Lack of Collaboration: Why It's So Costly, and How to Fix It

Last updated: September 3, 2026

Collaboration is the behavior of working with others, in-person or virtually, to produce something. It is the nature of business and a key factor for success, yet it is often lacking.

A lack of collaboration is rarely about people not wanting to work together. It's almost always one of six specific, fixable barriers, not a personality problem.

Some years ago, I was asked to run a conflict management training for a software company in Singapore. I explained to the client that providing people with conflict management strategies is a great idea, but the conflict would persist unless the underlying causes were addressed. I asked:

"Who is in conflict with whom, and about what?"

With more gentle probing, I discovered that the engineering team was motivated and rewarded to keep the servers online and secure. The innovation team was motivated and rewarded for developing new solutions and selling them to market.

'I'm curious,' I probed further. 'Does the innovation team need to test their beta software on the engineering team's servers?'

The answer was 'yes', and this was the source of the conflict: if the innovation team's product wasn't perfect, it negatively impacted the engineering team's key performance indicators.

The Barriers to Collaboration

There's an African Proverb that goes something like this:

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Humans work well together when they feel safe and part of a tribe. If there is conflict, the following barriers to collaboration may be present:

• Weak egos, driving a need for power over others
• Lack of confidence, causing people not to communicate
• Fear of consequences, leading to people keeping ideas to themselves
• An ill-designed reward system, creating competition between people and departments
• Out-of-date procedures, resulting in 'process over people'
• Unwillingness to consider others' perspectives, driving ignorance and arrogance

Effective leadership creates a culture and environment of psychological safety that addresses and negates these barriers. How to do this is covered in 'The New Leadership Playbook: Being Human Whilst Successfully Delivering Accelerated Results', but in short, you need to create two mindset shifts:

1. A shift from competition to abundance
2. A shift from solution first to needs first

Have you noticed how children will fight over who has the largest slice of cake? This is the mindset of scarcity because it feels like if someone else gets more, you get less. But have you noticed that, as an adult, if you collaborate, you can bake a bigger cake?

Moving from needs-first to solutions-first requires stepping back from reactive thinking to become aware of our needs and to consider the needs of other stakeholders.

For the software company I mentioned earlier, the engineers' need was security, and the innovation team's was experimentation. The needs were incompatible on a 'live' server, but when teams were reorganized to collaborate in a safe offline environment, the company was able to accelerate the creation of secure, innovative products that met its customers' needs without conflict!

What Weak Egos Actually Cost a Team

Nigel is sitting in his manager's office for his annual performance review. It had been a tough year, but Nigel had put in a superhuman effort and hit his targets. Nigel was expecting nothing but praise, so imagine his surprise when he heard: "You have met your quota, Nigel, but I have some concerns about how you got there."

His manager went on to explain. "Nigel, you have made this quarter all about you. You have heroically visited every client and been part of every deal, but is this sustainable? Your attrition is the highest of any manager, your colleagues find you rude and demanding, and you have refused their help when offered. Your people are demoralized. Is that the legacy you want to be remembered for?"

"But," stammered Nigel, "I thought you wanted the numbers?"

"I did, and I do," said his manager. "And it is possible to hit the numbers and coach your people, and collaborate with your peers, if you take on the mindset of a leader rather than try to be the hero."

Nigel is the weak-ego barrier in practice: a need for individual credit that quietly costs the team far more than it earns him.

What Confidence-Driven Collaboration Looks Like

Legendary basketball coach Doc Rivers, who led the 2008 Celtics to their first NBA championship in 22 years, faced the opposite problem to most teams: too much individual talent, not too little. Boston had traded for three superstar players, Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, and Kevin Garnett, each a leader in his own right. Rivers told them, "You're going to have to change." It wasn't about who was best. It was about being best, together.

Rivers built the team around the African concept of Ubuntu: "I can't be all I can be unless you are all you can be. I can never be threatened by you because you're good, because the better you are, the better I am." It's the abundance mindset from a few paragraphs up, made concrete: the more confident each player was, the more willing he was to pass the ball, defer credit, and make the team better rather than guard his own stats.

"Confidence creates collaboration."

That's the throughline across all the barriers above. Weak egos, low confidence, and fear of consequences are all, at root, the same problem: people who don't feel secure enough in their own standing to make someone else look good. Build that confidence, individually and in how the team is led, and collaboration no longer needs to be enforced. It becomes the obvious move.

Does your team need to address conflict or increase collaboration? Check out our self-leadership workshops and masterclasses.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does a lack of collaboration mean?
A lack of collaboration means people or teams who need to work together toward a shared outcome are instead working in isolation, in competition, or in conflict, usually because of weak egos, fear of consequences, or a reward system that pits them against each other rather than because they don't want to cooperate.

What does a lack of collaboration look like?
It looks like teams that need each other but are quietly working against each other's metrics, people who stop sharing ideas because they fear the consequences, individuals rewarded for personal wins at the expense of the team, and departments defending outdated processes over what would actually serve the people involved.

What causes a lack of collaboration?
Six barriers are most common: weak egos driving a need for power over others, low confidence that stops people communicating, fear of consequences that keeps ideas unshared, reward systems that create competition instead of alignment, outdated processes that put procedure over people, and an unwillingness to consider other people's perspectives.

How do you fix a lack of collaboration?
Two mindset shifts fix most collaboration problems: moving from a scarcity mindset (competition, defending your slice) to an abundance mindset (working together to make a bigger outcome for everyone), and moving from solutions-first to needs-first, understanding what each party actually needs before proposing how to get there.