Belonging Comes Before Collaboration

One of my clients asked me to help her manage two department heads who didn't get along.

Their conflict was slowing down decisions, frustrating their teams and creating friction across the organization. She wanted strategies. Conflict resolution techniques. Maybe a new process for how the two departments worked together.

Before we talked about any of that, I asked her a simple question. "How well do you know them?"

"One has been here twelve years," she said. "The other has been here ten."

"But do you know them?"

She paused. "Actually, not really."

That answer explained more than any process ever could.

Tenure Is Not the Same as Knowing

This is the reality inside most organizations. People can work alongside each other for a decade and still be strangers. They know each other's titles, responsibilities and reporting lines. They know who to send which email to. But they don't know what drives each other, what each person is uniquely good at, or what pressures they carry outside the meeting room.

When you lead many people, individuality often gets sacrificed in the name of efficiency. There is always another deadline, another priority, another meeting. Getting to know people as individuals feels like a luxury you will get to later.

Later rarely comes. And the cost shows up exactly where my client was feeling it: in conflict, misunderstanding and collaboration that never quite works.

Connection Has Gone Missing

The disconnection is widespread. Kahoot!'s 2026 Workplace Culture and Connection Report, which surveyed 2,000 office workers in the U.S. and 2,000 in the U.K., found that 56% of U.S. employees wish they had closer connections at work, and 39% report feeling lonely at work. Half of U.S. workers say meetings are their only interaction with certain coworkers.

Here is the part I find most revealing. 64% of U.S. workers say meetings are more effective when colleagues connect personally first.

People already know this instinctively. Collaboration works better when there is a human relationship underneath it. Yet most organizations design work as if relationships were optional, then wonder why teams struggle to work together.

Why Belonging Has to Come First

We tend to think of collaboration as a skill people bring to work. Communicate clearly. Share information. Divide the tasks. Hold each other accountable.

But collaboration isn't only a skill. It is a byproduct of belonging. People are willing to share half-formed ideas, admit what they don't know and give each other the benefit of the doubt when they feel they belong. When they feel like interchangeable parts, they protect themselves instead.

That is why so many collaboration initiatives fail. They try to build the house before laying the foundation. As I explore in The Teamwork You Think You Have, what looks like teamwork from a distance is often just coordination between people who have never really connected.

Think about the colleagues you collaborate with most easily. Chances are you know something about them beyond their job. You know what they care about, how they like to work and what they are carrying. That knowledge makes it easier to give feedback, ask for help and disagree without it becoming personal. The relationship carries the collaboration through the hard moments.

Belonging grows from small, consistent acts. Kindness. Genuine curiosity about the other person. Consideration for what they are dealing with. Professional respect shown in everyday interactions. None of it is complicated. All of it takes intention.

Where to Start

The answer to my client's problem wasn't a new process. It was a different starting point. Before you can help two people work together, you have to understand each of them as individuals. What they are proud of. What frustrates them. What they hope to build. What they need from you and from each other.

Conflicts between long-tenured colleagues are often built on assumptions made years earlier and never revisited. Knowing people well is how you surface those assumptions, and how you help colleagues see each other as people rather than obstacles.

That is the work of leadership in the age of personalization. Individuals can only be as reinvention-ready as their organization lets them be, and organizations can only collaborate as well as their people know each other.

A Question for Every Leader

Think about the people you work with most closely. How well do you actually know them? Not their role. Them.

If the honest answer is "not really," start there. Schedule a conversation that has no agenda except understanding. Ask what matters to them. Listen more than you speak. As I've written before, this is how new managers earn trust fast, and it works just as well for leaders who have been in their roles for years.

People do not collaborate with job titles. They collaborate with people they have come to know and trust.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.