If we value collaboration so much, why does it keep failing in higher education?

This is the second post in our series on collaboration…

“We need to collaborate more.”

It’s one of the most common things I hear when working with universities. It’s spoken with sincerity, often with urgency. We say it in strategy meetings, workshops, away days. We build it into job descriptions and team goals. We stick it on our walls and our websites. And yet, it’s one of the hardest things for institutions to actually do well.

So why is there such a disconnect between how much we talk about collaboration and how little of it seems to actually stick?

Collaboration is one of our sector’s favourite words

A few years ago at Pickle Jar, we conducted a study looking at the publicly stated values of every university in the UK. We wanted to understand which values the sector most commonly aligns itself with. “Collaboration” featured in the top six. (Read: Are university brands all a bit samey, and what can we do about it?)

This wasn’t surprising. It reflects something we intuitively know to be true. Universities are complex, interconnected places. They thrive on partnership - within the institution and externally. They need to find ways to connect teaching, research, student experience, community engagement, and operations. It makes perfect sense that we would highlight collaboration as a core value.

But here’s the thing: if collaboration is so widely claimed and celebrated, why do so many of us find it such a persistent struggle?

Collaboration is easy to say, but hard to do

When I’m supporting universities with content strategy, brand alignment, or audience experience design, I often see the effects of broken or superficial collaboration. It shows up in disjointed user journeys, duplicated content, inconsistent messaging, and confused governance.

The impact is particularly visible in student experience. I’ll often work with institutions that have put a huge amount of effort into creating a seamless marketing and recruitment journey. But once students arrive, the experience becomes fragmented. Different departments communicate in different ways, priorities clash, and students are left to join the dots themselves. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek but we even created this graphic to represent it with respect to student experience:

Image copyright: Utterly Content Ltd trading as Pickle Jar Communications

Alumni teams feel this too. I’ve worked with teams whose job is essentially to rebuild a connection that was lost or never fully formed in the first place. They often talk about needing to “reconnect” graduates to the institution. But really, it highlights that something wasn’t working all the way through.

So what’s really going wrong?

The problem is rarely a lack of intent. It’s a lack of clarity about what collaboration actually involves. Too often we think of it as a simple action - setting up a shared meeting, working on a joint campaign, looping someone into a conversation.

But real collaboration is something deeper. It’s not just something we do. It’s something we are. Or at least, it should be.

It’s a way of being. A mindset. A culture.

And that means it needs to be designed, nurtured, and held with intention. Not just delegated to a project group or handed over to technology.

Collaboration requires more than structure and tools

I see this a lot when institutions try to solve collaboration challenges with structural fixes. There’s a tendency to reach for new tools or team reshuffles in the hope that proximity will naturally lead to better ways of working.

Office moves are a common one. We put teams in the same space and hope the watercooler conversations will spark something new. But physical closeness doesn’t automatically lead to strategic alignment. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of cases where new silos simply form within a newly designed space. The headphones go in, the barriers go up.

Then there’s restructuring. I’ve worked with teams that have been through multiple reorganisations in quick succession, all in the name of better collaboration. But if those restructures aren’t accompanied by a deeper cultural shift, they often do more harm than good. People become anxious, withdrawn, reluctant to take risks. What’s intended as a collaborative move can instead create a trauma response.

And then, of course, there’s the meeting overload. Adding more meetings is one of the laziest responses to collaboration challenges. Without a real shift in how we use those meetings - in how we listen, engage, decide, and act - we’re just spending more time together without making meaningful progress.

So what does meaningful collaboration really look like?

It starts with commitment. Not just a strategic statement, but a personal and collective willingness to engage differently.

It requires us to show up with presence and intention. To design our interactions, rather than default to old habits. It asks us to build trust, to be open to challenge, to prioritise shared outcomes over individual wins.

When I talk about building a connected culture, this is at the heart of it. It’s not just about joining up platforms or messaging. It’s about designing our systems, behaviours, and relationships to support genuine collaboration.

We need a new model of collaboration - one that is conscious, not convenient

The truth is, good collaboration doesn’t just happen. It takes care. It takes courage. And it takes a willingness to pause and ask ourselves:

• Are we showing up, or just turning up?

• Are we building relationships, or just sending emails?

• Are we designing for collaboration, or just hoping it will emerge?

In the next posts in this series, I’ll dig deeper into what it means to build a true culture of collaboration - one that’s intentional, resilient, and capable of driving real change across the institution.

For now, I’ll leave you with this:

If we keep saying collaboration is one of our values, what would it take to truly live it?

Want to improve collaboration in your teams and organisations?

Our CEO, Tracy Playle, is a professional certified leadership coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation (ICF). She works extensively with teams and leaders to help improve collaboration in their organisations. This can be done through short talks, workshops or ongoing coaching support. Contact us to learn more and to discuss how we can help you.