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When universities struggle to embed internal collaboration, it is often misdiagnosed as a culture issue, but is more likely due to a lack of strategic alignment. Organisational design, incentives and leadership can help higher education leaders to rethink how institutional connectedness is created and sustained.
Across Europe, universities rightly champion internal collaboration. It remains a cornerstone of most university strategies, featuring in our narratives on education delivery, research activity, civic engagement and in the work of our European Universities alliances. Internal collaboration is the process by which individuals, teams or organisational units work across internal boundaries to share knowledge, resources and expertise in pursuit of common or organisational goals.
However, working across the faculties, campuses and cultures that make up a university can be very difficult. Leveraging the individual goodwill that is such a hallmark of university life, many institutions reward, organise and govern work in ways that reinforce individual and disciplinary boundaries. The challenge in addressing this is one of alignment – the degree to which strategy, structure, governance and, crucially, incentives direct people towards certain behaviours.
In my experience as a university vice-president with a strong internal focus, one of the lessons I have learned through organisational change is that people rarely resist collaboration itself. They resist systems that make collaboration unnecessarily difficult.
I have also seen how easy it can be to blame every challenge in an organisation on ‘culture’. Culture so often gets the blame – some version of ‘we don’t have the culture yet for that’ is often said in universities. However, culture is a lagging indicator. It tells us what was acceptable, what was tolerated, what was championed yesterday.
Changing culture means changing the organisational fabric that people interact with and leverage in order to navigate the truth of what is important to the university. Therefore, we must think in a more structured way. We must dismiss the notion that we are passive in developing internal collaboration and rather see the potential offered by embedding it as an organisational design principle.
Culture – whatever its role might be – does not appear out of thin air. It is a function of the organisation and its practices, processes and systems. Therefore, the road to better internal collaboration is well within our control. A ruthless emphasis on alignment can make collaboration the culture of the university.
With this in mind, there are three key things that universities can do to properly embed collaboration as an intrinsic habit.
Firstly, systemised and sustainable internal collaboration does not happen by accident. Rather, it is a key focus of an organisational design.
Universities can make internal collaboration a strategic organisational capability once we recognise that there is a mismatch between our rhetoric and our organising principles. Our higher education institutions continue to organise themselves around disciplines, departments, faculties and professional specialisms. There is nothing wrong with this, but it leads to universities being much more centred on discipline-based excellence and depth than on broad collaboration.
Traditionally universities have been designed to support autonomy and expertise, not integration. Universities need to ask if their structures are built for the genuinely strategic collaboration among all internal stakeholders from which true alignment arises.
Secondly, there is often a marked distinction between what we expect of university staff and what we actually incentivise.
We ask our colleagues to collaborate, and many have a natural predisposition to doing so. However, we recognise publications, grants, promotions, workload and performance through an individual lens.
This lack of alignment is clear in so many universities. For example, many contend that the culture in any organisation can be assessed by who gets promoted. And although this is changing somewhat, there is very little evidence to suggest that university promotion committees actively consider internal collaboration in a meaningful way.
A truly defining movement towards championing internal collaboration would see it as an essential feature of selection and promotion activities. There are other ways in which the same outcome can be achieved of course, where we see the incentive match the behaviour we are espousing. Culture only follows lived experience, however.
Thirdly, the role of leadership in driving internal collaboration is about moving away from a reliance on well-intentioned charisma. The role of leadership is to align governance, recognition, resources, decision making and cultural signals with the strategic intent of collaborative practice.
Any kind of collaboration, though worthwhile, consumes energy and time. But to truly make it ingrained, it needs to be resourced. This is particularly true in the early stages of engagement when trust, psychological safety and connection are being established.
Staff in universities where internal collaboration is valued need to experience leadership through deeply considered mechanisms, structures, processes and artefacts that give life to institutional connectedness. Leadership has an indispensable role in supporting the conditions that lead to systemised collaboration across disciplines and functions. Internal collaboration can thrive in environments where it is actively considered and designed into university life.
Note: This article is based on the author’s contribution to a panel discussion on ‘Championing internal cooperation across faculties, cultures and backgrounds’ during the 2026 EUA Annual Conference at Yeditepe University, Türkiye.
