“A culture of collaboration does not just happen. It must be formed and fashioned by many hands.” Seaburn et al. (1996)
"Teams who could easily reach other teams and access the knowledge they needed were more successful than teams with poor network connections. The ability to reach a diverse set of others in the network through very few links was the key to success." M. Hanson, Harvard
Network and team collaboration must be stoked and reinforced to flourish in organizations just like any other positive social relationship involving groups of people. Introducing and adopting collaboration programs and technologies effectively within organizations has many benefits - better team sharing and team building, cross-silo innovations, better faster communications, understanding and acceptance corporately, better productivity, access to the right resources and subject knowledge, collaborative co-creating, and a memory trail.
Some of the pitfalls to deploying collaboration process, methods and technologies? One size fits all roll-outs and deployments to staff; senior management not seen to be participating in the new ways of collaborating; trying to engage staff without a personal "hook"; and understanding where and how staff sit and engage on the technology adoption curve.
Bottom line, collaboration is a good thing for team success and organizational success if properly introduced, adopted, reinforced and maintained.
