How can I improve collaboration at work? 6Cs Framework

Many attempts to improve collaboration at work begin with the wrong question: how can we get people to collaborate more?

That assumes more collaboration is always the answer. It is not. Some work requires people to operate independently. Some requires coordination and mutual support. Other work depends on joint problem-solving or shared responsibility for the result. The important question is whether people are working together in the way that the work actually requires.

We use the word collaboration remarkably loosely in organisations. Sharing information is described as collaboration. Attending a cross-functional meeting is collaboration. Helping another department complete a task is collaboration. Even agreeing not to interfere with one another can be presented as evidence of effective collaboration. These ways of working may all be useful, but they are not the same.

I first encountered a framework for making these distinctions in 1994, when I moved from outdoor instructing and guiding at Plas y Brenin, the UK’s national outdoor centre, into a role with General Motors Europe. I became involved in a major transformation programme called The D!fference, which reached more than 50,000 employees and members of the franchise network.

One of the models used during the programme was the 6 Cs of collaboration. My understanding is that it originated with an internal consulting team at Saturn Corporation, General Motors’ US subsidiary, although I have not been able to verify the original authorship.

The model describes six ways in which people and groups can relate and work together, ranging from coercion at one end to co-ownership at the other. More than three decades later, I still find it useful, particularly when work crosses teams, functions and reporting lines.

Rather than labelling people as collaborative or uncollaborative, the 6 Cs helps us examine the pattern developing around a particular task, decision or outcome. This article explores what each of the six Cs looks like, what may help people change how they work together, and how leaders can use the framework to understand conflict, strengthen working relationships and improve collaboration across organisational boundaries.

The 6 Cs: Six ways of relating and working together

The six Cs are arranged from coercion through to co-ownership. Moving rightwards represents increasing potential for constructive interdependence, where people recognise how their work connects and become more involved in shaping shared outcomes.

That distinction matters, but it needs qualification.

• First, the continuum is not a measure of relationship maturity. Moving rightwards changes the nature of the interaction; it does not make the people involved intrinsically better leaders or contributors.
• Second, it describes the work between people, not the relationship in the abstract. We will return to the implications of that distinction.
• Third, relationships do not progress in a predetermined sequence. A new priority, change in authority or breakdown in trust can alter how people work together.

These qualifications make the model more useful because they move the discussion beyond whether people are good at collaboration towards a more interesting question: What is happening between these people, around this piece of work, that makes a particular way of working more or less likely?

What actually changes across the six Cs?

The differences between the six Cs are not simply differences in how friendly, supportive or cooperative people appear. Several underlying features of the relationship change.

These dimensions help explain why apparently similar behaviours can reflect different ways of working. For example, a manager might consult widely before making a decision. That consultation may represent genuine collaboration if the views expressed influence the outcome. Alternatively, it may be little more than a way of communicating a decision that has effectively already been made. Similarly, colleagues may share information regularly without ever engaging in joint problem-solving.

The point is not to establish rigid criteria for each C. These dimensions provide questions through which people can explore the relationship in greater depth. They also help avoid reducing collaboration to a matter of interpersonal goodwill.

One relationship, several ways of working

An important feature of the model is that the same two people can operate at different points on the continuum depending on what they are doing together. Consider a functional manager and a programme leader. They may collaborate effectively when designing a new service, cooperate when coordinating resources and coexist when carrying out unrelated responsibilities. However, when annual budget allocations are discussed, the relationship may become confrontational because each is accountable for different priorities and neither has the authority to resolve the competing demands alone. Describing their overall relationship as collaborative or confrontational would conceal these differences.

The more useful question is how they are working together in relation to a particular task, decision or outcome. This suggests a different starting point for a leadership conversation: Name the activity before evaluating the relationship.

How much collaboration does the work actually require?

Many organisations treat collaboration as an unquestioned good. Leaders are encouraged to break down silos, involve stakeholders, increase cross-functional working and build shared ownership. Joint discussions require time. More people involved in decisions can slow progress. Shared responsibilities can create ambiguity when decision rights are unclear. Extensive collaboration may reduce the autonomy of specialists who could otherwise complete their work efficiently.

The test is whether involving people more closely would improve the quality, speed or sustainability of the outcome enough to justify those costs.

Coercion and confrontation are not presented as desirable targets in this table. They may describe current relationships that require attention, rather than chosen approaches to productive work.

The costly mismatch can run in either direction. A team may execute well-defined tasks together through lengthy joint meetings when simple coordination would be faster. Another may deliver every individual workstream while failing to solve a cross-functional problem nobody owns.

Why people do not always work together as we expect

When collaboration breaks down, the tendency is often to focus on individual behaviour. People are described as territorial, defensive, unhelpful or unwilling to cooperate. Leaders respond by encouraging openness, improving communication or attempting to build trust. These interventions may be worthwhile, but they can miss the conditions that are maintaining the existing pattern.

Consider two departments competing for a limited pool of technical specialists. Both have legitimate priorities. Both have committed to delivery targets. Both know that releasing resources to the other will make their own objectives harder to achieve. Their confrontation may be unpleasant, but it is not difficult to understand.

Asking the departmental leaders to collaborate more effectively will accomplish little if nobody addresses the underlying resource conflict or decides how competing priorities should be balanced. The problem is not necessarily unwillingness to collaborate. It may be that the organisational arrangements make a different way of working difficult. Several factors are worth examining:

Interdependence determines how far people genuinely need one another. Where the work is independent, coexistence may be efficient. Where the work is tightly connected, separate decision-making may create repeated problems.

Objectives and incentives influence what people protect. When departments are rewarded for achieving local targets, cooperation may be conditional on whether it threatens those targets. Collaboration may be encouraged in principle while being discouraged in practice.

Power and decision rights shape who can make commitments and whose preferences carry weight. A person may be expected to take shared ownership of an outcome while lacking authority over resources or decisions that determine its success.

Trust and previous experience affect people’s willingness to share information, challenge assumptions or expose difficulties. A history of broken commitments can influence behaviour long after the original dispute has faded.

Organisational processes and boundaries determine how easily information, decisions and resources move. Even willing colleagues may struggle to collaborate when systems, governance arrangements or reporting requirements reinforce separation.

These conditions interact. Limited trust may encourage people to seek more formal controls. Those controls may reduce autonomy and increase defensiveness. Competing targets may intensify resource disputes, which then damage relationships and reinforce departmental boundaries.

The resulting behaviour can become self-sustaining. This is why improving collaboration sometimes requires changing organisational arrangements rather than concentrating solely on interpersonal skills.

How the 6 Cs connects to matrix leadership

The relevance of the model becomes particularly clear in matrix organisations. A matrix creates formal interdependence across functions, products, programmes, geographies or business units. People are required to contribute to outcomes that extend beyond their reporting lines, often with different leaders influencing their work and competing demands on their time. However, the structure does not determine how those relationships operate.

A programme leader may depend on a functional manager for resources. They might negotiate those resources through cooperation, work together to redesign the programme through collaboration or accept shared responsibility for the outcome through co-ownership. Alternatively, the same relationship may be dominated by confrontation or repeated attempts to use senior authority to secure compliance. The reporting lines have not changed. The way people are working together has.

This distinction helps explain why reorganising reporting structures does not automatically improve collaboration. A new matrix may create additional points of dependency without resolving the incentives, authority arrangements or working practices that make those dependencies difficult to manage.

It also connects with the challenge of building influence without authority. Matrix leaders frequently need support from people they cannot direct. They have to understand competing interests, build credibility and create conditions in which colleagues are willing to make commitments.

The 6 Cs provides a way of examining what kind of relationship those efforts are creating and whether it is sufficient for the outcome. There is a further connection with accountability without authority. A group may cooperate effectively, with each function completing its own responsibilities, while nobody takes responsibility for the dependencies between them. Moving towards collaboration may improve how the work is integrated. Moving towards co-ownership may strengthen commitment to the result as a whole.

Neither transition removes the need for clear decision rights and individual accountability. This is one of the central challenges of matrix leadership: creating enough collective commitment to achieve outcomes that no single function controls, without assuming that every decision needs to be shared or that influence can replace formal authority entirely. The 6 Cs helps make those distinctions more visible.

Using the 6 Cs to understand conflict

Conflict is one of the most useful applications of the model, but not because confrontation represents the only point at which conflict occurs. People can disagree while cooperating, collaborating or sharing ownership. In fact, the closer their work becomes, the more opportunities they may have to encounter different assumptions, priorities and expectations. The important distinction is how those differences are handled.

Deutsch’s (1949) work on cooperation and competition helps illuminate this. His theory distinguishes between situations in which people perceive their goals as positively linked, so that one person’s success supports another’s, and situations where goals are perceived as negatively linked, so that one person’s success threatens the other’s. These perceptions influence how people communicate, interpret behaviour and respond to disagreement.

The 6 Cs is not derived directly from Deutsch’s theory, but there is a useful connection. Confrontation can emerge when people see their interests as incompatible. Cooperation becomes easier when they recognise opportunities for mutual benefit, while collaboration and co-ownership require deeper engagement with shared outcomes. However, this should not be reduced to a simple matter of changing perceptions. Sometimes interests genuinely conflict, and no amount of positive communication will remove the need for difficult choices. A practical approach involves six steps.

Step 1: Identify the specific issue

Avoid beginning with a broad judgement about the relationship. Saying that two departments do not collaborate is considerably less useful than identifying that they repeatedly confront one another over resource allocation, while cooperating successfully on operational delivery. The more precisely the issue is defined, the easier it becomes to understand what is maintaining the difficulty.

Step 2: Identify how people are currently working together

Examine behaviour rather than personality. Who makes the decisions? How are differences handled? What information is shared? What happens when commitments become difficult? Are people seeking to understand one another’s concerns or primarily defending their own positions? Use the six Cs to form an initial assessment.

Step 3: Decide what the situation requires

Define what a workable resolution would look like before choosing an intervention. Two groups in persistent confrontation may need clearer boundaries and decision rights. Colleagues who coexist comfortably may need better cooperation around a particular handover. A project team may need collaboration to solve an integrated problem that separate functions have been unable to address.

Step 4: Examine what is maintaining the current pattern

A useful diagnostic is to ask whether the difficulty is primarily behavioural, relational or structural.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. A structural difficulty may contribute to repeated conflict, which then damages trust and makes future cooperation more difficult. This matters because different causes require different interventions. Communication training may help people manage a difficult conversation, but it will not resolve incompatible objectives. Clearer decision rights may reduce recurring disputes, but they will not automatically rebuild trust after repeated breaches of agreement.

Step 5: Choose the next useful move

Rather than attempting to transform the relationship, identify a practical change that addresses the immediate barrier.

These are possible interventions, not compulsory transitions. It may be appropriate to move directly from coexistence to collaboration when the work demands it. Equally, the best solution to a confrontational relationship may involve separating responsibilities rather than increasing interdependence. Where intimidation or serious misconduct is involved, formal intervention may be necessary before constructive dialogue is realistic.

Step 6: Review what has changed

The final step is to examine whether the intervention improved how people work together. A conversation may have felt positive without producing any meaningful change. People may express a willingness to collaborate while continuing to make decisions separately, withhold information or protect conflicting priorities. Look instead for observable evidence: Are concerns raised earlier? Are handovers more reliable? Do people explore differences without immediately defending their positions? Are decisions informed by the perspectives of those affected? Are commitments being honoured, and are problems between responsibilities being addressed rather than passed along?

The most revealing question is often: What can we now achieve together that was previously difficult or impossible? That keeps attention on the purpose of the relationship rather than the appearance of harmony.

When the two parties see the relationship differently

There is an additional issue worth exploring when using the model in coaching or team discussions. The two parties may place their relationship at different points on the continuum. A leader may believe they are collaborating because they involve colleagues in discussions. Those colleagues may experience cooperation because they are asked to contribute information but have little influence over decisions. A project manager may describe a functional relationship as confrontational, while the functional manager believes they are simply defending legitimate priorities. Neither assessment should automatically be accepted as an objective description.

People see the relationship through different responsibilities, expectations, experiences and degrees of power. One practical approach is to ask the parties to assess the same piece of work independently, identify the evidence behind their choice and then compare their interpretations. This can reveal important differences. Perhaps they disagree about whether a decision is open to influence. Perhaps one expects shared ownership while the other believes their responsibility is limited to delivering a specialist contribution.

Sometimes the disagreement is not about how well people are collaborating. It is about what they understand the relationship to require. Making those expectations explicit can be an important step towards improving the work.

When closer working would be inappropriate

The question of how much involvement is useful is different from the question of whether closer involvement is appropriate at all. Some boundaries are there for good reasons. A professional may need independence to make a judgement without undue influence. Conflicts of interest may require responsibilities to be separated. A leader may need to make a decision personally because the authority, legal obligation or accountability cannot be delegated.

There are also situations in which calls for collaboration can conceal an unfair distribution of power. Asking someone to share ownership of an outcome while denying them meaningful influence over the decisions or resources that determine it risks transferring responsibility without authority.

Where there is intimidation, harassment or abuse, the response should prioritise safety, fair processes and appropriate intervention. Greater closeness is not the measure of a successful resolution.

These are not exceptions to be overcome through better relationship skills. They are reasons to clarify rights, boundaries and responsibilities before deciding whether closer working would help.

A practical exercise: Mapping your working relationships

The 6 Cs can be used as a short individual reflection, a coaching exercise or a facilitated discussion with a leadership team. Begin by selecting a particular project, task or recurring issue. Avoid assessing a relationship in general, because the way people work together may differ significantly across activities. Then consider six questions.

For a more extensive discussion, identify several important working relationships around the same initiative and compare current and required ways of working.

This is an illustrative example, not an assessment of an actual organisation. Notice that the Finance relationship does not need to move rightwards. Its current approach may be entirely appropriate. The more important gaps lie elsewhere. Nor should the leader automatically concentrate on the relationship furthest to the left. The greatest risk may come from a relationship that appears positive but falls short of the level of joint working required for a critical outcome.

That distinction makes the exercise useful for prioritising leadership attention. The six Cs is a reflective framework, not a validated psychometric instrument. Its value lies in helping people examine what they observe, challenge assumptions and agree practical changes, rather than generating a score.

Wrapping up

The word collaboration often hides more than it reveals. It can refer to exchanging information, helping a colleague, designing a solution together or accepting shared responsibility for its success. Those activities place different demands on people, and treating them as interchangeable creates confusion.

The 6 Cs gives leaders a language for examining those differences without labelling people. Its value is greatest when applied to specific work: who depends on whom, where the difficulties occur and which conditions are influencing the way people respond. It also changes the nature of the intervention. A strained relationship may call for clearer decision rights, a joint problem-solving process, more reliable coordination or a change to conflicting objectives. Choosing between these requires more than a general appeal to collaborate.

Before asking people to collaborate more, perhaps we should ask what they need to accomplish together and what way of working would give them the best chance of doing it.

Origins and attribution

As mentioned at the start, my understanding is that Saturn Corporation’s internal consulting team originated it, although I have not been able to verify the original authorship. The interpretation, distinctions and practical applications in this article reflect my subsequent experience working with leaders and organisations using the 6Cs. The visual in the header was created by the late Paul Richardson, who was the Graphic Recorder and creator of visuals for the programme.

Sources:

The research below informs particular arguments in this article; it should not be interpreted as evidence of the original authorship or academic validation of the 6 Cs.

• Deutsch, M. (1949) ‘A theory of co-operation and competition’, Human Relations, 2(2), pp. 129–152. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674900200204 (Accessed: 20 October 2026).
• Edmondson, A. (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999 (Accessed: 20 October 2026).
• Okhuysen, G.A. and Bechky, B.A. (2009) ‘Coordination in organizations: An integrative perspective’, Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), pp. 463–502. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520903047533 (Accessed: 20 October 2026).
• Pearce, C.L. and Conger, J.A. (eds.) (2003) Shared leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452229539 (Accessed: 20 October 2026).