As Seen in Strategic Alliance Quarterly: Better Team Collaboration Means Better Alliance Outcomes

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Collaboration | Partnering Guide | SAQ

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February 1, 2025

Collaboration Is Not a Discrete Skill but a Way of Working—and the Data Shows That Improving Your Teams’ Collaboration Leads to Improved Alliance Results.

Every alliance manager has dealt with dysfunctional project teams and governance committees that never seem to gel and are beset with one challenge after another. Decisions don’t get made timely and often leave value on the table. There is a lack of trust, so people suppress their opinions—but then try to get them accepted behind the scenes. There is a new fire drill every week when an executive is surprised by something they should have known about the project, the partner, or the views of another executive within their own company. It happens too often. It destroys alliance value and team enthusiasm.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Alliance professionals can help their alliances achieve better outcomes by enabling governance committees and project teams to collaborate well. You may ask, “Isn’t collaboration something everyone understands? People collaborate all the time, right?” Certainly those who have grown up as digital natives have been collaborating online all their lives. As the typical thinking goes, collaboration is just the ability to work with others, and we all know how to do that.

Not a Skill but a Way of Working—That Gets Results

But collaboration isn’t as simple as just working together, especially when crossing company boundaries. The ability to work collaboratively isn’t a single skill, nor is it a value embodied in lofty corporate mission statements. It is a strategic and purposeful way of working that endeavors to create an environment of trust, transparency, and respect. Within that environment the parties coordinate resources, exchange information, and access each other’s knowledge, expertise, and other valuable resources to achieve outcomes that benefit both the partners and their customers.

Collaboration works on influence, and influence works on the norm of reciprocity. That is a fundamental social principle: people tend to respond in kind to the way they are treated. If someone helps you, you feel compelled to help them, and vice versa. If you help someone do what they are trying to do, they are more willing to help you do what you are trying to do. We call this the “give and get” of collaboration. This norm fosters mutually beneficial relationships and helps build the trust necessary for teams to create an environment where they can flourish.

The empirical research showing better collaboration produces better results is growing. Our data, gathered through assessments of complex codevelopment and cocommercialization alliances using a consistent algorithm, finds that among the alliances with the most effective collaboration, team enthusiasm skyrockets—by as much as 80 percent compared to low performers. Team enthusiasm is an important indicator because teams that are not enthusiastic don’t give it their all. They want to get to a decision—any decision—as quickly as they can and don’t strive for the greatest value possible. In the worst cases, the most talented people don’t want to be on the alliance team and find ways to get different assignments—or leave the company altogether. High levels of enthusiasm create a surge in energy that translates to impressive alliance results, boosting them by up to 60 percent (See Figure 1: Outcomes by Collaborative Ability). Yet, as the data shows, many alliances still have room to improve how they approach collaborative work. The benefits are too significant to ignore.