I coach a senior operations executive who runs much of his company’s technology and supply chain functions. He’s spotted an opportunity that would save real money and make things better for both customers and employees. There’s just one problem: pulling it off requires his team and another department to work together, across the fence. The head of that other department isn’t opposed to the idea. He’s just not giving it enough attention, and he isn’t directing his team to actually make the change happen.

If you’ve led anything beyond your own function, you’ve lived this. Finding a good idea is rarely the hard part. Getting someone who doesn’t report to you, who you don’t have direct authority over, to prioritize your priority — that’s the hard part.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Work today runs on a matrix, not an org chart. Nearly everything that gets done well — a new product launch, a customer issue resolved, an initiative that actually ships — requires people from different teams working together, often people who don’t report to each other at all.

Research backs up why this matters. Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends research found that shifting toward a team-based organizational model improves performance, often significantly. And the McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that improving collaboration and communication within and across organizations can raise the productivity of knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent.

There’s a second, quieter benefit too. When we collaborate, we learn. We see how someone else views the problem. We hear about constraints we didn’t know existed. We pick up new approaches to problems we thought we’d already solved. Collaboration isn’t just a productivity lever — it’s one of the best professional development tools available, and it’s free.

What Gets in the Way

If collaboration is this valuable, why is it still so hard to get right?

Mismatched priorities. What’s urgent for you may not be urgent for me. I’d love to help, but my team is heads-down on our own goals, and that’s where our time goes. This usually isn’t bad faith — it’s bandwidth. Research from Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant in Harvard Business Review found that the time managers and employees spend on collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more in recent decades, and that 20 to 35 percent of the value-added collaboration in an organization comes from just 3 to 5 percent of employees. Collaboration is unevenly distributed, and the people who give the most are often stretched the thinnest.

Misaligned incentives. If my team’s goals or KPIs don’t reward me for helping you — or actively work against them — I have very little reason to say yes.

Bad history. If our last attempt to work together was frustrating, we’re not eager to jump back in. Trust, once spent, is expensive to rebuild.

No time to even talk about it. We’re all in back-to-back meetings, and collaboration requires actual conversation — agreeing on outcomes, who owns what, and by when. Without that conversation, collaboration doesn’t happen; it just gets talked about.

Six Conditions for Collaboration That Actually Works

None of this means collaboration is doomed. It means it needs to be built deliberately, especially when you’re trying to move something forward with people who don’t report to you. Here’s what I’ve seen work:

1. Anchor in a goal everyone already has to care about. Don’t sell the project on how it helps you. Sell it on what it means for the organization — its growth, its customers, its results. Focus on the higher-level goals, beyond your individual departments. And be honest about the cost of inaction: what stays broken, what keeps costing money, if nothing changes.

2. Bring in allies. It’s much harder to ignore a request when more than one department is asking. If Finance is tired of inaccurate forecasts caused by last-minute fixes, they’re a natural ally — and their presence in the room changes the conversation.

3. Agree on what success looks like, together. Get specific: “When we’re done, we’ll have a reliable report with these fields.” Better yet, let your peers help define what “done” looks like. People commit harder to what they help create. Also talk about the cost of doing nothing, and paint the picture of what changes once the work is in place.

4. Set milestones you can actually see. Keep the early ones close together so the team feels progress quickly. Early wins build momentum; momentum builds commitment.

5. Name ownership and outcomes out loud. “Just to confirm — your team owns finishing X by this date, and we’ll know it’s working when Z is true.” Be annoyingly, clear about what success looks like and who does what. Ambiguity is where collaboration quietly dies.

6. Show up as a partner, not just a requester. A quick “thanks” can read as a formality. Make it specific and forward-looking instead: “This matters, and my team is ready to help make it happen — tell us what you need from us.” That signals real investment, not just gratitude, and it’s what makes the next ask land differently.

What You Actually Get

When it works, you get the obvious win: the problem gets solved, the metric moves, the experience improves. But you also get something that outlasts the project. You’ve shown your organization a model for how teams can work together well. You’ve raised the bar on what people expect collaboration to look like. And you’ve made the next ask — yours or someone else’s — a little bit easier.

That compounding effect is, in the end, the real return on collaboration.