationships. Donald Sull, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig explore why Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation , and what you can do to prevent it.

4. Overwhelmed Nodes

When team members cannot keep up with the collaborative demands placed upon them, leading to insufficient time for work, inefficient decision making, excessive compromise, lower engagement, and ultimately burnout.

What drives this pattern: The growth of the group surpasses the limits of its design. Too much work is assigned by leaders or assumed by members, accompanied by poorly defined role and accountability parameters. Collaborative workload metrics and analytics are ineffective or missing, leaving many demands invisible. Over-inclusion—often driven by fear of making unilateral decisions or of being left out—contributes to people taking on more than they can handle.

What you can do: Redesign the structure and work of the group, clearly delineating roles, responsibilities and true interdependencies. Map impact-to-effort of new activities. Reduce low-value activities and re-balance work. Adopt and practice meeting and communication discipline. Define and respect roles and responsibilities. Empower members to say “no.” Check out Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner on their podcast No Stupid Questions , where they ask, “How can you stop catastrophizing?”

5. Isolated Networks

When impermeable group borders block stakeholder input and external resources/expertise resulting in flawed decisions, innovation failures and misalignment with the organization.

What drives this pattern: Leaders or project practices—such as skunkworks or agile initiatives—purposely separate a group and cut it off from potential input or assistance. A group becomes too focused on optimizing the outcome based on its expertise or values and not the end need. Isolation or lack of integration with stakeholders creates an echo chamber of ideas, and shifting context creates disconnect.

What you can do: Engage in systematic inclusion of relevant stakeholders and influencers, including both positive and negative opinion leaders. Build in time for iteration with stakeholders. Focus on the outcomes from the stakeholder perspective, not just the execution process. Provide groups with greater visibility into organizational goals and outcomes. We’ve seen a huge shift in how our workplaces function in the last two years. Dale Buss explores 12 Ways Companies Are Adapting To The New Work Place .

6. Priority Overload

When external demands cause group members to lose sight of their mission and highest priorities, resulting in execution and performance shortfalls.

What drives this pattern: An inability to manage demands on the team, as external leaders ask too much or set too many goals at once. Lack of North Star clarity/agreement among project leaders or overemphasis “one firm” culture. Personal aspirations and cultural values (such as servant-based mindsets and the desire to “just say yes”) lead to overcommitment.

What you can do: Michael Porter famously said, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Map activities for external stakeholders. Review demands based on task and collaborative footprint. Force decision makers to make tradeoffs of demands or timing. Adopt priority definition process and mechanism or coordinator to screen incoming requests for help. Be transparent about workload and competing demands, and reset group priorities collectively. Rose Holllister and Michael D. Watkins break down how to combat Too Many Projects in Harvard Business Review.

Want more tips on how to collaborate effectively? Subscribe to Work Smarter or connect with me for a network analysis of your specific challenges and goals.