ACCELERATING PERFORMANCE

Trust Is the Real Operating Model:
Collaboration Across Silos

1,253 WORDS | 8-MIN READ | NOVEMBER 2026

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Introduction
The Trust Equation, turned inward
Structures that pull us apart
What the evidence says
Building trust across the lines
The bottom line

Quick Takeaways

If you only have a minute:

Trust is the foundation of collaboration. Organisational structures can create opportunities to work together, but trust is what makes people willing to share clients, knowledge, credit and responsibility.
Silos are often reinforced by competing incentives. When teams are rewarded for individual performance rather than shared success, protecting their own interests becomes the rational choice.
Credibility and interpersonal trust both matter. People need confidence in their colleagues' expertise and reassurance that they will look after each other's interests.
⁠Collaboration should be intentional, not universal. The greatest value comes from bringing specialists together to solve complex, high-stakes problems where an integrated approach benefits the client.
Leaders set the tone for collaboration. By sharing credit, recognising expertise, building relationships and rewarding collective success, leaders can create a culture where collaboration becomes part of how the organisation operates.

ARTICLE START

Most organisations say they want more collaboration. Few get it. They redraw the organisation chart, launch a cross-selling initiative, add “One Team” to the values statement, and then watch people carry on much as before.

The reason is rarely the structure itself. It is trust: whether people trust each other enough to share clients, credit and risk. That is why I find it useful to start not with organisational design, but with a deceptively simple formula most of us first met in the context of clients.

📌 The Trust Equation, turned inward

In The Trusted Advisor, David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford set out the Trust Equation. It was born in professional services, but it describes trust in almost any working relationship:

TRUSTWORTHINESS =

Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy

Self-orientation

Credibility: Do I believe you know what you are talking about?
Reliability: Do you do what you say, when you say you will?
Intimacy: Can I raise something difficult with you without it backfiring?
Self-orientation: Are you focused on me and our shared goal, or on yourself?

It was written about client relationships, but it applies just as well between colleagues and departments, in any kind of business.

Picture a sales director deciding whether to bring an engineering colleague into a key customer meeting. Or a partner deciding whether to introduce a colleague from another service line to a valued client. The questions running through their mind map exactly onto the equation:

Are they as good as I need them to be to make me look good too?
Will they follow through, or leave me exposed?
Can I tell them frankly if something goes wrong?
And, often the deciding one: are they going to take my credit – or even my client?

Self-orientation sits in the denominator for a reason. No amount of expertise makes up for a colleague who is seen to be playing for themselves. And inside organisations, self-orientation is often not a personal failing but a structural one. It is what people are measured on and paid for.

📌 Structures that pull us apart

Functional silos and strategic business units exist for good reasons. They build depth of expertise, clear accountability and manageable spans of control. The trouble is that customers’ problems do not respect those boundaries.

A manufacturer's key account needs sales, engineering, supply chain and service working as one. A family business preparing for sale needs tax, transaction, audit and wealth advice joined up, not delivered as four separate projects.

Each unit, meanwhile, optimises for its own targets: sales volume, cost per unit, utilisation, billings or its own P&L. Collaboration becomes a cost to the unit that gives, while the benefit lands somewhere else. Rational people respond rationally: they protect their patch and hold on to their customers.

The matrix was meant to solve this. It gives people one line into their function and another into a market, sector or key client. In practice it often adds its own complexity: two bosses, competing priorities, slow decisions and a great deal of time in meetings.

Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal made the point back in 1990 that a matrix works only when it exists in managers' minds, not just on the organisation chart.

That is the heart of it. Structure can permit collaboration; it cannot compel it. Trust is what makes a matrix workable.

📌 What the evidence says

Heidi Gardner of Harvard Law School has spent years researching collaboration, initially in professional services and subsequently across a much wider range of industries. Her findings make a compelling commercial case.

The numbers are striking:

Revenue: In her research, moving from one to two practices serving a client roughly tripled revenue from that client, with further practices adding more.

Loyalty: Around 75% of clients served by a single partner said they would consider switching firms if that partner left. Among clients served by two or more partners, 90% said they would stay.

Collaboration doesn't just grow revenue; it makes it more durable.

Gardner's research also helps explain why collaboration is often difficult. People need two kinds of trust before they are willing to share work: competence trust (do I believe you can do the job?) and interpersonal trust (do I believe you will look after my interests?). Both matter. A brilliant colleague you don't trust personally is unlikely to get the introduction.

But Gardner makes another important distinction: collaboration should be smart, not universal. Not every task needs a cross-functional team. The real value comes from bringing specialists together around complex, high-stakes problems where an integrated solution is worth more to the customer.

In one firm she studied, clients billed by three practice groups generated only around 1.5 times the fees of single-practice clients. The groups were working alongside each other, not together.

That is an important distinction. Activity across silos is not the same as collaboration.

📌 Building trust across the lines

So what can leaders actually do? Using the Trust Equation as a lens, a few things consistently make a difference.

Make credibility visible. People cannot trust expertise they don't know exists. Internal teach-ins, sector groups and shared case studies let colleagues see what each other can really do.

Build reliability in instalments. A low-risk first joint piece of work, delivered well, achieves more than any amount of exhortation.

Invest in relationships before you need them. Intimacy grows through time spent together: mixed teams, cross-office development programmes and informal contact. It is hard to call a stranger when a customer needs help tomorrow.

Reduce structural self-orientation. Look honestly at how credit, sales attribution and reward are allocated. If the system punishes sharing, no values statement will fix it. Shared credit, customer-level metrics and appraisals that ask "who did you help succeed?" all change the arithmetic.

Role-model it from the top. When senior leaders visibly bring in colleagues and give them the credit, others follow.

📌 The bottom line

Organisation charts tell us who reports to whom. They say nothing about who trusts whom, and that is what really decides whether an organisation acts as one.

Structure, incentives and process matter, but they are the conditions, not the cause. The cause is people choosing, one relationship at a time, to trust colleagues with something they value.

The Trust Equation gives us a practical way to diagnose where that is breaking down. Next time a collaboration stalls, ask:

Is this a credibility problem?
A reliability problem?
An intimacy problem?
Or are we simply rewarding self-orientation?

Where have you seen collaboration across silos work well, and what made the difference? I'd be interested to hear.

ARTICLE END

“

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

— Henry Ford

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