As organizations grow, team-level collaboration starts to strain. Most teams start aligned enough: they share goals, meet regularly, and work through problems in real time. However, as more teams form, especially across different functions, maintaining strong coordination becomes increasingly difficult.
You start to see:
- Duplicate efforts or missed handoffs
- Delayed decisions or unclear next steps
- Local optimization over shared progress
These are signs of drift. As structure increases and context fragments, teams begin to reinforce different ways of working.
What Consistency Looks Like
Consistency doesn’t mean every team operates the same way. It means that teams across the organization are grounded in the same core habits:
- Shared goals are visible and referenced regularly
- Roles and responsibilities are named and agreed on
- Decisions are clearly made, communicated, and followed through
- Information is shared in time for others to act on it
- Dependencies are surfaced and addressed as part of the work
These behaviors aren’t glamorous, but they note the difference between teams that deliver together and teams that quietly diverge.
What to Watch For
You don’t need a new framework; you need to pay attention to the patterns. Here are a few signals to look for across your teams:
These signals tell you how a team is working, before bigger problems begin to emerge.
How to Reinforce the Right Habits
Strong collaboration is a product of repeated, supported behavior. That means we need to create the right conditions for those behaviors to take hold.
Here’s how to start:
- Make the work visible
Decisions, owners, blockers…write them down. When teams can see what’s been agreed to, they’re more likely to follow through.
- Prompt the right questions
Simple prompts work:
- “What decision needs to be made?”
- “Who’s owning this?”
- “Is anything blocking us?”
These kinds of questions build muscle and surface ambiguity before it becomes a delay.
- Name and reinforce helpful behavior
When someone cues a decision, links the work to a goal, or flags a blocker, call it out. Reinforce behaviors that lead to scaled alignment.
- Pay attention to process, not just outcomes
Great results can come from messy collaboration, but that doesn’t make it sustainable. Look at how the work is happening, not just whether it gets done.
Final Thought: Scale Doesn't Have to be Messy
As organizations grow, it’s easy to assume that collaboration will get messier, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
When the right behaviors are supported (across teams, across functions, and across time), collaboration can scale. It may not be perfect, but it can be predictable, and that makes all the difference.
