Why Good People Start Working Around Each Other

In a faster, more pressured world, collaboration and accountability are the key disciplines that keep good organisations working well.

Are we working around each other?

I keep seeing a pattern in pressured organisations. Good people start working around each other.

That can sound like a small thing. It isn’t. In my experience, it is one of the clearest signs that an organisation is getting harder to lead and harder to move.

Nobody plans for this. It rarely starts with ego, politics or obvious dysfunction. More often, it happens in organisations full of decent, capable people who are trying to do good work in difficult conditions.

What changes is not their intent. What changes is the way pressure begins to shape behaviour.

People become more cautious. Teams become more protective. Decisions take longer. Ownership gets less clear. Too many people get brought into things that should involve fewer people. Leaders start taking on more than they should because they no longer trust things to move without them.

And slowly, often without anyone saying it out loud, people stop working with each other and start working around each other.

That is usually the point where I think leaders need to pay close attention.

Why this matters now

As I wrote in the Aftershock series, we are operating in a world shaped by economic disruption, geopolitical uncertainty and technological change.

• McKinsey’s latest State of Organisations 2026 makes a similar point: leaders are trying to improve performance while dealing with tech disruption, economic pressure and changing workforce structures.

That is the backdrop to this piece, but I do not want to repeat my points in the Aftershock series. I want to get to something more specific.

In this kind of environment, leaders quite understandably talk about pace, resilience and execution. But underneath all of that are two more basic disciplines that decide whether work moves well through an organisation or gets stuck.

Those two disciplines are collaboration and accountability.

Collaboration matters, but it is easy to get wrong

• McKinsey’s work on collaboration is useful for one simple reason: done well, collaboration improves performance; done badly, it creates drag.

• Better communication and collaboration can raise productivity, but not when they turn into endless interaction. The benefit comes when people can share knowledge, solve problems and make decisions without unnecessary friction.

That matters because pressure tends to push organisations in the wrong direction.

Instead of becoming more intentional about collaboration, they become more expansive. More people are involved. More meetings are added. More conversations are treated as essential. More decisions stay open for longer because nobody wants to exclude the wrong person or move too early.

It feels responsible. But often it is really just organisational anxiety.

And the cost is real. People spend more time navigating than doing. Meetings multiply while clarity does not. Work gets heavier, not better. Teams start to experience one another not as partners in solving problems, but as additional layers to manage.

That is not healthy collaboration. It is collaboration overload.

Accountability is what stops drift

This is where accountability matters.

• Gallup’s March 2026 report, Accountability Is Leadership’s Greatest Weakness, says “create accountability” is the lowest-rated of the seven core leadership competencies it studied, both for leaders rating themselves and for managers rating their leaders. It also found that managers who believe their leaders are exceptional at creating accountability are far more likely to be engaged than those who do not.

That is worth pausing on, because accountability is often misunderstood. It is still heard by many people as a hard-edged word, associated with pressure, correction or control.

But good accountability is not mainly about pressure. It is about clarity.

It tells people what is expected, what good looks like, who owns what, and where decisions sit. It reduces ambiguity. It gives people something clear to work from.

That becomes especially important in difficult periods, because ambiguity gets expensive very quickly.

If priorities are not translated into clear ownership, people fill in the gaps themselves. If managers are not explicit about expectations, people make their own assumptions. If decisions do not sit somewhere obvious, they drift upward or outward. And if nobody is truly carrying an outcome, everybody stays involved longer than they need to.

When accountability weakens, it does not create freedom. It creates drag.

Why good people start working around each other

When collaboration becomes heavy and accountability becomes blurred, people adapt:

• They stop waiting for things to move. They find ways around them.

• They bypass formal channels because those channels no longer feel reliable.

• They copy more people into discussions because that feels safer.

• They hold onto decisions because they are not convinced the organisation around them will support the call.

• They protect their own team’s time because demand no longer feels well managed.

• They escalate earlier because escalation has become one of the few dependable ways to get movement.

From the outside, this can look like poor teamwork or siloed behaviour. Sometimes it is framed as a culture problem.

But often it is something more ordinary and more human than that. People are not being difficult for the sake of it. They are adapting to an organisation that has become harder to get anything done in.

That is why I do not think the real issue is that people have forgotten how to collaborate. I believe in many organisations, working well together has become too hard, and clear accountability has become too rare.

In those conditions, good people become more cautious with each other. They trust more carefully. They look for ways around the friction.

That is not a personality issue. It is a sign that something in the organisation is not working properly.

What leaders need to rebuild

Once collaboration gets heavy and accountability gets blurred, senior leaders usually end up carrying what the organisation itself should be carrying. They become the point of integration. They clarify what should already be clear. They join conversations that should not need them. They reconnect broken threads and keep things moving by force of personal effort.

Most leaders can do that for a while. But it is not scalable, and it is not healthy.

So the real work now is not simply to ask people to move faster. It is to make it easier for work to move.

That means being far more intentional about collaboration. Where is cross-functional involvement genuinely needed, and where has it simply become habit or self-protection? Every extra meeting, stakeholder and handoff has a cost. Not all collaboration is useful, and not all inclusion is wise.

It also means restoring accountability in a steadier, clearer way. Meaningful priorities need real owners. Outcomes need to be defined properly. Managers need to be explicit about what good performance looks like. Ownership needs to sit somewhere clear, rather than floating upwards until someone more senior ends up carrying it.

In practice, this often starts in a few very ordinary places: being clearer about where decisions really sit, stripping out unnecessary interaction, and helping managers define ownership and expectations more explicitly. None of that sounds dramatic, but in pressured organisations those are often the moves that begin to restore traction.

That, to me, is where many organisations need to refocus.

Not on more noise. Not on more activity. On better conditions for effective work.

What this is really about

When organisations stay under pressure for too long, people do not just become less efficient. They often become less patient with each other, and less generous in how they respond. Collaboration starts to feel expensive. Accountability starts to feel uncomfortable. And people retreat into what they can control.

That affects performance, of course. But it also affects the feel of working life. It can make good people more abrupt with each other than they want to be. It narrows trust. It adds to that familiar sense that everyone is busy, everyone is tired, and yet somehow the important things still move too slowly.

I do not think leaders can afford to treat that as a side issue. I think it sits much closer to the centre of organisational effectiveness than many realise.

Because in a faster, more demanding world, collaboration and accountability are not nice-to-haves. They are the disciplines that allow good people to work well together.

And when those disciplines weaken, good people start working around each other. Not because they want to, but because the organisation has made that the easier path.

TheTeam Alignment & Performance Programme is designed specifically for leadership teams navigating exactly these conditions - rebuilding the clarity, accountability and collaboration that allows good people to work well together. Let's talk.