foHRsight: HR, Leadership & the Future of Work

Why Great Teams Don't Happen by Accident with Alison Coward

• Mark Edgar and Naomi Titleman • Episode 183

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0:00 | 29:08

Most teams don't have a collaboration problem because they lack talented people.

They have a collaboration problem because they've never really talked about how they work together.

We invest in Slack, Teams, Miro, Notion and countless other tools designed to make collaboration easier. But more tools haven't necessarily made teams better at collaborating. In some cases, they've simply created the illusion that collaboration is happening.

In this episode of foHRsight, Naomi sits down with Alison Coward to explore why great teamwork rarely happens by accident and what it means to intentionally design the way people work together.

They discuss why talented people don't automatically create high-performing teams, why workshops so often fail to create lasting change, and why small, consistent shifts in how teams communicate, align and make decisions can be far more powerful than sweeping culture initiatives.

For HR leaders, there's an important challenge here: stop treating collaboration as something that should happen naturally. Start creating the conditions for it.

About Our guest

Alison Coward is a team culture strategist, workshop facilitator, trainer, and keynote speaker based in London. As founder of Bracket, she partners with ambitious, forward-thinking companies to help them build high-performing team cultures. Her book, Workshop Culture, lays out a practical framework for taking the energy and effectiveness of great workshops and embedding them into how teams work every day.

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