Ask Christa! How Can I Improve Collaboration in My Team? (S4E37)

Introduction and Listener Question

Hi everyone and welcome to Ask Christa! the place where you can ask questions about how to work through business challenges and workplace issues. I'm Christa Dhimo and today’s listener question is focused on a critical, and very competitive, life skill. Here’s the question:

“I manage a team of six people. We all support a vital system for our organization. We interface with the business side, and we have a sister-team we work with very closely supporting the system side. Our company is growing, which is good for stability, and we are also able to hire properly as we grow. Six months ago we hired two new people on the business-side team, my team. Before their hire, all candidates interviewed with the business and systems teams plus a mixed panel of my team and my counterpart’s team for the final rounds. We hired based on skill, but placed emphasis on working style and fit as well as bringing in new ways of working.

 “That last piece is creating some tension. One of our new hires on the business side—my team—prefers to meet with internal clients on his own and does not share information that would help the team learn and apply different and sometimes better ways of working. As a shared service across multiple teams, this is a key part of his role. I recently brought this up in our 1:1 check in, and he said it seemed wasteful to have to work with the team when it’s something he knows could benefit his internal client and probably not the others on the team. He feels that working with the team makes the process longer. He understood the reasons behind collaborating, he just didn’t seem to value the reason as I expected, and this was a big part of the interviewing process.

 “My new employee hasn't displayed defensive or closed off behavior and he is open to being more collaborative, but his uncollaborative behavior has led to riffs with the existing team, especially since collaboration and working as a team is so vital and was explained that way throughout the interview process, including in the job description and organizational goals. How do I get my team to collaborate better?”

 Assumptions About the Definition of Collaboration

There are a lot of resources and tips and tricks to help with this, so my answer is going to focus on what I see as the most common assumptions about collaboration, and these assumptions lead to issues.

 The first is how many people think of collaboration as cooperation. They’re actually not the same. Collaboration is about working together—melding together—to achieve a shared result produced by the team, where everyone contributed their fair share to the result. It’s about solving problems, making decisions and changes together, give and take, and working through challenges constructively to achieve the shared goal. It could be with a team in your organization or with a team outside of your organization, like clients and customers or vendors and partners. 

Cooperation is when you work with someone and offer assistance or support or guidance so THEY can achieve a result they’ve been tasked with or so YOU can achieve a result you’ve been tasked with. It’s not a SHARED goal, though. These are individual goals—even if you work in the same team, the idea is about how individuals are able to meet or exceed individual goals as a result of a cooperative effort by someone who is not directly a part of that goal.

For this listener’s question, it could be that the new hire is used to being cooperative—he is used to lending support or assistance to others for their success, but he is not used to working with others to achieve a shared team goal. The listener described how he does his work alone, individually, and also how he makes decisions about engaging in collaborative efforts based on his perception of whether it will be useful for him or the team. And I say this to make a point about how easy it might be for someone to confuse collaboration with cooperation—not as a means to introduce guesswork as a viable option for a manager. 

Truly, the best and only way to address a situation like this is directly with your employee and without putting too much thought into what he or she may be thinking. We should always use a direct approach and simply… ask.

The other assumption I see floated all over is that collaboration is the same as consensus or is how you drive to consensus, so if you “collaborate,” it means everyone needs to agree before you can achieve what needs to be achieved. This ALSO isn’t true. YES, collaborations can lead to consensus, and sure, collaborations may be easier if you have consensus, but collaborating is how you work together TO achieve a shared goal. If you’re truly committed to collaborating, the team will discuss and decide how they’ll make decisions, and the high-functioning, collaborative teams will ask for a tie-breaker if they get into a gridlock situation and cannot make a decision. That’s typically when a key stakeholder or a manager steps in and makes the next-step decision SO THAT THE TEAM can move on. And, the team does in fact move on. 

Consensus isn’t the goal of collaboration, though. A shared RESULT—a shared OUTCOME, a shared work product—is the goal. Consensus may or may not be something you achieve along the way, though, and if you have a team member who believes collaboration means consensus, they may automatically move away from collaborating, concerned that it may be process-heavy and/or slow them down. It also means they do not think of collaboration as having a stake in the success of a team goal.

I say all this because it’s REALLY important for managers and leaders to talk about collaboration as a way of working together to achieve that shared result, especially if you’re building or repairing a foundation for collaborating. As stated earlier, it could be solving problems, making improvements, increasing productivity; it could also be more specific, like reducing or leveling out or sharing workloads during high impact times, or designing, creating, then producing and launching a highly complex product.

And by the way, if your team has individual goals and none of them is shared, or only two team members have shared goals, then it could be that there is no need for the full team to collaborate on a regular basis. But in reality, most teams have shared goals, so I don’t suspect many will fall into a category where the team doesn’t collaborate more frequently. It’s just important to know what collaboration means as a starting point when building or repairing a collaborative team culture.

Before I go any further, there is one caveat I need to make about people’s ability to collaborate: people often become LESS collaborative at work when they’re under time pressure or workload stress even when they are clear on what collaboration means and their role in the success of such a collaboration

SO, with ALL that build up, I’ll answer the question directly: the best way to get a team to collaborate better is to first: clarify and normalize what collaboration means, why it’s a GOOD thing (and I’ll include some of that in the show notes, but you can find hundreds of evidence-based reasons why collaboration is a GOOD thing for teams), and the second way is to set an expectation that collaboration is a foundational and necessary enabler for your team to work well together to achieve their shared goals.

The Manager’s Role to Improve Team Collaboration

But you do need to know more than that, so let’s talk about collaboration as a trait and a skill. Some people are naturally born to collaborate with others. Some… not so much, but the good news is… if you’re not a naturally collaborative person, you can learn, practice, and BUILD collaboration skills. And… good or bad, those are vital skills to have as a good human if you want to work well with others—or even LIVE well with others.

And remember: the “working well with others in a team” isn’t just about YOUR team. A lot of people forget this part. As mentioned earlier, it could be how you work with clients and customers, how you work with vendors and partners… how you work in a volunteer role. Whether you’re able to even collaborate in your family, where you can work together to… solve problems, determine a better way, improve conditions. 

Now… here’s an important question: what’s the most important part of the definition? When I say, “collaboration means working together to achieve a shared goal,” what’s the most critical part?

MOST of you probably agree that the “working together” part is the most critical part of collaboration.

BUT, in the context of organizational performance, I want you to instead focus on the second part: to achieve a shared goal. This must be the purpose behind ANY and EVERY collaboration, and if you’re seeing tension or a strain in your team and you believe it’s because they are lacking in collaboration, or maybe they don’t believe it applies—as might be the case with the new hires our listener is describing—it’s likely because they’ve lost site of, or perhaps aren’t even aware, of the shared goal, the shared result…. The reason behind WHY they are working together to begin with. 

So, start with what collaboration means to you and why it’s an expectation—a foundational necessity—in your team by providing the definition of collaboration. Next, make sure everyone is aware of the shared goals, which is the evidence behind WHY they must collaborate.

The last part is making sure you, as a manager, are keeping up with the skills of the team: who needs help in collaboration skills? Who could use some practice? Who deserves recognition as a role model?

Rinse. Repeat.

Additional Resources

Your additional resources are as always located in the show notes, and for this listener question, I’ve included two great article from job search sites. It’s no surprise that you’ll find articles about collaboration in these sites because collaboration is one of the most important skills in the workplace no matter WHERE you work.

The first articles is called, “Collaboration skills: How to improve them and examples for your resume.” It’s from the Seek website and was published in April 2024.

The next article is from the Indeed Editorial Team, and I’ve found excellent resources there, called “Collaboration Skills: Examples and Ways to Improve them.” It was published in July 2025 under their Career Advice section.

Wrap Up & Submitting Your Questions

And that’s a WRAP!!! for Episode 37 and the start of season 4 where I'll be focused on listener questions focused on Doing the Work.

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