A team collaborating to build a Growth Culture

Building a Growth Culture

Q: Why is effective collaboration so important?

Collaboration connects individual contributors around shared momentum and clarity, helping teams challenge assumptions, make better decisions, and spread useful lessons.

Q: Does a Growth Culture require more meetings or coming to consensus?

No. It means involving the right people at the right moments, with clear roles and decision rights.

Q: How do silos get in the way of growth?

Silos limit information, expertise, and learning, leading to duplicated effort, slow decisions, and local solutions that create problems elsewhere.

Q: What does this work look like in practice?

Participants examine patterns affecting trust and coordination, then practice feedback, constructive challenge, and clearer decisions on real work.

Q: How can we tell whether the culture is improving?

Track information sharing, early resolution of tension, decision ownership, learning across teams, decision speed, rework, and progress on shared priorities.

Make your team’s collaboration an engine of continuous growth and improvement

Organizations grow when people bring different perspectives together, question assumptions, learn from setbacks, and turn insight into better decisions. A Growth Culture makes those behaviors part of how work gets done. We help leaders and teams strengthen the trust, candor, and collaboration needed to adapt and improve together.

Talk to Us About Building a Growth Culture →

Colleagues sharing perspectives in candid conversation

A Growth Culture Depends on Collaboration

A Growth Culture creates room to surface what is not working, learn from feedback, adjust, and share what works. Collaboration keeps that learning from stopping at the boundaries of an individual contributor, a team, or a department.

When people share information openly and consider the needs of the whole organization, they have a broader view of the challenges they face, leading them to ask better questions and make wiser decisions. As teams make progress and share what they learn, they build the trust to collaborate more candidly the next time.

Why Shared Learning Matters Now

In a changing environment, strategies can’t stay static: they require continuous refinement, adjustment, and improvement. A Growth Culture helps organizations notice shifts early, bring together insight from across the business, and adjust before a small disconnect spirals into an unnecessarily expensive problem.

Individual growth mindsets provide the foundation, and trust and clarity in the culture build on those conditions, allowing people to speak honestly, work through competing priorities, and understand how decisions affect customers, operations, risk, and other teams. A Growth Culture gives them shared habits for learning and acting across those boundaries.

Effective collaboration means involving the right people at the right moments, surfacing relevant information and disagreement, clarifying ownership, and moving forward.

Who This Work Is For

Organizations scaling rapidly as specialization makes collaboration more complex
Leadership teams aligning enterprise priorities and modeling candid dialogue
Cross functional teams facing shared decisions and competing demands
Organizations seeing duplicated work, slow decisions, or unclear ownership
Teams working through low trust, unresolved tension, or siloed communication
HR, Talent, and Learning teams turning a growth mindset into everyday behavior

A cross-functional team working through a shared decision

The Cost of Fragmented Collaboration

Without a Growth Culture, the cost of working in silos accumulates gradually:

Decisions move ahead without relevant input from other teams, leaving risks and dependencies undiscovered until after resources have been committed.
Unclear ownership and uneven information flow lead teams to duplicate analysis, revisit decisions, and redo work.
Functions optimize for their own targets while shifting cost, risk, or workload onto others.
Unresolved tension encourages teams to work around one another, making shared problems harder to solve.
Useful lessons stay within individual teams, so the organization repeatedly pays to learn the same thing.

0%The percentage of enterprise leaders who experience burdensome or dysfunctional collaboration on critical growth initiatives,¹ demonstrating how cross-functional work becomes a source of friction when effective collaboration is most critical.

0 hours a yearThe average amount of time per year a knowledge worker spends on duplicative work.² That’s the equivalent of approximately 5-6 working weeks per year, illustrating the scale of avoidable effort that consumes time and energy that could be repurposed toward customers, innovation, and strategic priorities.

The Business Case for a Growth Culture

In Asana’s 2023 global study, 79% of workers at collaborative organizations said they felt prepared to respond to business challenges—four times the share in organizations with weak collaboration.³

A McKinsey case study shows the operational difference that better coordination can make. At one communications company, changes to cross-functional targets and ways of working coincided with an increase in first-time-right delivery from 65% to more than 80%; customer support requests during the first six weeks after installation fell by one-third.⁴

McKinsey reports that organizations in the healthiest quartile, meaning those better able to align, execute, and renew, have delivered three times the long term total shareholder returns of those in the least healthy quartile.⁵ These comparisons support the business case for shared learning and effective execution.

0%prepared to respond to business challenges

0xthe share in weak-collaboration organizations

0%+first-time-right delivery

0xlong-term shareholder returns

What Stronger Collaboration Makes Possible

Better enterprise decisions.

Teams bring relevant expertise and downstream consequences into view.

Faster learning.

Feedback and setbacks inform the next decision instead of prompting blame.

Less rework.

Clear priorities and communication reduce avoidable duplication.

Productive tension.

People challenge ideas and surface risks while preserving working relationships.

Stronger innovation.

Ideas move across boundaries and improve through diverse perspectives.

Sustainable performance.

Collective energy goes toward shared goals rather than internal workarounds.

How We Build a Growth Culture

A Growth Culture takes hold through repeated behavior in real work. Through Collaboration Unlocked and our broader work with leaders and teams, we help organizations:

See the patterns shaping trust, information flow, decisions, and collaboration.

Understand the pressures and assumptions that lead people to withhold information or defend their position.

Align across functions on shared outcomes, priorities, and tradeoffs.

Practice candid feedback, constructive challenge, and decisions with clear ownership.

Apply new behaviors to live challenges, reflect on the results, and share what they learn.

Equip people to start with curiosity, own their missteps, and treat setbacks as chances to learn.

By practicing on work that already matters, teams can make new habits visible in their daily decisions and relationships.

Talk to Us About Collaboration Unlocked →

A Growth Culture in Practice

“

You can rework your strategy 10 times over. You can’t execute it unless the team is a well-oiled machine pulling in the same direction. That’s what this program is designed to achieve.

Eric Severson

Former Chief People Officer, Neiman Marcus

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Growth Culture?

A Growth Culture treats setbacks as opportunities for growth and development, and it gives people the safety to take risks, make mistakes, and learn from them. The paradox is that an organization that blindly pushes for results and makes failure feel dangerous creates a climate of fear that burns people out makes performance more difficult to sustain. An organization that learns from its missteps, and applies and shares those lessons, becomes an engine for growth and sustainable high performance.

Why is effective collaboration so important?

Collaboration is what turns a scattered group of individual contributors, often rowing in different directions, into a connected team rowing in sync, with shared momentum and clarity. It also allows teams to draw on different perspectives and information to see the whole picture, challenge each other's assumptions, make better decisions, and spread useful lessons across the organization.

Does a Growth Culture require more meetings or coming to consensus?

No. A Growth Culture is about building effective collaboration, which means involving the right people at the right moments, with clear roles and decision rights. People can disagree productively, make choices to move forward with shared understanding and ownership, and pivot when decisions don’t pan out.

How do silos get in the way of growth?

Silos limit the flow of information, expertise, and learning. They can lead to duplicated effort, slow decisions, and local solutions that create problems elsewhere. They also tend to suppress necessary disagreement and conflict, leading to diminished innovation and increased pressure over time. A Growth Culture helps people work through those boundaries while staying focused on shared outcomes.

What does this work look like in practice?

Through Collaboration Unlocked and our other work with leaders and teams, participants examine the patterns affecting trust and coordination. They practice feedback, constructive challenge, and clearer decisions on real work, then reflect and adjust as they go.

How can we tell whether the culture is improving?

Start by watching how people work together day to day, and focus on the behaviors that matter most to your organization. Are people sharing the information others need, raising tension before it builds, knowing who owns each decision, and passing what they learn on to other teams? You can track these shifts over time through employee feedback, how quickly decisions get made, how much work has to be redone, and how well teams are moving on shared priorities.

Build a Growth Culture Where Friction Fuels Momentum

Organizations that sustain growth learn from friction, uncertainty, and setbacks. We help leaders and teams replace protective patterns with the trust, candor, and shared accountability to solve problems across boundaries and keep improving.