Every executive I know is trying to accomplish something bigger than simply delivering results.

They’re trying to create an organization where leaders, departments, teams, and individuals genuinely share ownership of the mission instead of working at cross-purposes or creating unnecessary friction.

Creating shared ownership isn’t something you can assign. It requires something much deeper.

We spend enormous energy improving communication, strengthening processes, running better projects, and developing strong strategic plans. And we should. But far less attention is paid to what people are actually giving one another inside those meetings.

People are constantly giving—or withholding—gifts like attention, honesty, encouragement, confidence, and grace.

Collaboration isn’t primarily what we do together. It’s what we intentionally give one another while we’re doing the work.

The quality of our collaboration is determined less by what’s written on the agenda than by what’s passed between people.

Leaders experience this every day.

Whether you’re a CEO, executive, department leader, manager, or individual contributor, much of your success depends on people you influence as much as people you manage. That’s why what we give one another matters so much.

This simple idea became the foundation for what I call the Four Collaboration Passes.

Here’s one practice you can use immediately.

If collaboration is built by what people give one another, the first step is discovering what people actually need.

Before your next leadership meeting, project kickoff, planning session, team meeting, or when your team feels stuck, try something different.

Before jumping into the agenda, go around the room and ask one simple question:

“What’s one thing you need from this group in order to succeed?”

You might hear:

• “I need people to speak up sooner.”
• “I need more context.”
• “I need data and tools.”
• “I need help.”
• “I need to know it’s okay to disagree.”
• “I need to feel like I’m not carrying this alone.”

Some groups will answer this question immediately. Others may hesitate. That’s natural. People are more willing to answer honestly when they’ve seen that the group genuinely wants to help them succeed.

What you’ve done is shift the conversation from just “What do we need to get done?” to “How can we help each other succeed?”

Shared ownership isn’t built through agendas or assignments. It’s built one interaction at a time, as people intentionally give one another what they need to succeed.

That’s the idea behind Uncommon Collaboration™.

 

Every leader wants a team that isn’t just working hard but doing the best work they’ve ever done together. They want people who take initiative, own problems, bring great ideas, collaborate across boundaries, make good decisions, and move the organization forward together.

To achieve that, leaders naturally tend to focus on goals, metrics, accountability, systems, and processes. Goals, metrics, accountability, systems, and processes all matter. They help leaders manage the work.

But the best leaders manage something even more fundamental: the environment in which the work happens.

Your primary job as a leader isn’t producing great work. It’s creating the conditions where great work becomes the natural result.

So what does it mean to manage the environment instead of just the work?

We often think of leadership as directing people. In reality, much of leadership is giving people what they need to succeed. Sometimes that’s clarity. Sometimes it’s honest feedback. Sometimes it’s encouragement. Sometimes it’s the grace to learn from a mistake. Sometimes it’s simply your full attention.

I recently coached a leader whose team struggled with cohesion and alignment. We didn’t spend our time redesigning workflows. Instead, he began consistently connecting with his team, addressing difficult conversations instead of avoiding them, and establishing clear behavioral expectations.

Whereas before the team felt frustrated, unheard, and cautious, these new behaviors gradually changed the environment. People became more willing to speak up, take ownership, solve problems together, and move the work forward. They felt heard, appreciated, and relieved.

The biggest change wasn’t the process or structure. It was his daily choice to intentionally create a better environment for his team.

The work changed because the environment changed.

Great teams don’t emerge because leaders manage the work perfectly. They emerge because leaders consistently create an environment where people give each other what they need to succeed. When leaders intentionally create that kind of environment, people don’t just work harder. They do their best work together. That is Uncommon Collaboration™.

Most leaders want projects to get done faster, issues to be resolved quicker, and outcomes to be realized sooner. They want faster execution. Who doesn’t?

The reality is that many times projects stall, issues get escalated, people wait, meetings multiply, and outcomes lag.

The culprits we often point out are accountability, communication, and even a lack of urgency.

But there is a deeper reason that often gets overlooked: people don’t believe they’re allowed to carry the ball themselves.

How can you tell this is happening?

• Every disagreement gets escalated
• People ask permission for routine decisions
• Meetings become approval-seeking exercises
• Managers become traffic cops
• Leaders complain they’re overwhelmed while simultaneously requiring every decision to come through them

These conditions often emerge when leaders:

• Reverse decisions
• Step in and take over too quickly
• Solve problems and issues without giving people time to resolve them themselves
• Criticize decisions that didn’t work out

The problem isn’t always accountability, communication, or a lack of urgency. Sometimes, it’s that people haven’t been given what they need to carry the ball confidently.

What they need is Belief, one of the Four Collaboration Passes.

Belief is the confidence that someone can carry responsibility, make decisions, solve problems, and move work forward.

Without Belief, people will hesitate to make decisions, escalate more than they should, and schedule more meetings to build consensus instead of clarity.

Passing belief means behaving in ways that give them confidence to carry the ball forward.

Here is what it looks like practically:

• Saying out loud that you believe in and trust them, not just in your head.
• Not taking the ball back too quickly when something goes awry.
• Not rescuing people from issues and disagreements too quickly, giving them space to work through them themselves.
• Formally telling them you trust them to make decisions.
• Standing by them after mistakes or decisions that didn’t work out, treating them as learning opportunities instead of confidence-degraders.

Belief doesn’t mean abandoning clarity. In fact, clarity is a required ingredient. People move faster when they know the outcomes they’re responsible for, the decisions they own, and where the boundaries are. Belief works best when paired with clarity.

When people know what they’re responsible for and believe they’re trusted to act, execution accelerates.

Faster execution doesn’t happen when leaders make more decisions. It happens when more people are confident carrying the ball forward.

The fastest organizations aren’t dependent on a few people. They’re filled with people who know they’re trusted to carry the ball forward.

And when that happens, teams don’t just move faster. They move forward as one team.

We all want a team where leaders trust each other, work well together, and are moving in the same direction. It’s much more productive, not to mention more enjoyable.

Most of us have also been on teams where two or more people couldn’t seem to work together, meetings were tense, and the friction affected everyone else.

How do we create a leadership team that gets along better?

Leadership teams don’t become cohesive simply because they spend more time together. They become cohesive because they intentionally change how they work together.

One clarification: the goal is not a tension-free team. Healthy tension produces honest conversations, better decisions, and stronger commitment. A team can experience tension without losing trust or productivity. A team doesn’t even have to “get along” all the time. They do have to be cohesive and productive.

What we really want is to eliminate unhealthy tension: when it gets personal, when people just can’t seem to get along, and it’s pulling the whole team down.

With that out of the way, here are four steps to solve the problem:

1. Set standards of behavior

Most teams haven’t clarified how they will act with each other. How can we expect them to behave when we haven’t set the standards of how we will behave?

An example of a standard is that we debate ideas but don’t attack people.

I worked with a leadership team at a real estate organization who laid down simple expectations of how they would behave in the room when they disagreed with each other, encapsulated in a team playbook. Just like the example above. That clarity and practical playbook began to change the team dynamic.

Often it’s the leader who needs to set these standards. I’m reminded of Alan Mulally, who turned around Ford Motor Company, creating a business card-sized short list of how they would interact with and treat each other, which turned around the culture of their leadership team.

2. Get to know each other

It’s hard to extend grace to someone whose story you don’t know. That means we need to spend time knowing each other’s stories better.

One of my go-to tools was taught to me by Patrick Lencioni. It’s simply having team members answer three questions about themselves:

1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in that order?
3. Describe a unique or interesting challenge or experience from your childhood.

This creates a different type of conversation. The team slows down, listens to one another’s stories, and begins to understand each other differently.

3. Work on individual target behaviors

We all have behaviors we need to work on. For example, we may need to pause and listen before reacting, address issues head on, or take time to build a personal connection with others.

Every person on the team needs to pick a behavior they are working on. We’re in this together, working on being better leaders together. We’re not singling anyone out or pointing fingers.

Then, you have to work on the behaviors, together, as a team. Set aside regular time to remind each other the behavior you are working on and share positive progress (not perfection).

Your team will start to have very different, positive conversations with each other, and behavior overall will begin to improve.

Final thought: the number one factor in whether this works is whether you, as the leader, are committed to it. The leader must go first by setting the standard, engaging in a different type of conversation, working on your own behavior, and holding people accountable to working on theirs.

Teams don’t become cohesive by accident. They become cohesive because leaders intentionally create the conditions where trust can grow. Set the standard. Know each other. Grow together. Hold each other accountable. Those simple practices create leadership teams that can navigate tension without losing trust, alignment, or momentum.

Misalignment has several potential causes such as conflicting priorities, unresolved decisions, and a lack of cohesion.

But beneath those symptoms is another cause I have seen play out that doesn’t get talked about enough:

Letting the past run the future.

About seven years ago, while facilitating a leadership team retreat, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everyone was nice to each other and everyone participated. Everything seemed fine on the surface. But the team felt guarded and cautious.

And then a past wrong that had happened months earlier suddenly came rushing into the room like it had just happened that morning, and the lid blew off.

That team wasn’t reacting to what was happening in the room. They were reacting to what had never been resolved. And until grace showed up, nothing was going to change.

In The Four Passes framework, which I share in my keynotes and retreats, Grace is the pass that says you are enough, that you don’t always have to have it all together.

Grace doesn’t mean pretending the past didn’t happen, minimizing pain, or excusing behavior. It doesn’t reduce accountability. And sometimes trust needs to be earned back consistently over time.

Grace does mean refusing to let the past keep running the future, for ourselves and for others.

Sometimes that means releasing the score even when we feel justified in keeping it.

The problem is when we withhold grace:

• Mistakes never die
• We keep score
• Old stories show up in new conversations

The result is predictable: team cohesion suffers, alignment weakens, and execution slows because we’re dragging yesterday’s hurt and disappointment into today’s work.

This isn’t about fixing everything or letting everything go.

It is about noticing what we’re carrying and deciding to carry it differently.

So, who needs grace from you so that something better can finally move forward?

When alignment starts slipping, the instinct is often the same: communicate more, have more meetings, demand more updates, send more emails, and create more dashboards.

None of these are wrong, it’s just that often, there is a deeper issue than just communication.

When people, work, departments, or expectations become misaligned, there can be many causes: unclear priorities, competing agendas, incongruent incentives, silo mentalities, lack of communication, or even the complexity of the work itself.

But there is one overlooked cause that keeps popping up: the inability to decide what matters most.

Misalignment is often a prioritization problem before it is a communication or culture problem.

Someone has to decide what matters most. Until that happens, alignment is largely impossible.

Alignment doesn’t happen when everyone agrees. It happens when everyone understands what the organization is optimizing for.

When we don’t make that decision, we’re withholding clarity from the people who depend on us.

The result?

• Multiple “important priorities”
• People start to drift apart
• Projects stall
• Rollouts create friction
• Departments optimize for themselves
• Teams keep revisiting decisions
• Execution slows
• We lose the power of our collective effort on an important problem or opportunity

No wonder alignment slips and we don’t feel like we’re operating as one team. Why would we? There’s no compelling target to work towards together.

One of the passes we must give to those we serve as leaders is truth. And often, the truth people need from us is not just candid feedback or more information. It is clarity about what matters most.

I understand there are legitimate conflicts between priorities. Often times, prioritization is just as much about deciding what matters less than what matters most. Yet I’ve repeatedly seen the momentum that emerges when people are clear about what matters most.

Here are some examples:

• A newly opened medical facility smoothed out daily operations much faster by everyone in the building being focused on eliminating root causes of start-up problems.
• A manufacturer gained market share by everyone rallying around the fact that project management was going to be the strength of the company.
• When I was young, working as a cook for Pizza Hut, our restaurant thrived because everyone understood the priority: get pizzas to customers in 15 minutes or less. Cooks, servers, and managers all knew what mattered most.

Do we do that after hearing everyone’s perspective and engaging in debate? Absolutely. Do we need to reinforce the decision over and over? Definitely. But those are topics for another time.

For now, recognize that when alignment starts to slip, before increasing communication, ask whether the organization lacks clarity on what matters most.

 

Every department is busy and every leader is working hard, but somehow the organization still feels fragmented.

Perhaps you’ve been there: meetings are constant, projects are moving, and communication never stops, but underneath it all, it feels like people are pulling in different directions.

On the surface, everything may look fine, but dig a little deeper and you realize that activity is disguising misalignment and busyness is being mistaken for progress.

Teams are moving fast but not necessarily toward the same outcome.

The typical reaction is to push harder, hold more meetings, communicate more, create new dashboards, or reorganize in some way.

But the same issues keep resurfacing:

• We revisit the same conversations
• Departments are protecting their own priorities
• Initiatives slow down when collaboration is needed
• Everyone appears aligned publicly but operates differently privately

Usually, it’s not an effort problem, and more communication alone rarely fixes it.

It’s a direction problem.

When people are operating from different assumptions about what matters most, communication often multiplies activity instead of alignment.

What Actually Creates Alignment

What actually helps is remarkably simple, though not easy.

A Clear Strategy

Teams pull in different directions when leaders are operating from different assumptions about what matters most, how success is defined, and what the organization is really, actually trying to achieve together.

When leadership teams have even subtle misalignment around priorities or direction, the rest of the organization feels it quickly.

Clarity around how we behave together matters too. Organizations drift when leaders tolerate different standards, different expectations, and different interpretations of what teamwork looks like.

 A Most Important Goal

While working with a leadership team a few years ago, one team member piped up and said “I don’t know what our Super Bowl is.”

It was February, and he was feeling the weight of not knowing what the organization was truly rallying around.

I still remember that because when there isn’t something meaningful to pursue together, teams naturally drift back toward their own priorities and individual agendas.

Strong organizations usually have two big goals:

• A larger long-term goal that requires the entire organization working together to accomplish it.
• A clear short-term priority that is more important than anything else right now.

Different Conversations

Even with a clear direction and shared priorities, organizations still don’t move together unless conversations also change.

Too often, conversations become:

• Safe instead of honest
• Polite instead of productive
• Focused on updates instead of decisions
• Focused on departmental activity instead of enterprise priorities
• Focused on problems without clear ownership or movement

Alignment grows when leaders are willing to talk honestly about what is actually slowing the organization down.

None of this works without trust. When trust is weak, people protect departments, protect information, protect priorities, and protect themselves. Building trust is often the first step. It allows teams to stay in hard conversations long enough to solve real problems together.

 

Organizations move forward when people are aligned around what matters most and willing to work through the conversations required to get there.

Hard work without shared direction creates exhaustion. But shared direction creates movement.

 

You’ve probably been there. A new rollout, major project, or big strategic initiative is coming, and suddenly departments that have coexisted for years can’t seem to work together.

When that happens, we often start looking in the wrong direction.

We start by looking downward:

• Why won’t team members work with team members in another department?
• What are the process issues getting in the way?
• Would a re-organization help solve this?
• Is geographic separation causing this?
• Why can’t people just get along?

But the place to start is upward, at the leadership team.

Almost always, there is an overt or subtle trust issue that starts manifesting itself at the leadership team level. It could be as simple as two people on the leadership team that don’t trust each other, don’t get along, or don’t respect each other, and this is often the place to start.

Some questions I ask as part of my discovery process when presented with this problem include:

• How has the leadership team been working well together?
• Where is their tension or mistrust on the leadership team?
• Are there behaviors that are dysfunctional but have been tolerated?
• What do conversations look like in meetings?
• Do substantive conversations happen in meetings or side conversations?
• What has happened in the past?

This isn’t to be judgmental but to understand what’s really going on.

Because nothing changes until we are able to stare the sometimes ugly truth in the face.

Usually, the problem of departments not working together has been there all along, but it gets exposed through a system rollout, a big project, or a major strategic initiative. It’s often the case that we’ve known about the issue but haven’t had the conversations or done the work to address it.

The project isn’t creating the dysfunction, it’s exposing it.

That’s actually good because now you have a lever for cultural change. Now, departments must work together or the consequences are high.

So the first place to start is to focus on building trust between leaders. And that starts by saying the things we’ve been avoiding, addressing unresolved tension, and getting to know each other at a more personal level.

Because while there may very well be more work to do further down in the organization, departments rarely work well together when tension and mistrust remain unresolved at the leadership team level.

 

The conversation starts normally. People are talking about updates, priorities, or timelines. Then someone says something honest, risky, or uncomfortable, and the room changes. Suddenly everyone is looking at their notes, someone jokes, or someone quickly changes the subject.

And the conversation quickly stalls right when it starts getting real.

Over the years, I have witnessed how highly collaborative, effective teams have the important conversations that actually move work and collaboration forward. Other teams avoid these conversations.

I’ve seen leadership teams spend 20 minutes discussing project timelines when everyone in the room knew the real issue was a breakdown in trust between two leaders.

These are the conversations that carry emotional weight, risk, or consequence. They are conversations where teams either move forward together or drift apart.

Teams don’t usually stall around easy topics. They stall around consequential conversations that are in some way tied to fear, identity, power, trust, or uncertainty.

Examples of these types of conversations include:

• Addressing tension between two departments or people that no one wants to acknowledge
• Working through disagreement about the direction of the team
• Giving honest feedback to a high performer who is damaging the team
• Asking whether the organization is avoiding a difficult but necessary change
• Naming the real issue underneath surface-level conflict
• Clarifying priorities when everyone is overloaded and competing for resources
• Addressing behavior from a senior leader that others are afraid to confront
• Saying what everyone is privately thinking but nobody has voiced yet

 

Why Conversations Stall

Moving from Information to Exposure

You’ve probably noticed the shift in the meeting. People are talking about facts, updates, timelines, or surface-level observations and then suddenly the conversation starts touching trust, disagreement, behavior, accountability, or power dynamics.

Most conversations don’t stall because teams lack communication skills. They stall because the conversation stopped feeling informational and started feeling personal.

At that point, everyone feels the risk:

• “This could create conflict.”
• “I’m not sure how this will land.”
• “This may upset someone.”
• “I might regret saying this.”
• “This could make things awkward.”

And we fall back on typical, safer responses:

• We soften the truth
• We joke
• We pivot to a different topic
• We intellectualize
• We move back to logistics
• We ask for more data
• We table the conversation

Teams often retreat into process the moment the conversation requires courage. It’s just safer and easier. Suddenly the conversation becomes about timelines, spreadsheets, or next steps instead of the actual tension underneath the issue.

Unintentional Responses

Leaders sometimes unintentionally shut the conversation down with their responses: answering a question before anyone else can respond, defending before understanding, rescuing people from discomfort, rushing toward agreement, or unintentionally punishing honesty.

Teams watch leaders carefully in tense moments. One defensive response can train people to stay surface-level next time.

These kinds of responses make people feel the outcome is already decided, which is the fastest way to stop real conversation.

Pressure Creates Protection

Pressure makes people protect instead of collaborate. Under pressure, people naturally protect their reputation, resources, certainty, relationships, and themselves. Of course they do. We all do.

But protection changes conversations. People become careful instead of curious, which shuts down important conversations. They might start carefully wording everything, start side conversations after the meeting, or privately vent instead of openly discussing.

 

What Leaders Can Do Instead

Notice When the Room Changes

Sometimes the first step is to notice silence, energy shifts, sudden disagreements, joking, or topic pivots. Sometimes the signals are subtle: people stop building on others’ ideas, everyone agrees too quickly, or people start looking to the leader for the “right” answer.

That may mean forcing yourself to stop plowing through the agenda and pause to read the room and notice that something has shifted.

Name What is Happening

Acknowledging what is happening out loud makes it OK to have the conversation. This could be as simple as:

• “I think we may be getting close to the real issue.”
• “This feels important.”
• “Let’s stay here for a minute.”

Slow the Conversation Down

Sometimes we need to deliberately slow the conversation down, even when everything is screaming at us to move faster. Slowing down the conversation by pausing, asking a different question, and being curious is what strengthens collaboration and engages the team in an important conversation.

Help the Team Move Through the Moment

As a leader, you can say what no one else feels capable or comfortable saying. You can:

• Acknowledge tension
• Ask the next honest question
• Clarify what’s actually being discussed
• Make disagreement feel normal
• Invite the quieter voice

Real collaboration requires someone willing to help the room stay in the conversation a little longer.

“Take One Step Further”

Instead of pivoting, softening, joking, or tabling the conversation, take one step further than you are comfortable. When there is tension in the room, acknowledge it. When there is disagreement, accept it. When someone needs to say what everyone is thinking, say it. When something doesn’t feel right, ask a question and sit in it.

Reward Honesty When It Appears

The action that may help more than all the others is to celebrate and reward when honesty and truth shows up, instead of getting defensive. People watch what happens after someone tells the truth. Defensiveness will shut down honesty and truth for months. Rewarding and appreciating honesty will communicate it’s OK and safe for more.

 

The goal is not to create unnecessary conflict. The goal is to build teams capable of staying in important conversations long enough to move forward together.

Most organizational problems are not caused by a lack of intelligence. They are caused by conversations that never happen or stop too soon.

 

 

Perhaps you have experienced this on your team: everyone nods in agreement, says that priorities x, y, and z are important. Then they leave the meeting and go back to working on their own priorities.

It’s like walking toward your car after dinner with friends or family, thinking everyone is following you, only to look back and realize they’re still standing there talking.

Most leadership teams don’t struggle because they lack priorities. They struggle because they have too many, haven’t resolved the disagreement underneath them, or keep changing them before people can align around them.

Here are three practical shifts to start aligning your team around the same priorities:

1. Choose one, overarching, short-term goal that is more important than anything else.

You must have a single goal that is more important than anything else and big enough that the team must work together to accomplish it. If you don’t, why would the team align together? They’ll be too busy working on their own priorities.

This goal must be specific, so everyone knows exactly what it means to be done. And it must be short-term, ideally in the next 3-9 months.

Every major priority should clearly support this overarching goal, apart from the everyday work required to keep the business running.

Here’s a quick test:

If you stopped a random leader and asked, “What matters most this quarter?” would you get the same answer?

 

2. Surface disagreement early

Watch for hesitation, silence, and quick agreement on complex issues. There is often disagreement under the surface. Don’t rush past it. Lean into it.

Create space for truth to surface:

• “What feels off about this?”
• “Where could this break down?”
• “Who sees this differently?”

 

3. Eliminate competing priorities

Alignment is about eliminating competing priorities just as much as it is about choosing priorities. Misalignment often happens because leadership teams don’t have the courage to say no. Everything can’t be important. Otherwise you don’t actually have any priorities. You just have a big list of goals and tasks.

So what will NOT be a priority?

 

Alignment is rarely a communication problem alone.

More often, it’s a clarity problem, a courage problem, or a priority problem.

And under pressure, those problems only become more visible.

The leadership teams that move forward together are usually not the teams with the best strategy on paper. They’re the teams willing to slow down long enough to get truly aligned around what matters most.