Here are 24 (!) of the common ways collaboration goes sideways. Buckle up

• Dropped balls. Someone says they will do something, but then they either don’t do it or they do something that doesn’t align with what others were expecting them to do. Or, perhaps the meeting invite or important email thread left off (intentionally or not) someone who needs to be in the loop. As one CEO said when I asked what goes wrong in collaborations: “Some people just don’t do their sh*t.”

• Uneven workload. Whether a function of interests, energy, capacity, or know-how, the work is distributed unevenly – and often unfairly – across the members of the team. Some people end up feeling way under benefited while others end up being total free loaders.

  
  

• "My way or the highway". Somebody ends up throwing their weight around as the decider, acting on behalf of the full group, perhaps with little or no sincere effort to understand the needs, interests, and preferences of others. Other people end up feeling dragged along.

• “I’ll just do it myself.” An eager collaborator feels as though they alone care enough about the project to do it the “right” way or as quickly as it needs to get done. They may think they’re doing everyone else a favor. Or, as suggested by one start-up founder, perhaps they truly feel others are incompetent: “I’m bad at working with people because sometimes they’re stupid. And I just ignore them. And then I just do my thing. And I get away with it because the product ends up being really good. I’m not going to wait for a mediocre product from this dumbass who doesn’t understand what I’m asking for.”

  One investment fund manager I spoke with observed, “These individuals are prepared to put the world on their shoulders and carry the project forward. But they have to understand that the answer they come up with on their own is not nearly as rich as if the work had incorporated the views, perspectives, and work from everyone who was part of that collaboration.”

• No capacity to give. Somebody enthusiastically volunteers to take care of a set of tasks, despite the fact they have no time to actually do those things amid their other commitments. The result? The project backs up, to-dos remain undone, and other people have to rearrange their work to release the log jam – all the while, the person continues to claim they’ll get to it. They often apologize profusely, then may try to remedy the situation by spending a few distracted minutes on the project as they jam through their overly-packed day.

• Under preparation. Due to time pressures, disinterest, or lack of accountability, people arrive to meetings unprepared to fully engage in the shared work at hand. They haven’t read the pre-work or completed the background research they had promised, compromising the team’s ability to move the project forward.

• Disengagement. Some people don’t reply to emails for days. They may attend meetings, but text on their phone the whole time. Whatever the reason, the group doesn’t benefit from this person’s insights and expertise and they have to waste time downstream revisiting–sometimes, at great expense–issues that have already been covered.

  
  

• Herding cats. Even with a lot of upfront effort to set goals and expectations, one person shoots off on their own, creating fires for others, not to mention downstream chaos and confusion.

  
  

• Too-late contributions. Despite an agreed-upon timeline that clearly indicates when input needed to be received, someone withholds their feedback until well past the deadline. When that person finally gets around to giving comments, their feedback, even if it is wonderful and spot-on, causes an avoidable crush of both effort and morale, impacting the work of those both earlier and later in the workflow.

  
  

• Inconsistent contributions. A collaborator binges on the project one week, and then falls off the face of the earth the next, resurfacing again a week later. Up and down. Back and forth. It becomes impossible to predict and thus plan around their contributions. As one non-profit leader noted, “I need to know that your past behavior predicts your future behavior. Don’t get lazy with our relationship. Work as hard on this contract as you did on the first one. You can’t just rest on your laurels.”

  
  

• Stealing credit and placing blame. One person takes credit for others’ work or for the team’s successes, perhaps while also shirking any responsibility for the failures or placing all the blame for the failures squarely on others’ shoulders.

  
  

• Off-loading risk. Related to stealing credit and placing blame, off-loading risk may pop up in collaborations guided by formal written agreements. In adversarial contracting, the goal is to snag as many of the rewards for oneself as possible while strapping the other party with as many of the risks as possible. A consultant I know won’t do business with clients who put lopsided contracts in front of her, protecting their interests (e.g., intellectual property, release of liability), but either squishing or not bothering to mention her interests (e.g., “Hey, I’d like to keep my IP and not get sued, too!”).

  
  

• Egos, titles, and credentials. Someone may seem utterly unable or unwilling to even beyond their needs and interests to even consider, much less value, others’ needs and interests. The mere fact of their title or letters behind their name may give them the mistaken belief that they alone are capable of making valuable contributions to the cause.

  
  

• Hoarding and withholding. Even when the collaboration is ostensibly designed with resource sharing in mind, a collaborator hoards access to information, tools, perspectives, or people. Whether due to insecurity, carelessness, an inability or unwillingness to anticipate collaborators’ needs, or the absence of clear channels for sharing, hoarding creates unnecessary barriers to completing the work. As one example, an engineer at a multinational tech firm blindsided a project manager on the same team with a slide deck enumerating 14 unmitigated risks he had noticed - and should have shared much earlier - during their months and months of working together.

  
  

• Tyranny of perfectionism. When someone feels their worth is contingent on presenting only perfect work, they sometimes keep collaborators at arms length when developing work. Rather than seeking and getting constructive input on half-baked work early in its development, they wait until their piece is as perfect as possible before sharing it, making it difficult for others to contribute and creating a high-stakes environment where feedback can set back timelines or set off emotions.

  
  

• Dodging hard conversations. Despite the importance of constructive tension in helping teams identify the best path forward, a conflict averse member of the team may sweep differences of opinions aside, making it difficult for the team to optimize across competing demands. Such behaviors can make it impossible to talk about important issues.

  
  

• Mushy roles. Poorly defined roles result in confusion, redundant effort, absent talents, and incomplete coverage.

  
  

• Failing to decide how to decide. Nobody can really explain how decisions are made, resulting in varied expectations and inevitably hurt feelings when people later feel cut out from decision making or burdened by decisions they’d rather not make.

  
  

• Tool overload. Collaborators mindlessly import their favorite technology tools from other projects into this project without considering the preferences or capabilities of others. Perhaps they heard about new tools to help with communication, task management, or decision archiving and adopt them by fiat. Before you know it, confusion and drag emerge as people try to figure out how to work across disparate tools, struggle to find time to learn a new tool, and are unable to find where key documents and decisions are housed. As one tech consultant shared, “I don’t want to adopt another damn tool. Are you kidding me?” A start-up leader echoed, “We are loosing productivity because we are consumed by productivity tools.”

  
  

• Asymmetrical power. Whether a function of rank, role, budget, or any number of other personal or situational variables that imbue power within your context, asymmetrical access to power among collaborators can impede information flow, derail due consideration of competing ideas, and hijack the frankness of accountability conversations.

  
  

• Responsibility without authority. This one is less an issue of someone making a misstep as it is just a reality of the modern workplace. As one tech executive who came up through project management observed, “You’ve got lots of responsibility and zero authority. The engineers don’t work for you, they work for the VP of engineering. They could tell you to go to hell. And yet you’re held accountable for the product.”

  
  

• Hiding. Failure to communicate to one’s team when you’re stuck leaves them to operate under the assumption that all is well and leaves them unable to help clear the path. The tech executive mentioned above said, “You don’t want to be dependent on that magic guy in the backroom who’s doing a super important thing. Inevitably, he hits a wall and has problems. And now he’s scared to tell you and the whole project is going to blow up.”

  
  

• Poisoned well. Sometimes, the culture in an organization or even on a specific team gets so toxic that all trust, goodwill, and care are gone. The proverbial well is poisoned, making it impossible to regain the very assets that enable collaboration. The icky residue of past wrongs builds up , making it impossible to build a climate of trust. As one journalist aptly put it, “Forget collaboration at that point.”

  
  

• Undermining. Undermining is defined by Duffy, Gangster & Phone (2002) as someone intentionally sabotaging a colleague’s work over time such that that person’s relationships, reputation, or accomplishments take a hit. Spreading rumors and “accidentally” forgetting to bring the handouts to the meeting are both examples of undermining. It’s one thing to have to deal with a collaborator who consistently undermines you, but, research suggests that it’s even more demoralizing to have to deal with a colleague who is sometimes undermining and sometimes supportive.

  
  

Gulp. That’s a long list of ways collaboration can go off the rails. Anyone else feeling like working on a deserted island sounds nice? Frankly, these potholes along the road to collaboration aren’t all that surprising given how few people ever receive any training in how to collaborate well.

If you’d like support turning collaborHATE into collaborGREAT–whether through a keynote, workshop, or consulting engagement–I’d be glad to help. It is possible to do together better.