Uniting your teams: Moving from competition to collaboration

If your teams are fighting to win, your business is already losing. 

Competition between departments isn’t driving performance - it’s draining it. In our research on the alignment between culture and strategy, we found that research reveals a critical fault line in today’s organisational culture: nearly 1 in 5 leaders say divisions within their business are in competition rather than collaboration.

That’s not a strategy. That’s dysfunction. 

At Culture Impact, we help leaders face this truth head-on: when teams compete against each other, the business pays the price. Siloed thinking, duplicated effort, fractured trust, misaligned goals - these are the hidden costs of internal competition. And they show up in your performance. 

Competition is comfortable: That’s the problem 

Why do so many businesses still fall into this trap? Because the signals the workplace sends to employees still reward internal competition. 

A misaligned board, each director driving their own agenda, creates a ripple effect throughout the organisation. Directorates become fiefdoms, competing for resources for their own gain and driving initiatives for the sake of the directors’ CVs. Celebrating individual success over shared achievement teaches teams to protect their turf.

Disconnected KPIs pull people in different directions. These aren’t isolated choices; they’re patterns. And those patterns shape your culture. 

How does workplace culture influence competition? 

Culture is the pattern of behaviours that are encouraged, discouraged, or tolerated over time. So, if your business tolerates internal competition, don’t be surprised when collaboration flatlines. 

The benefits of promoting collaboration in the workplace  

Collaboration isn’t about “being nice”, it’s imperative for commercial effectiveness.  

When you look inside a high-performing organisation, you’ll find that HR teams and leaders have done the work to break down silos, build collective ownership, and have created environments where people solve problems together. By taking this approach, they’ve connected teams to a shared mission, not just individual targets. 

When collaboration becomes the norm, businesses will see an array of benefits: 

• Teams move faster, not in circles 

• Innovation accelerates through shared learning 

• Trust deepens across functions and levels 

• Leaders focus on outcomes, not ego 

  
  

Ultimately, collaboration should be seen as a “nice to have”, it should be looked upon as your competitive advantage.  

How to promote collaboration in the workplace  

To build a collaborative culture, you don’t need a transformation programme. You just need to make targeted tweaks to the patterns that guide your organisation day-to-day. When working with clients, we break this down into behaviours, symbols and systems. With each of these covered, you’ll build effective patterns to promote collaboration effectively across an organisation. 

Behaviours 

Model it at the top. If your executive team doesn’t collaborate, neither will anyone else. Prioritise cross-functional wins. Call out and correct turf wars, and champion leaders who build bridges, not walls. 

Symbols 

What gets celebrated, gets repeated. Are you spotlighting collective wins, or putting individuals on pedestals? Are your internal success stories and business updates telling a story of togetherness or internal competition? 

Systems 

Align employee incentives to shared outcomes. Break down silos and connect teams wherever possible.  Have shared KPIs not competing KPIs. Revisit performance reviews and understand if they are reinforcing collaboration or fuelling competition? 

 

Where are you creating competition without realising it? 

Start with awareness. Audit the culture you’re reinforcing by taking our Organisational Culture Survey to uncover the unseen patterns shaping your teams. 

Or speak to Fraser, one of our culture experts, to get tailored support on how to shift from rivalry to result, and build patterns of success that fuel strategy, not friction. 

Take our survey