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• Published: 14 October 2022

Towards understanding the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful collaborations: a case-based team science study

• Hannah B. Love   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0011-1328 1 , 2 ,
• Bailey K. Fosdick   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3736-2219 3 ,
• Jennifer E. Cross   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5582-4192 2 ,
• Meghan Suter   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8824-279X 4 ,
• Dinaida Egan 4 ,
• Elizabeth Tofany 3 &
• Ellen R. Fisher   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6828-8600 5 , 6  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  371 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Science, technology and society

Scientific breakthroughs for complex, large-scale problems require a combination of contributory expertize, disciplinary expertize, and interactional expertize, or socialized knowledge. There is, however, little formal recognition of what expertize is important for team success, and how to evaluate different types of contributions. This is problematic for the field of the Science of Team Sciences (SciTS). Funding is increasing for team science globally, but how do we know if teams are collaborating in meaningful ways to meet their goals? Many studies use bibliometric and citation data to understand team development and success; nevertheless, this type of data does not provide timely metrics about collaboration. This study asks: Can we determine if a team is collaborating and working together in meaningful ways in a process evaluation to achieve their goals and be successful in an outcome evaluation, and if so, how? This exploratory longitudinal, mixed-methods, case-based study, reports on eight interdisciplinary scientific teams that were studied from 2015–2017. The study used six different methods of data collection: a social network analysis at three-time points, participant observation, interviews, focus groups, turn-taking data during team meetings, and outcome metrics (publications, award dollars, etc.). After collecting and analyzing the data, a Kendall Rank Correlation was used to examine which development and process metrics correlated with traditional outcome metrics: publications, proposals submitted, and awards received. Five major implications, practical applications, and outputs arise from this case-based study: (1) Practicing even turn-taking is essential to team success. (2) The proportion of women on the team impacts the outcomes of the team. (3) Further evidence that successful team science is not about picking the right people, but on how to build the right team for success. (4) This article presents process metrics to increase understanding of successful and unsuccessful teams. (5) Teams need to engage in practices that build relationships for knowledge integration. This case-based study represents an early step to more effectively communicate how teams form and produce successful outcomes and increase their capacity for knowledge integration. The results contribute to the knowledge bank of integration and implementation by providing additional evidence about evaluation for scientific teams, including the know-how related to everyday interactions that lead to goal attainment. This study provides further evidence that to create new knowledge, scientific teams need both contributory and interactional expertize.

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Introduction.

Scientific breakthroughs for complex, large-scale problems require a more systemic approach than cross-disciplinary scientific teams merely exchanging information and collaborating across different disciplines (Read et al., 2016 ). They require different types of expertize. Bammer et al. ( 2020 ) defined two types of expertize needed to solve complex global challenges: contributory and interactional expertize. Contributory expertize is the “expertize required to make a substantive contribution to a field” (Collins and Evans, 2013 ; Collins H. and Evans, 2007 ). Interactional expertize is socialized knowledge about groups that are codified through “learning-by-doing,” and augmented from project to project (Bammer et al., 2020 ). Today’s most pressing environmental, societal, and health problems, however, cannot be solved with contributory expertize alone. To solve complex global problems, teams need to have both contributory and interactional expertize. This aligns with a growing body of literature that frames knowledge creation as a social process (Zhang et al., 2009 ; Brown and Duguid, 2000 ; Cravens et al., 2022 ; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999 ; Hakkarainen, 2009 ; Love et al., 2021 ; Paavola and Hakkarainen, 2005 ; Sawyer, 2003 , 2017 ; Wheatley and Frieze, 2006 ; Zhang et al., 2011 ) There is, however, little formal recognition of what expertize is important for the team’s success, and how to evaluate different types of contributions to the team’s success. To date, most SciTS research has relied heavily on bibliometric data to assess team formation, team structures, and outcomes (Duch et al., 2012 ; Guimerà et al., 2005 ; Leone Sciabolazza et al., 2017 ; Wuchty et al., 2007 ; Zeng et al., 2016 ). A recent review of literature on SciTS, published between 2006–2016, found 109 articles that met the criteria for inclusion as specific studies of scientific teams (Hall et al., 2018 ). They reported that 75% of these articles used pre-existing data (e.g., archival data), 62% used bibliometrics, over 40% used surveys, and over 10% used interview and observational data (Hall et al., 2018 ). Notably, the majority of these studies used only one evaluation method, rather than a mixed-methods approach to examine the processes of team formation and team interaction. This 2018 review concluded by stating there is “a critical need for more sophisticated designs, including those that are multivariate, examine multiple causal factors, and take longitudinal, experimental, or data-intensive approaches (e.g., within-team time series analyses or computationally driven modeling)” (Hall et al., 2018 , p. 542). It is essential to adopt more sophisticated methods of evaluation to understand the phasic and developmental features of scientific teams (Hall et al., 2012 ) because bibliometric and citation data do not provide a timely measure of team success.

To date, few studies provide methodological or practical guidance on how to assess the capacity for knowledge integration, and provide pragmatic and feasible methods to study knowledge integration (Hitziger et al., 2019 ). There’s a lack of understanding across many disciplines including One Health (Hitziger et al., 2018 ), sustainable agriculture (Ingram, 2018 ), ecosystem services (Dam Lam et al., 2019 ), sustainability science (Lang et al., 2012 ) and SciTS about what makes some teams successful while others fail to launch. To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the connections, networks, and outcomes of knowledge, more studies need to engage social network analysis to characterize how patterns of interaction impact the development and processes of scientific teams.

Existing studies do not provide pertinent data to know if teams are collaborating in meaningful ways to meet their goals. This is problematic for the field of the Science of Team Sciences (SciTS). The National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other major research funders have recognized the necessity for support of scientific research teams; yet, there is limited evidence about, how scientific teams build the infrastructure for the teams; how to use the evidence from Science of Team Science (SciTS) in impactful ways; and how do funding organizations measure the impact of the investment (Börner et al., 2010 ; Hall et al., 2018 ; Love et al., 2021 ; Oliver and Boaz, 2019 ; Stokols et al., 2008 ).

SciTS scholars have published frameworks to understand more about what processes contribute to a team’s success, but few published studies have ultimately used those frameworks. Wooten et al. ( 2014 ) outlined three types of evaluations to understand the complexity of scientific teams over time: outcome, developmental, and process. An outcome evaluation is a measure of goal achievement (Wooten et al., 2014 ). Developmental evaluations aim to answer questions such as: are specific roles being fulfilled? Are tasks being completed? It focuses on the continuous process of team development (Patton, 2011 ). A process evaluation is an iterative and recursive practice that centers on measuring program effectiveness (Saunders et al., 2005 ; Wooten et al., 2015 ). Similarly, Borner et al. ( 2010 ) proposed a multi-level mixed-methods approach to study complexities, gain perspective, and create best practices for scientific teams. Studying a scientific team’s development, process, and outcomes, at multiple levels, presents many challenges and few literature studies use multiple methods, are multivariate, examine causal factors, or use data-intensive approaches to understand how teams change over time.

This exploratory case-based study thus seeks to explore various evaluation methods that provide a more comprehensive view of how scientific teams are collaborating. This study asks: Can we determine if a team is collaborating and working together in meaningful ways in a process evaluation to achieve their goals and be successful in an outcome evaluation, and if so, how? We explored the literature for process metrics that might increase our understanding of how scientific teams develop, interact, and perform.

Case-study selection

In 2015, a major research university initiated a program to invest in and support interdisciplinary research teams. This program provided teams with significant financial and programmatic support to catalyze interdisciplinary teaming and increase proposal submissions and competitiveness to high-risk, high-reward extramural funding opportunities. Early in the program, the university determined that, in addition to supporting the teams financially and administratively, it was also essential to provide these teams with skill development in effective team development and interaction. The extant literature, however, provides few studies of team development or intergroup interactions and none that have established metrics that align with the theoretical framework of successful and unsuccessful science team development (Hall et al., 2018 ). Therefore, this research university and their program became the case-study.

Case-study description

The teams were self-formed interdisciplinary scientific teams. Each team submitted a written application to the program, which was reviewed by both faculty and staff internal to the university. A select group of applicants then advanced to compete in a “pitch fest” (a very short oral presentation of the proposed project, with an intensive question and answer session) to vie for selection into the program. Seven teams from a range of university colleges, academic disciplines, and topics were selected to participate. With this investment, teams were expected to contribute to the following high-level program goals, and within the outcome evaluation for the program, team success has been primarily measured by a team’s ability to achieve these overarching goals:

Increase university interest in multi-dimensional, systems-based problems

Leverage the strengths and expertize of a range of disciplines and fields

Shift funding landscape towards investing in team science/collaborative endeavors

Develop large-scale proposals; high caliber research and scholarly outputs; new, productive, and impactful collaborations

These overarching goals were measured by having the teams report on a variety of outcome metrics, including publications, proposals submitted, and awards received. An additional team was evaluated herein, which was not part of the program, but that volunteered to participate in the study. This team was a multidisciplinary team that had already received a large grant from a federal agency. These eight teams were randomly assigned a number 1–8 and will be named based on their assigned number for anonymity.

There were 135 team members in the sample, which included 17 graduate or undergraduate students. Each team was organized around a distinct “grand challenge” type topic that brought together individual researchers from across multiple disciplines. These topics were wide-ranging, spanning air quality, urban eco-districts, polymers, sensors, microgrid electricity, sustainable agriculture, and genomics.

Social network surveys

A social network survey was administered to understand both scientific collaborations and to identify what social relationships were forming. (See Supplemental Table 2 for the complete survey). Annually, the teams self-reported a team roster listing the team members, self-identified gender, academic department, and email address. A social network survey was sent to every member of each team’s roster. Participants were surveyed using this tool at the beginning of the program, halfway through the program (mid-points), and at the conclusion of the program. The response rate for the three periods of data collection is presented in Supplemental Fig. 1 . The lowest response rate for a team was 39% and the highest was 93%. Following IRB protocol #19-8622H, participation was voluntary; all subjects were identified by name on the social network survey to allow for complete social networks construction; following data recording, names were removed (Borgatti et al., 2014 ).

The survey had two sections with multiple questions. The first set of questions was developed primarily to collect information about scientific collaborations within the teams. It asked if team members collaborated on joint publications, presentations, or conference proceedings; composed or submitted a grant proposal together; conducted university business together, consulting and technical support; and/or served jointly on a student’s committee (or, for students, if a team member was a member of their thesis/dissertation committee). These questions were analyzed separately, and they were combined to create the measure called ‘collaboration’ for the purposes of statistical analysis. The second set of questions focused on social relationships within the team including mentor relationships; advice relationships (personal/professional); who you would want to hang out with for fun, and who would you consider a personal friend. Data from this set of survey questions were also analyzed separated and combined used to construct multiple social networks (e.g., mentor, advice, friend, and fun networks).

The relational networks were analyzed using UCInet (Borgatti et al., 2014 ) and RStudio (RStudio Team, 2015 ), wherein nodes are the researchers and an edge exists from researcher A to researcher B if A perceived a relation with B. For example, in the mentorship network, a link from A to B signified that A considered B to be a mentor. These relations were summarized using nodal average degree and nodal betweenness. The average degree of a node is the average of the in-degree (how many links enter) and out-degree (how many links exit) (Giuffre, 2013 ). Average degree of a network is average number of edges for all nodes in the network. Average degree of the network was selected because it can be used as a tool to compare networks that are different sizes. We calculated the betweenness score for each member of the team for five social network diagrams: mentor, advice, friendship, fun, and collaboration (as noted above the “collaboration” diagram combines grant writing, publications, new research/consulting, and participation on student committees). Betweenness centrality is a measure of node centrality that captures a person’s role in allowing information to travel from one side of the network to another (Golbeck, 2015 ). A person with a high betweenness centrality or betweenness score is acting as a bridge to other nodes in the network. Given this, we hypothesize that betweenness scores help us understand how social support travels and is shared on teams involving multiple scientific disciplines.

Turn-taking data

An evaluator attended one to two meetings per year for each team, to observe and collect turn-taking data. In the meetings, the evaluator recorded information on who spoke, for how long, and what types of knowledge were transferred during the conversation. After each meeting, the evaluator recorded and calculated the number of turns-taken every 10 min and the median number of speaking turns for each attending participant. The percent above/below the median that each person on the team spoke was also calculated to investigate the variability in turns across participants. Finally, the spread above/below the median was calculated.

Participant observation and field notes

Two to four meetings of each team were attended to gather turn-taking data and to make additional observations about the team. There were two exceptions to this: Team 1 did not have face-to-face team meetings, precluding participant observation; Team 5 did not consent to evaluator observation at their meetings. After the meetings, field notes were recorded to provide qualitative insights about the progress of the team development and their patterns of collaboration.

Outcome data

The seven program teams self-reported typical scientific outcome metrics quarterly to the university, and the eighth team reported to NSF metrics, which included: total proposal dollars submitted, total award dollars received, and total publications. Additional outcome metrics include the average degree of the final publications and grant networks. Recognizing that team development takes time and occurs over stages, we exclude metrics reported from the first year to allow teams time to become established.

Statistical analysis

We use Kendall’s rank correlation to quantify the association between and among the process and outcome metrics. Kendall’s rank correlation assesses the degree to which there is a monotonic relationship between variables (i.e., do larger values of turn-taking correspond to larger numbers of publications?) but is invariant to the specific form of the relationship (e.g., linear, quadratic). Permutation based p -values are calculated and used to assess the statistical significance of the estimated correlations. We discuss p -values less than 0.10 as “marginally significant” and p -values less than 0.05 as “significant.”

Process, development, and outcome data

This article uses a combination of process and development data, as well as outcome data to understand which process measure correlated with positive outcome measures. A complete table of metric descriptions can be found in the Supplemental Table 3 . These data provide insights into the development and processes of teams. Table 1 lists current SciTS literature measures and measures used in this study to extend those literature measures. Also listed are team development and process data and outcome metrics that align with the literature measures. Ultimately this extension and alignment with literature measures allows us to provide additional insight into the context of previous research.

The outcome metrics were established by the university and focused heavily on traditional metrics of scholarly performance and productivity. Outcome data were recorded for quarters five to nine because we recognize that team development takes time. Moreover, outcome measures of scholarly performance were unlikely to be directly resultant from the program itself, but rather representative of efforts by the team and team members that were already underway prior to participation in this program. Therefore, we excluded outcome metrics reported from the first year (four quarters), in recognition that teams need time to become established and included outcome data after funding ended, as outcomes often extend well beyond a funding period.

Table 2 reports on the team process and development metrics that are significantly associated with the outcome metrics. In Table 2 , the outcome metrics include average degree of the publication network, total publications, total award dollars received, and total proposal dollars submitted. The following subsections further discuss metrics focusing on those that were statistically significant.

Role of women on teams

In the data set, each team had team members who self-identified as women, and many of the teams had women as Principle Investigators (PIs) and/or women on the leadership team (Table 3 ). In the rank correlation (Table 2 ), the proportion of women on each team had a negative correlation with one outcome metric: final grant network average degree ( τ  = −0.52, p  < 0.10). As this finding did not entirely align with previously published literature, these data were further investigated.

Field notes revealed that during the quarterly updates to the university, Teams 1, 4, and 7 never had a woman presenter. Further investigation of the field notes found that women had a range of roles on teams from PI or member of a leadership/executive group, to simply being present on the team roster. A woman PI or member of the leadership team was correlated with the total proposal dollar submitted ( τ  = 0.86, p  < 0.01).

Based on these data and observations, we calculated the betweenness score of the women in the mid-point social network data. We found that the top woman betweenness score in the mentor network was positively correlated with the publication network ( τ  = 0.60, p  < 0.05) total proposal dollars submitted ( τ  = 0.52, p  < 0.10) and total award dollars received ( τ  = 0.69, p  < 0.05). The top woman betweenness score in the collaboration network was correlated with total proposal dollars submitted ( τ  = 0.62, p  < 0.05). The advice networks were not correlated with any outcome metrics (Supplemental Table 1 ). Figure 1 illustrates differences in betweenness scores for individuals in the mentor network.

Women play significant role in mentor network on teams.

Figure 1 reports the betweenness score for each individual on a team in the mentoring network. Notably, high (i.e., ≥~0.2) and low (i.e., <0.05) betweenness scores appeared in both small and large teams. Women did not play central roles on Teams 1 and 7. Teams 2, 4, 5, and 8 had women with very high betweenness scores, indicating these women played a central role in the mentoring network. In some instances, the woman with the highest score was the PI, and in some instances, she was just a member of the team.

Mid-point social network measures

Knowledge creation has traditionally been framed in terms of individual creativity, but recent literature has placed more emphasis on social dynamics. A team with a high average degree hangs out with more team members for fun and/or considers more team members friends (Supplemental Fig. 2 ). The average degree of the fun network was correlated with the publications network average degree ( τ  = 0.60, p  < 0.1). The average degree of the friend network was not only correlated with publications network average degree ( τ  = 0.63, p  < 0.1), but also with total proposal dollars submitted ( τ  = 0.60, p  < 0.05), and total award dollars received ( τ  = 0.78, p  < 0.01). Finally, the friend and fun networks were highly correlated ( τ  = 0.9, p  < 0.001). In addition, the average degree of the advice network was correlated with total award dollars received ( τ  = 0.55, p  < 0.05), and having isolates in the advice network was negatively correlated with the average degree of the publication network ( τ  = −0.69, p  < 0.10).

Second, the average degree of the network ‘serving on a student committee’ was correlated with multiple outcome metrics (Supplemental Fig. 3 ). The rank correlation (Table 2 ) found a correlation between the student committee network and total publications ( τ  = 0.64, p  < 0.05), total proposal dollars submitted ( τ  = 0.62, p  < 0.05), and total award dollars received ( τ  = 0.69, p  < 0.01). In addition, the collaboration network in 2016 was correlated with the average degree of the publication network in 2017 ( τ  = 0.87, p  < 0.05). Many of the process variables to measure scientific collaboration (grants average degree, publication average degree, collaboration network. expertize, contribute) were not statistically significant with the outcome measures or only significant with one metric (Supplemental Table 1 ).

Turn-taking

Based on field notes, a team with a high number of turns in 10 min typically had multiple members sharing ideas and no dominant turn-takers. In the Rank Correlation (Table 2 ), turns-taken in 10 min was positively correlated with total award dollars received ( τ  = 0.80, p  < 0.05) and total proposal dollars submitted ( τ  = 0.8, p  < 0.05). Figure 2 illustrates two turn-taking measures: (1) number of turns-taken in 10-min intervals and (2) number of turns-taken over the observation time.

Time spoken and number of turns-taken in 10-min.

To measure uneven turn-taking for the Rank Correlation (Table 2 ), we calculated the spread between the person on the team who had the highest number of turns above the median and the one lowest below the median. Field notes revealed uneven turn-taking occurred when one person was monopolizing the time and number of turns. We found a negative correlation between this measure of uneven turn-taking and total proposals ( τ  = −0.74, p  < 0.05).

Figure 3 illustrates in more detail the total time a person spoke during the meeting. Team 7 has the most extreme outlier. This person did not take many turns in 10 min, but they took a lot of time when they did speak, monopolizing over 50% of the total meeting time. Team 4 had two team members who took a lot of time, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the available meeting time on a team with nine members. Teams 3, 6, and 8 had relatively even distributions of turns, with Team 8 having the most even distribution among all individual team members.

Time spoken per person.

Finally, Bear and Woolley ( 2011 ) wrote that women on teams often mediate even turn-taking. We found a −0.9 correlation between the proportion women on teams and turns above the median ( p   ≤  0.001), indicating that teams with low proportions of women also tended to have a dominant speaker, confirming findings by Bear and Woolley ( 2011 ) and Woolley et al. ( 2010 ).

Scientific teams are complex systems; thus, conducting a team evaluation with only one method and a handful of measures is not likely to provide adequate insight into why a team succeeds or fails. Can we determine if a team is collaborating and working together in meaningful ways in a process evaluation to achieve their goals and be successful in an outcome evaluation, and if so, how? Although many studies have recommended conducting longitudinal, mixed-methods studies with social network analysis, few have conducted this type of assessment. This study aimed to help fill a methodological gap in SciTS literature by longitudinally studying eight scientific teams. In this study, by using a mixed-methods approach, we found process metrics and measures that were significant in the development, process, and outcome of teams as well as those that appear not significant. The addition of qualitative data such as field notes and interviews provided additional information not contained in the quantitative data. Moreover, the mixed-methods methodology allowed for comparison of the data across different time points of data collection to assist in future research and theory development.

Proportion women

Researchers from many disciplines have found that gender-balanced teams lead to the best outcomes for group process in terms of men and women having equal influence (Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Keyton et al., 2008 ; Smith-Doerr et al., 2017 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ) Fewer studies have explanations for why gender balance (or why proportion women ) plays an important role on interdisciplinary teams. In this study, the proportion of women on teams was not the key factor in team outcomes. We extended our exploration of gender and teams through participant observation, social network, and turn-taking data to further clarify these observations. We found that women played a significant role in the mentoring networks for teams and are correlated with turn-taking in team meetings. We also found that having a woman in a PI or leadership position positively impacted the outcome metric of team total proposal dollars submitted. The question of how or why gender balance on teams affects team performance remains a complex issue and additional work on this question must continue to address the myriad ways that team members interact.

Mid-point social network Measures

Our findings build on a growing body of literature that suggests knowledge integration is a social process. Considering knowledge integration as a social product, it is not surprising that the average degree in the friend, fun, and advice networks was statistically significant. In addition, the friend and fun networks were highly correlated. Writing grants and publications is a long, arduous task. When conflict arises or challenges occur, strong social relationships keep the team together. This also explains why data on several scientific collaboration measures including collaborating on grants and publications appear to not be statistically significant or only significant with one outcome metric.

We were surprised that the measure ‘student committees’ was correlated with so many outcome metrics. More research is needed to understand why serving together on student committees is important. We present three hypotheses: first, this is perhaps a proxy for the strength of ties, where faculty who collaborate more frequently tend to sit on committees of student members of their teams. However, of the 135 team members in the sample, only 17 were graduate or undergraduate students. Another possible explanation is that faculty are fulfilling the role of the outside committee member on graduate student committees, providing a perhaps otherwise non-existent link between faculty members. Although the formal role of the outside committee member is to ensure there is no bias in the student evaluation process, often the outside committee member is selected for their relevant (albeit extra-disciplinary) expertize. Moreover, many outside committee members are selected by the student or suggested by a third party (e.g., another graduate student), rather than by the advisor. In other words, the graduate student may be the connector between faculty members. As all graduate committees have an outside committee member, future research should investigate the role graduate students play in knowledge transfer across the university. Another possible explanation is that when team members have served on a student committee together, it is more likely they have had additional opportunities to discuss terminology, create a shared language, and build trust. Thus, participating in student committees creates additional opportunities for faculty to get to know each other’s perspectives and collaboratively explore scientific questions, thus strengthening trust and shared understandings.

This study and numerous others have consistently documented the importance of even turn-taking on scientific and business teams (Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Lehmann-Willenbrock et al., 2013 ; Ravn, 2017 ; Rawls and David, 2005 ; Schegloff, 2002 ; Stivers et al., 2009 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ). In our study, even turn-taking was positively correlated with total publications, total proposal dollars submitted, and total award dollars received. Uneven turn-taking was negatively correlated with the total proposal dollars submitted.

The mixed-methods study design also highlighted the role of women in turn-taking. Similar to previous studies, we found the presence of women on scientific teams was correlated with more even turn-taking (Bear and Woolley, 2011 ; Woolley et al., 2010 ). We further found that teams with a member who monopolized time and turns were negatively correlated with outcome metrics and also had fewer women. The mixed-methods design provided additional information about teams with uneven turn-taking from participant observation data and field notes. Less-even turn-taking on teams was attributable to one or two men monopolizing time and turns. In our study, a woman never monopolized time or turns in a meeting attended by an observer. Why do teams with more women have more even turn-taking and better outcome metrics? It is well accepted in the scientific literature that diversity of thought increases creativity, and influences knowledge integration (Amabile, 1988 ; Cravens et al., 2022 ; Csikszentmihalyi, 1999 ; Hitziger et al., 2018 ; Pearsall et al., 2008 ; Phelps et al., 2012 ; Sawyer, 2003 , 2017 ; Smith-Doerr et al., 2017 ). When everyone has a voice on a team, it could signify an openness to diversity and inclusion in team composition, discipline, and more. Because of the reasons outlined above, we believe that even turn-taking is one of the most important measures to creating effective collaborations with the capacity to truly build new knowledge through scientific teams.

Insignificant measures and analysis

In evidence and policy studies, the first step to understanding effective teams is establishing and sharing effective (and less effective) methods to study teams (Oliver and Boaz, 2019 ). To support future research and improved methods in the SciTS field, we also report other process measures that appear as not significant in our study (Supplemental Table 1). First, we hypothesized that the survey question “I understand how their expertize will contribute to the research team” [asked about other team members] would be statistically significant. We also asked a question about how well the survey respondent understood the expertize of each team member (e.g. “I could not describe their area of expertize at all,” “I could vaguely describe this person’s expertize,” “I can explain the general field of this persons expertize, I can explain this persons unique expertize in their field,” and “I understand this person’s expertize very well because it overlaps with some of my expertize.”) These questions appear not statistically significant. Our data revealed that social relationships matter more than expertize or understanding of the expertize of others. In other words, building a personal connection with a team member may be more important than having deep-level knowledge of that individual’s field or discipline. It also suggests there may be more nuances not captured by this relatively simple question around how individual team members interpret the goals and mission of their team, and how they perceive other members may fit into that individualized picture of the team.

Many of the mid-point social network questions did not appear to be statistically significant. From the mid-point social network data on interpersonal relationships, we calculated the average degree of the following mid-point social network measures: advice, mentoring, grant, and publications. Further, we hypothesized that the number of isolates in the mentor and advice networks would be statistically significant because everyone on a team should be either giving or receiving mentoring/advice. Finally, the combined metric called the collaboration network was only correlated with the 2017 publication network, which further emphasized that the interpersonal metrics were more influential than the scientific collaboration metrics. It was surprising that the metrics about scientific collaborations on scientific teams were not significant in this study, and we recognize that this might not be true for all teams (Thompson, 2009 ).

Regarding turn-taking, there were many statistical measures that did not adequately capture field notes and participant observations from the meetings. For example, average number of turns per person, percent of turns above and below the median for each person on the team, and statistical measures related to the average turn-taking (e.g., z -scores) were easy to read and interpret but did not appear to represent turn-taking during the meeting. We believe this is a result of the nature of interdisciplinary scientific teams, wherein meetings sometimes focus on the science or technical challenges of specific projects and sometimes they focus on budgets or other operational concerns of the team. These conversations do not always involve the same groups of people and can easily skew an average because they may just naturally end up being one-sided (e.g., when a business manager reports on the current status of a team’s budget expenditures and revenues).

Limitations

The current work reports on the results from an exploratory study on real-world academic scientific teams. Thus, the data presented herein do have some notable limitations. First, because these were real-world scientific teams, each team had different concerns about participating in SciTS research. For example, Team 5 was initially reluctant to participate in our research study, and consequently, we have a more limited data set for this team. It is also possible that teams behaved differently because they were part of a research study. Participant observation requires a team scientist to be in the room at meetings, retreats, during conflicts, and more. All of these instances were detailed in field notes so that the positionality and possible influence of the team scientist was well-documented (Baxter and Jack, 2008 ; Greenwood, 1993 ; Marvasti, 2004 ).

Second, a researcher was not present at every team meeting for every team. Thus, the turn-taking data may not be representative of all the team interactions. Moreover, given that many of the team meetings that were observed had a very mixed agenda (i.e., both scientific results and business/operations were discussed), deciphering the evenness of the turn-taking becomes problematic because a business meeting might involve fewer graduate students, or a scientific meeting might focus on one troublesome aspect of the science. Third, the sample size is limited to only eight teams and should be expanded in future research. Fourth, a limitation of all social network data is that it captures one-time point (the time of the survey). For example, teams not routinely asked whether they were having fun, so this measure taken solely from the survey results may not be an accurate representation of the amount of “fun” any team might experience. Finally, the survey did not give respondents the option to report gender in non-binary terms. However, all of our respondents reported binary gender identifiers (men and women). Future research should seek more diverse samples and provide additional options for gender identifiers.

Future directions

Future research should focus on four key areas. First, future studies should engage mixed-methods methodologies to explore additional metrics and measures. Second, numerous studies have consistently documented the importance of turn-taking. Future research should further explore what constitutes even turn-taking and why it is important. Ravn ( 2017 ) described four different types of meetings. The managerial style, which relies on somewhat authoritarian management; the parliamentary style, which has rules and formalities; the collective–egalitarian style of community-type meetings where anyone can speak anytime about anything; and the facilitative style, wherein a trained facilitator guides the meeting conversation to increase even turn-taking and participation. We highlight these differences because turn-taking might look different in different types of meetings, as indicated in our discussion of the limitations of the study. In terms of scientific teams, turn-taking in a meeting about science outcomes (e.g., presentations of recent results by team members) may be very different than in a meeting about business administration/operations for the team. We do not believe that even turn-taking on a scientific team means that everyone participates equally in every meeting. Meetings often focus on one aspect of the research project, and some are more focused on administrative details. These different roles should shift and adjust turn-taking in a well-structured team. More data are needed to develop measures that account for more nuances in team interactions and fully explore the impact and effects of these two measures for team science success.

Third, this exploratory study revealed measures that are important for team development, processes, and outcomes, but we are certain there are more. Questions we would like to test in the future include: who did you learn from?, who do you consider a leader on the team?, who do you trust?, questions about inclusivity (e.g., did you feel listened to? and did team members respect your diverse ideas?), and specific questions about expertize. Fourth, numerous bodies of literature have reported that the “proportion of women” is important on scientific teams. We tested many measures to try to understand the role of women on the scientific teams studied here. However, only three measures were statistically significant. More investigation is needed to understand the significance of how women shape team interactions and thus team performance. Future research should investigate non-binary gender roles, intersectionality, and other forms of diversity on scientific teams and their roles in knowledge integration.

Finally, a key limitation of the study is the length of time we followed teams. Teams were followed for 2.25 years. Many important outcome metrics take years to fully materialize. For example, the number of citations would increase understanding about the impact of the research; whether or not a team stays together after the funding ends could indicate a measure of cohesion; and developing an appropriate timeline for the number of years before team ‘outcomes’ are declared should be considered. Thus, future research studies that follow teams for even more extended periods of time are needed.

Application to scientific teams

SciTS represents a complex system that requires attention to both standard outcome metrics as well as more nuanced interpersonal interactions to develop robust measures of team success and promote the creation of truly effective teams. Although there is not a silver bullet to create the perfect team that meets their goals. there are four major implications, practical applications, and outputs from this case-based study of successful and unsuccessful teams: (1) Practicing even turn-taking is essential to team success. (2) The proportion of women on the team positively impacted the outcomes of the team. (3) Further evidence that successful team science is not about picking the right people, but on how to build the right team for success. (4) This article presents process metrics to increase understanding of successful and unsuccessful teams. (5) Teams need to engage in practices that build relationships for knowledge integration.

To date, few studies provide methodological or practical guidance on how to assess the capacity for knowledge integration, and provide pragmatic and feasible methods and metrics to study knowledge integration (Hitziger et al., 2019 ; Love et al., 2021 ). These findings about successful and unsuccessful teams could be applied and investigated further in areas such as One Health (Hitziger et al., 2018 ), sustainable agriculture (Ingram, 2018 ), ecosystem services (Dam Lam et al., 2019 ), and sustainability science (Lang et al., 2012 ). To provide a more comprehensive understanding of the connections, networks, and outcomes of knowledge more studies need to engage social network analysis to understand the patterns of interaction.

This case-based study provides additional evidence for the knowledge bank on how both contributory and interactional expertize contributes to scientific innovation. It advances claims about how teams form and produce successful outcomes. The mixed-methods evaluation builds on a growing body of literature in SciTS studies that team science is not just about the science, but also about building relationships; further demonstrating the need for both contributory and interactional expertize. These processes are not, however, always recognized and rewarded in tenure and promotion decisions, by funding agencies, and by others. How do you reward even turn-taking, and how do you support equal gender proportions on teams? These and other challenges will need to be addressed. Otherwise, our scientific teams lose potential brainpower when women are excluded, and likely more than half their brainpower when all ideas are not included in the process (even turn-taking).

In conclusion, based on our exploratory case-based study, one simple thing a team can do to improve collaboration, is to practice even turn-taking. Furthermore, the next time the question, “How do we pick the right people for the team?” arises, scientists should additionally be asking, “How can we build the right relationships for a success team?”

Data availability

The data for the article may be accessed here: https://hdl.handle.net/10217/194364 .

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The business case for collaboration

Smart collaboration generates profits, loyalty, talent and innovation. So what are you waiting for? 

Smart collaboration takes time. But it generates higher profits, inspires greater customer loyalty, helps attract and retain the best talent, and delivers greater innovation when specialists collaborate across silos. 

Organisations today face a serious conundrum. They and their customers increasingly face complex business problems – everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity – that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet, most of the required subject-matter experts are distributed across different internal departments and offices, creating organisational silos that are often reinforced by profit and loss structures, distance and differing micro-cultures. Collaborating across these silos typically feels costly, risky and inefficient, despite being essential for delivering integrated solutions. When they do it right – that is, integrate their knowledge effectively and efficiently to form unified solutions – I call it smart collaboration. 

If you think collaboration is a soft skill, think again.

For more than a decade, I have examined smart collaboration among organisational leaders while on the faculty at Harvard Business School and now at Harvard Law School. My research is based on millions of data records collected across multiple organisations, as well as statistical analyses, case studies, survey results and in-depth interviews. Both quantitative and qualitative findings reveal that smart collaboration makes organisations more productive and more profitable. In this article, I’ll outline the benefits and outcomes of smart collaboration, explain why individuals and organisations may resist, and offer suggestions on exactly how to achieve it in your organisation. Let’s dive in. 

Benefits and outcomes of smart collaboration 

Collaboration is a significant driver of both financial and people-related benefits for organisations. Yet, smart collaboration – as I define it – can be a painful endeavour to tackle. As such, it’s critical to address what I call “getting through the pain barrier” in the graph below.

At the outset of collaborative efforts, the costs – both actual and perceived – almost always outweigh the benefits and the gap can be significant. Take the plunge, and hang in there. As people develop networks and learn the routines associated with collaboration, the costs drop. And over time, the benefits (outlined below) start to accumulate. The trend lines eventually cross, as collaboration becomes the new normal, and your business will get better and better. Organisations that foster smart collaboration across business units and geographies earn higher margins, inspire greater customer loyalty, attract and retain the best talent and gain a competitive edge. The financial incentives to collaborate are impressive. On average, when product development specialists teamed up across three different business units, revenue from their customers was 160 per cent higher than the sum of their individual sales in the prior year. Profits climbed even faster. Why? They were able to offer more holistic solutions to more vexing problems, and the "owner" of those troubles was a higher-up executive with more spending power. Customers valued the integrated, sophisticated answers and were willing to pay. As the chief financial officer of one Fortune 100 company told me, “Margins rise with complexity.” 

The more departments serving a customer, the longer that customer remains with the organisation, even if the lead salesperson changes. The relationship is even stronger when multi-expert teams span business units and when they serve multiple contacts within the customer’s organisation. Consider the risk of losing a customer when one of your key salespeople departs: results show that probability drops from 72 per cent to 10 per cent if the account is served by a pair of co-leaders, rather than a solo account handler. 

Not only that, but collaboration produces more innovative outcomes – that is, solutions that are both novel and useful and which therefore lead to long-term benefits for customers. Getting employees to collaborate across units makes it easier to spread and leverage technology and other kinds of investments, because adoption jumps once people understand how those tools are used elsewhere. Collaboration also increases employee engagement, which translates into tangible financial rewards of talent retention and productivity, in turn generating stronger commercial outcomes. Innovation differentiates an organisation from the pack, generating higher profits in the near term and more sustainable competitive advantage in the long term. 

The pushback against collaboration 

Considering the benefits collaboration offers, why do rational people resist? As compelling as this evidence is, it’s no secret that an organisation’s structure, compensation systems, and cultures often seem to favour individual contributors rather than team players. 

“Considering the benefits collaboration offers, why do rational people resist?”

Distrust of colleagues is another root cause, including concerns that co-workers won’t uphold high enough levels of quality and responsiveness. Every organisation seems to have some doomsday story like, “I spent decades building a deep client relationship, but the first time I took Joe along he screwed up and we were kicked out for good.” In some organisations, lack of interpersonal trust is even more pressing; some employees worry that a co-worker might deliberately undermine a special customer relationship or take undue credit for success. 

Lastly, collaboration takes time. The financial rewards of collaboration that lead to new customer deals accrue slowly over time. But most of the costs and risks, such as locating an expert and assessing whether she’s trustworthy, available and conflict-free, are borne right away. Fortunately, as professionals gain more experi-ence with collaboration, the costs tend to fall because people discover how to collaborate more efficiently and effectively as they construct a set of reliable collaborators. How-ever, many professionals give up before reaching the point where the investment pays off, which creates a negative feedback loop that reinforces the perception that “collaboration wasn’t worthwhile.” 

How to foster collaboration in your organisation 

The key benefits and outcomes of collaboration outlined above may have implied that collaboration automatically generated these benefits, but in fact, it’s only excellent collaboration that ensures them. If leaders simply call together a team and divvy up the work in a “the sum equals the total of the parts” way, the benefits are far from assured. You can increase the odds that your organisation’s leaders are equipped and willing to lead their collaborative efforts in ways that generate the maximum returns. How? 

Create an organisation-wide approach for effective project launches. McKinsey, for example, has a format in which a leader is expected to kick off every new project by briefing the team on the project objectives, and then clearly discussing how each person’s piece fits into the bigger picture. Teams also spend some time getting to know each other’s work styles, strengths, and development areas. This step is essential for aligning members’ goals, helping them know where to turn with questions (which avoids the leader becoming the sole-source bottleneck), and allowing them to see how their specialty contributes to a bigger solution. Develop a template, train managers on how to use it, then give the system teeth: withhold their expense code until they actually conduct the project launch. 

Facilitate personal within-team interactions. People won’t build relationships or feel the benefit of peer support unless they have the opportunity to interact during collaboration. Provide a travel budget that allows members some face-to-face time together – ideally, early in the project, when they need to establish trust. Throughout and at the end of the project, a modest celebration fund will encourage teams to focus on their wins. These interactions enhance members’ sense of pride and accomplishment, boost firm morale, and build the "glue" that is the essence of a collaborative culture. 

“People won’t build relationships or feel the benefit of peer support unless they have the opportunity to interact during collaboration.” 

Embed explicit learning processes. Taking a cue from elite military units, the best team leaders use the time right before the celebration event to conduct a short after-action review (AAR) to boost team members’ learning from both mistakes and successes. AAR is a form of group reflection; participants review what was intended, what actually happened, why it happened, and what was learned. Critically, the intent is to learn rather than blame, and to prompt the sort of reflection that makes learning possible. As a leader, you should model this behaviour, and hold your partners accountable for doing it, too. 

Provide a technology platform that makes it easy for collaborators to see each other’s work-in-progress, and to share knowledge about the project. This transparency helps foster a sense of common purpose by giving participants a deeper understanding of the issue and how various pieces intersect; it also aids learning as participants get exposure to others’ ways of thinking – not simply their end results. 

Showcase collaboration. Distribute "latest wins" to highlight big and little cross-departmental success stories via email bursts. Stage 20-minute "road show" presentations to allow employees to highlight their expertise and potential cross-practice collaborative opportunities. 

The time is now 

Smart collaboration is an investment that takes time to generate returns. The evidence is clear that those benefits do accrue for the individual professional, their organisations and their customers when experts collaborate across silos to tackle sophisticated issues. Of course, doing it "smart" requires strong leadership, sustained efforts, and strong commitment from managers at all levels to collaborate with colleagues. The money and energy your firm puts into fostering high-level collaboration will almost certainly pay you back many times over. Now is the time to learn smart collaboration – before it’s too late. 

Dr. Heidi Gardner is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession, a lecturer on Law, and faculty chair of the school’s Accelerated Leadership Programme. Previously she was a professor at Harvard Business School. Her research, teaching, speaking and consulting focus on leadership and collaboration in professional service firms, and her book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silo s has just been published by Harvard Business Press. Previously with McKinsey & Company, and as a Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Gardner has lived and worked on four continents. 

Making collaboration across functions a reality

Companies have long struggled to break down silos and boost cross-functional collaboration—but the challenge is getting more acute. The speed of market change requires a more rapid adaptation of products and services, while customers increasingly expect an organization to present them with a single face. Even well-established multinationals routinely fail to manage operations end to end. 1 1. Pascal Visée, “ The globally effective enterprise ,” McKinsey Quarterly , April 2015. The result: interactions with customers are sluggish; complex, customized products are hard to create on time and on budget; and blocked lines of communication make new sales and distribution channels difficult to navigate.

The basic principles for improving performance—imposing stretch targets from the center, empowering cross-functional teams, standardizing processes, tightening up execution—are mostly familiar. But making these things happen is a different matter. In many companies, ownership of processes and information is fragmented and zealously guarded, roles are designed around parochial requirements, and the resulting internal complexity hinders sorely needed cross-business collaboration. What’s more, in our experience, companies that apply traditional solutions (such as lean and business-process reengineering) either exhaust their managers with efforts to rework every process across business units or, by contrast, focus too narrowly within functions.

Our observations of 25 companies in a wide range of industries in Europe, Asia, and North America have led us to conclude that perspiration is as important as inspiration in addressing these challenges. Here’s the story of how two companies launched new approaches successfully. One needed to focus narrowly to fix a critical process that compromised its core business. The other, swamped by the complexity of its processes, required a broad-based transformation.

Resetting targets

Executives at a communications-services company were initially puzzled by feedback showing that only 65 percent of its customers got a working connection when they first attempted to use a new premium fiber-optic product. After all, the functions responsible for the various parts of the process—the sales, back-office, operations, and logistics teams—had received scores of more than 90 percent in an earlier survey to assess their ability to “get things right first time.”

On closer inspection, executives discovered that field engineers, under pressure to meet new orders, had cut down on the time they spent with customers during installation, prompting a flood of requests for help to call centers. Back-office staff, meanwhile, were struggling to cope with incomplete and often incorrect orders submitted by the sales team. More fundamentally, collaboration was weak and incentives were misaligned. Sales and marketing, for example, rarely discussed how they could work with field engineers (or vice versa) to address problems. Meeting the needs of customers wasn’t included in individual or functional performance targets.

The company responded by setting several breakthrough targets aimed at uniting different teams and pushing them beyond their usual work practices and patterns. One target, for the sales and field-engineering teams, was to halve the number of requests for help to the call center following new installations.

At the same time, the company established new cross-functional teams charged with controlling the installation process from initial order to after-sales service. As a result, teams that traditionally had separate workflows and little shared responsibility were forced out of their comfort zones. The cross-functional representatives convened every week to review how well they did on a set of cross-functional key performance indicators and to generate further ideas for improvement. These meetings provided an opportunity to choose the high-payoff areas for execution—it was clear, for instance, that engineers should spend additional time in the field educating customers (at their premises) about successful connection procedures. Senior leaders reinforced accountability by assigning a strong manager to coordinate the process end to end.

The impact of this cross-functional collaboration has been tangible: first-time-right delivery has increased to over 80 percent (from 65 percent), customer satisfaction is up, and the number of requests for help to the call center during the first six weeks after installation dropped by one-third, with a commensurate reduction in costs. The leadership concluded that focusing on the way a single process broke down across functions, rather than following the initial impulse to have each of them address a range of process issues, generated a better solution, with far less stress on management resources.

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Rethinking processes and roles.

After steady performance declines in key business areas, the reconstituted board and new CEO of a global industrial company realized that internal complexity was hampering its reputation for innovation. Sixty businesses, each with its own P&L, often devised or maintained their own fairly similar processes, sometimes even lauded internally as marks of innovation. “We were like the UN without translators,” one executive noted, “with different language and terminology describing nearly every process.” In one division, half of the job titles in a commercial function were unique to a single person, making it hard to share information and thwarting potential economies of scale and the transfer of skills across businesses units. Different ones often swarmed clients with different and uncoordinated approaches; for example, each sales team pursued customers with separate promotional materials and financing arrangements. Atomized processes led to fragmented IT architectures, which allowed only a limited sharing of production or customer data.

The company’s leaders concluded that squeezing marginal improvements out of thousands of processes wouldn’t achieve their goals. Their response was to launch a multiyear business transformation built on two levels of a tightly specified architecture. One was bottom-up, grounded in an end-to-end view of markets and customers, the other a top-down redesign of the company’s operating model (exhibit).

Rewiring expectations

The company started by identifying a few hundred combinations of global businesses and local markets: matrix-like operational units known as business-market combinations. The executives in charge of each of them co-owned P&Ls and had free rein to overturn conventional ways of working and forge cross-functional and cross-business combinations. They also set stretch goals that no individual function or business could meet on its own. These included achieving a number-one market position, reaching new segments in emerging markets, embracing new business models, and opening new sales channels.

A group of transformation leaders was created to fight cultural resistance and help connect teams end to end. Monthly reviews by top executives tagged lagging business-market combinations requiring extra attention. One of the business units in need of change manufactured lower-tech products. It had long operated in an oligopoly market with high margins and sluggish multiyear technology cycles but now faced threats both from chip-based offerings with six-month technology churns and from more efficient competitors, some in China, offering better-priced products.

A business-market combination took the lead in redesigning its value chain end to end. Early on, it agreed to move new products from sourcing to retail shelves in 50 days rather than the usual lead time of up to 300 days. This radical shift in tempo forced the company to plan more collaboratively with retailers, to introduce platform-based product designs that encouraged input across business units, and to redesign regional supply chains to keep pace with the changing components.

Within 18 months, this business-market combination turned around its performance—from heavy losses to a number-one market position, with healthy margins. Company leaders noted that few of the changes were fundamentally new in concept; it was the mind-set and behavioral shifts that had enabled broader collaboration and made the real difference. They also concluded that they could accelerate cultural change by investing in leadership capabilities rooted in transparency and regular feedback. This overcame the impulse of many managers to sidestep any changes that might lead to conflict.

Revolutionizing processes

Without more standardized processes, however, the innumerable variations in operating models across the company’s many businesses and geographical markets would hamper collaboration between the new cross-functional and cross-business teams. This would continue to stymie innovation, constrain cross-business sales, frustrate efforts to achieve scale economies in IT, and inhibit the sharing of information and skills. Team leaders, including some of those initially most skeptical about change, had a year to simplify processes. They began by defining seven value chains that created and delivered value to customers in truly distinctive ways. These value chains served as the operational platforms for manufactured products, large projects, two distinct software business models, and three broadly different service businesses. By identifying what really mattered to customers, the company consolidated more than 80 value-chain designations.

For each designation, the team leaders identified cross-business processes across the company that were truly distinctive, typically about 10 percent of the total. They allowed variations only in processes that were needed to serve specific customer segments or to satisfy regulatory requirements. The hundreds of others were slotted into standardized process templates that could be supported by readily available IT. A new and relatively concise process lexicon 2 2. The company now has a total of 340 processes, which can be described by a straightforward vocabulary of 6,000 individual tasks. replaced a massively complex compendium that hindered cooperation—for example, by including dozens of business-planning definitions that prevented units from sharing forecasts. Standardization also led to vastly simplified roles (reducing them to just a handful of roles for each function), as well as to shared performance metrics and capability frameworks.

The changes have had a striking impact on the company’s morale, ways of working, and performance. Multiple sales teams in a region, for instance, with a transparent view into each others’ order books, can now negotiate deals collaboratively with customers across a range of products. The greater transparency has enabled health-services businesses in one part of the group to learn from the large-project capabilities of manufacturing-oriented units. Consumer-products businesses have been able to share speed-to-market insights with other units. In IT, a consolidation of approaches to enterprise resource planning has expanded opportunities to share data and develop more robust analytics. Meanwhile, to remain agile, functional teams from different units coalesce and disband as demand and business conditions shift.

As in most transformations, pockets of resistance took time to unblock. In one business, sales managers pushed back when asked to open their book of potential clients to colleagues in other units, arguing that critical intelligence would leak to competitors. In reality, core competitive information was well protected, and when the list was opened, several business lines came together to win a big contract to serve a major new customer. By making senior managers owners of simplified process repositories, the company hopes to keep complexity from creeping back at the grass roots.

Overall, however, the leaders have been struck by how cultural change takes hold once proof of the gains from transparency and collaboration become tangible. They point particularly to the way functional “ambassadors” outlined the benefits of standardization, so that a multitude of variations on a commercial process for forecasting sales and managing leads could be replaced by just one. These ambassadors, with their strong knowledge of how to standardize processes, have taken on a second mandate: collaborating with peers from other functions to link processes end to end. New measures of accountability, and end-to-end performance targets (for functional leaders) tied to them, have served to bring teams together.

While markets remain fluid and organizational change is hard, executives across a wide range of companies and industries must expect silos to continue obstructing joint action among functions. But they can head off the problem before it overwhelms them if they establish the kind of targets, end-to-end accountability, process standardization, and execution-oriented, collaborative culture the two companies described here did.

Ruben Schaubroeck is a principal in McKinsey’s Antwerp office; Rob Theunissen is a principal in the Amsterdam office, where Felicita Holsztejn Tarczewski is an associate principal.

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73 Community Engagement and Collaboration | Case Studies

Below we have curated a number of case studies of community engagement within the KMb and research context for you to review. Each case study has associated thought questions for you to work through in order to increase your learning in relation to these real-world examples.

Knowledge Management and Communication Copyright © by Trent University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Six Case Studies About Collaboration by the National Park Service

Click here to access a PDF publication,  Leading in a Collaborative Environment: Six Case Studies Involving Collaboration and Civic Engagement , published in 2010 by the National Park Service.

Learn about common collaborative themes that emerged from six case studies related to historic and protected lands, including a sacred burial ground, a recreational park, and a national preserve and park. The publication offers suggests strategies on what to do before convening, what it takes to be an effective leader through a collaborative process, and how to build team capacity and relationships.

Publication credit: Jacquelyn L. Tuxill and Nora J. Mitchell, eds. Leading in a Collaborative Environment: Six Case Studies Involving Collaboration and Civic Engagement. Woodstock, VT: Conservation Study Institute, 2010. (For more information:  www.nps.gov/csi ).

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16 Team Building Case Studies and Training Case Studies

From corporate groups to remote employees and everything in between, the key to a strong business is creating a close-knit team. in this comprehensive case study, we look at how real-world organizations benefited from team building, training, and coaching programs tailored to their exact needs.  .

Updated: December 21, 2021

We’re big believers in the benefits of  team building ,  training and development , and  coaching and consulting  programs. That’s why our passion for helping teams achieve their goals is at the core of everything we do.

At Outback Team Building & Training,  our brand promis e  is  to be  recommended , flexible,  and  fast.  Because we understand that when it comes to building a stronger and more close-knit team, there’s no one-size-fits-all formula. Each of our customers have a unique set of challenges, goals, and definitions of success. 

And they look to us to support them in three key ways:  making their lives easy by taking on the complexities of organizing a team building or training event; acting fast so that they can get their event planned and refocus on all the other tasks they have on their plates, and giving them the confidence that they’ll get an event their team will benefit from – and enjoy.

In this definitive team building case study , we’ll do a deep dive into real-world solutions we provided for our customers.

4 Unique Team Building Events & Training Programs Custom-Tailored for Customer Needs 

1. a custom charity event for the bill & melinda gates foundation  , 2. how principia built a stronger company culture even with its remote employees working hundreds of miles apart , 3. custom change management program for the royal canadian mint, 4. greenfield global uses express team building to boost morale and camaraderie during a challenging project, 5 virtual team building activities to help remote teams reconnect, 1. how myzone used virtual team building to boost employee morale during covid-19, 2. americorps equips 90 temporary staff members for success with midyear virtual group training sessions, 3. how microsoft’s azure team used virtual team building to lift spirits during the covid-19 pandemic, 4. helping the indiana cpa society host a virtual team building activity that even the most “zoom fatigued” guests would love, 5. stemcell brightens up the holiday season for its cross-departmental team with a virtually-hosted team building activity, 3 momentum-driving events for legacy customers, 1. how a satellite employee “garnered the reputation” as her team’s pro event planner, 2. why plentyoffish continues to choose ‘the amazing race’ for their company retreat, 3. how team building helped microsoft employees donate a truckload of food, 4 successful activities executed on extremely tight timelines, 1. finding a last-minute activity over a holiday, 2. from inquiry to custom call in under 30 minutes, 3. a perfect group activity organized in one business day, 4. delivering team building for charity in under one week.

We know that every team has different needs and goals which is why we are adept at being flexible and have mastered the craft of creating custom events for any specifications.  

When the  Seattle, Washington -based head office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – a world-renowned philanthropic organization – approached us in search of a unique charity event, we knew we needed to deliver something epic. Understanding that their team had effectively done it all when it comes to charity events, it was important for them to be able to get together as a team and give back  in new ways .

Our team decided the best way to do this was to create a brand-new event for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which had never been executed before. We created an entirely new charitable event – Bookworm Builders – for them and their team loved it! It allowed them to give back to their community, collaborate, get creative, and work together for a common goal. Bookworm Builders has since gone on to become a staple activity for tons of other Outback Team Building & Training customers! 

To learn more about how it all came together, read the case study:  A Custom Charity Event for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation .

Who said hosting an impactful training program means having your full team in the same place at the same time? Principia refused to let distance prevent them from having a great team, so they contacted us to help them find a solution. Their goals were to find better ways of working together and to create a closer-knit company culture among their 20 employees and contractors living in various parts of the country. 

We worked with Principia to host an  Emotional Intelligence  skill development training event customized to work perfectly for their remote team. The result was a massive positive impact for the company. They found they experienced improved employee alignment with a focus on company culture, as well as more emotionally aware and positive day-to-day interactions. In fact, the team made a 100% unanimous decision to bring back Outback for additional training sessions.

To learn more about this unique situation, read the full case study:  How Principia Built a Stronger Company Culture Even with its Remote Employees Working Hundreds of Miles Apart .

We know that employee training that is tailored to your organization can make the difference between an effective program and a waste of company time. That’s why our team jumped at the opportunity to facilitate a series of custom development sessions to help the Royal Canadian Mint discover the tools they needed to manage a large change within their organization. 

We hosted three custom sessions to help the organization recognize the changes that needed to be made, gain the necessary skills to effectively manage the change, and define a strategy to implement the change: 

• Session One:  The first session was held in November and focused on preparing over 65 employees for change within the company. 
• Session Two:  In December, the Mint’s leadership team participated in a program that provided the skills and mindset required to lead employees through change. 
• Session Three:  The final session in February provided another group of 65 employees with guidance on how to implement the change. 

To learn more, read the full case study:  Custom Change Management Program for the Royal Canadian Mint .

When Greenfield Global gathered a team of its A-Players to undertake a massive, challenging project, they knew it was important to build rapports among colleagues, encourage collaboration, and have some fun together.

So, we helped them host an Express Clue Murder Mystery event where their team used their unique individual strengths and problem-solving approaches in order to collaboratively solve challenges.

To learn more, read the full case study:  Greenfield Global Uses Express Team Building to Boost Morale and Camaraderie During a Challenging Project .

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, we were proud to be able to continue supporting our customers’ goals with virtual team building activities and group training sessions.

With remote work being mandated as self-quarantine requirements are enforced on a global scale, companies began seeking ways to keep their newly-remote teams engaged and ensure morale remained as high as possible.

And MyZone was no exception. When the company found themselves feeling the effects of low employee morale and engagement, they noticed a decrease in productivity and motivation.

To make matters even more difficult, MyZone’s team works remotely with employees all over the world. This physical distancing makes it challenging for them to build a strong rapport, reinforce team dynamics, and boost morale and engagement.

The company was actively searching for an activity to help bring their employees closer together during this challenging time but kept running into a consistent issue: the majority of the team building activities they could find were meant to be done in person.

They reached out to Outback Team Building and Training and we were able to help them achieve their goals with a Virtual Clue Murder Mystery team building activity.

AmeriCorps members are dedicated to relieving the suffering of those who have been impacted by natural disasters. And to do so, they rely on the support of a team of temporary staff members who work one-year terms with the organization. These staff focus on disseminating emergency preparedness information and even providing immediate assistance to victims of a disaster.

During its annual midyear training period, AmeriCorps gathers its entire team of temporary staff for a week of professional development seminars aimed at both helping them during their term with the company as well as equipping them with skills they can use when they leave AmeriCorps.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic got underway, AmeriCorps was forced to quickly re-evaluate the feasibility of its midyear training sessions.

That’s when they reached out to Outback. Rather than having to cancel their midyear training entirely, we were able to help them achieve their desired results with four virtual group training sessions: Clear Communication ,  Performance Management Fundamentals ,  Emotional Intelligence , and  Practical Time Management .

Find all the details in the full case study: AmeriCorps Equips 90 Temporary Staff Members for Success with Midyear Virtual Training Sessions.

With the COVID-19 pandemic taking a significant toll on the morale of its employees, Microsoft’s Azure team knew they were overdue for an uplifting event.

It was critical for their team building event to help staff reconnect and reengage with one another. But since the team was working remotely, the activity needed to be hosted virtually and still be fun, engaging, and light-hearted.

When they reached out to Outback Team Building and Training, we discussed the team’s goals and quickly identified a Virtual Clue Murder Mystery as the perfect activity to help their team get together online and have some fun together.

For more information, check out the entire case study: How Microsoft’s Azure Team Used Virtual Team Building to Lift Spirits During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The Indiana CPA Society is the go-to resource for the state’s certified public accountants. The organization supports CPAs with everything from continuing education to networking events and even advocacy or potential legislation issues that could affect them.

But as the time approached for one of INCPAS’ annual Thanksgiving event, the Indiana CPA Society’s Social Committee needed to plan a modified, pandemic-friendly event for a group of people who were burnt out my online meetings and experiencing Zoom fatigue.

So, we helped the team with a Self-Hosted Virtual Code Break team building activity that INCPAS staff loved so much, the organization decided to host a second event for its Young Pros and volunteers.

For INCPAS’ Social Committee, the pressure to put on an event that everyone will enjoy is something that’s always on their mind when planning out activities. And their event lived up to their hopes.

For more information, check out the entire case study: Helping the Indiana CPA Society Host a Virtual Team Building Activity That Even the Most “Zoom Fatigued” Guests Would Love .

When Stemcell was looking for a way to celebrate the holidays, lift its team members’ spirits, and help connect cross-departmental teams during the pandemic, they contacted us to help host the perfect team building activity.

They tasked us with finding an event that would help team members connect, get in the holiday spirit, and learn more about the business from one another during the midst of a stressful and challenging time.

So, we helped them host a festive, virtually-hosted Holiday Hijinks team building activity for employees from across the company.

For more information, check out the entire case study: Stemcell Brightens Up the Holiday Season for its Cross-Departmental Team with a Virtually-Hosted Team Building Activity .

We take pride in being recommended by more than 14,000 corporate groups because it means that we’ve earned their trust through delivering impactful results.

We’ve been in this business for a long time, and we know that not everybody who’s planning a corporate event is a professional event planner. But no matter if it’s their first time planning an event or their tenth, we  love  to help make our customers look good in front of their team. And when an employee at Satellite Healthcare was tasked with planning a team building event for 15 of her colleagues, she reached out to us – and we set out to do just that!

Our customer needed a collaborative activity that would help a diverse group of participants get to know each other, take her little to no time to plan, and would resonate with the entire group.

With that in mind, we helped her facilitate a  Military Support Mission . The event was a huge success and her colleagues loved it. In fact, she has now garnered a reputation as the team member who knows how to put together an awesome team building event.

To learn more, read the case study here:  How a Satellite Employee “Garnered the Reputation” as Her Team’s Pro Event Planner .

In 2013, international dating service POF (formerly known as PlentyOfFish) reached out to us in search of an exciting outdoor team building activity that they could easily put to work at their annual retreat in  Whistler, B.C . An innovative and creative company, they were in search of an activity that could help their 60 staff get to know each other better. They also wanted the event to be hosted so that they could sit back and enjoy the fun.

The solution? We helped them host their first-ever  Amazing Race  team building event.

Our event was so successful that POF has now hosted The Amazing Race at their annual retreat for  five consecutive years .

To learn more, check out our full case study:  Why PlentyOfFish Continues to Choose ‘The Amazing Race’ for Their Company Retreat .

As one of our longest-standing and most frequent collaborators, we know that Microsoft is always in search of new and innovative ways to bring their teams closer together. With a well-known reputation for being avid advocates of corporate social responsibility, Microsoft challenged us with putting together a charitable team building activity that would help their team bond outside the office and would be equal parts fun, interactive, and philanthropic. 

We analyzed which of our six charitable team building activities would be the best fit for their needs, and we landed on the perfect one: End-Hunger Games. In this event, the Microsoft team broke out into small groups, tackled challenges like relay races and target practice, and earned points in the form of non-perishable food items. Then, they used their cans and boxes of food to try and build the most impressive structure possible in a final, collaborative contest. As a result, they were able to donate a truckload of goods to the local food bank.

For more details, check out the comprehensive case study:  How Team Building Helped Microsoft Employees Donate a Truckload of Food .

Time isn’t always a luxury that’s available to our customers when it comes to planning a great team activity which is why we make sure we are fast, agile, and can accommodate any timeline. 

Nothing dampens your enjoyment of a holiday more than having to worry about work – even if it’s something fun like a team building event. But for one T-Mobile employee, this was shaping up to be the case. That’s because, on the day before the holiday weekend, she found out that she needed to organize a last-minute activity for the day after July Fourth. 

So, she reached out to Outback Team Building & Training to see if there was anything we could do to help – in less than three business days. We were happy to be able to help offer her some peace of mind over her holiday weekend by recommending a quick and easy solution: a  Code Break  team building activity. It was ready to go in less than three days, the activity organized was stress-free during her Fourth of July weekend, and, most importantly, all employees had a great experience. 

For more details, check out the full story here:  Finding a Last-Minute Activity Over a Holiday .

At Outback Team Building & Training, we know our customers don’t always have time on their side when it comes to planning and executing an event. Sometimes, they need answers right away so they can get to work on creating an unforgettable experience for their colleagues.

This was exactly the case when Black & McDonald approached us about a learning and development session that would meet the needs of their unique group, and not take too much time to plan. At 10:20 a.m., the organization reached out with an online inquiry. By 10:50 a.m., they had been connected with one of our training facilitators for a more in-depth conversation regarding their objectives.

Three weeks later, a group of 14  Toronto, Ontario -based Black & McDonald employees took part in a half-day tailor-made training program that was built around the objectives of the group, including topics such as emotional intelligence and influence, communication styles, and the value of vulnerability in a leader.

To learn more about how this event was able to come together so quickly, check out the full story:  From Inquiry to Custom Call in Under 30 Minutes .

When Conexus Credit Union contacted us on a Friday afternoon asking if we could facilitate a team building event for six employees the following Monday morning, we said, “Absolutely!” 

The team at Conexus Credit Union were looking for an activity that would get the group’s mind going and promote collaboration between colleagues. And we knew just what to recommend:  Code Break Express  – an activity filled with brainteasers, puzzles, and riddles designed to test the group’s mental strength. 

The Express version of Code Break was ideal for Conexus Credit Union’s shorter time frame because our Express activities have fewer challenges and can be completed in an hour or less. They’re self-hosted, so the company’s group organizer was able to easily and efficiently run the activity on their own.

To learn more about how we were able to come together and make this awesome event happen, take a look at our case study:  A Perfect Group Activity Organized in One Business Day .

We’ve been lucky enough to work with Accenture – a company which has appeared on FORTUNE’s list of “World’s Most Admired Companies” for 14 years in a row – on a number of team building activities in the past. 

The organization approached us with a request to facilitate a philanthropic team building activity for 15 employees. The hitch? They needed the event to be planned, organized, and executed within one week. 

Staying true to our brand promise of being fast to act on behalf of our customers, our team got to work planning Accenture’s event. We immediately put to work the experience of our Employee Engagement Consultants, the flexibility of our solutions, and the organization of our event coordinators. And six days later, Accenture’s group was hard at work on a  Charity Bike Buildathon , building bikes for kids in need.

To learn more about how we helped Accenture do some good in a short amount of time, read the full case study:  Delivering Team Building for Charity in Under One Week .

Learn More About Team Building, Training and Development, and Coaching and Consulting Solutions 

For more information about how Outback Team Building & Training can help you host unforgettable team activities to meet your specific goals and needs on virtually any time frame and budget, just reach out to our Employee Engagement Consultants.  

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GAD works closely with NHS Resolution which handles negligence claims on behalf of indemnity scheme members; NHS organisations and independent sector providers.

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The Government Actuary’s Department (GAD) has formed a successful and embedded relationship with NHS Resolution .

NHS Resolution is an arm’s length body of the Department of Health and Social Care. A large a part of the work at NHS Resolution is handling negligence claims on behalf of the members of their indemnity schemes: NHS organisations and independent sector providers.

The majority of claims are funded by contributions from members, with some claims funded centrally by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

GAD works with NHS Resolution in detailed and strategic ways to support a number of different workstreams, including reserving (forecasting the ultimate cost of claims), cashflow projection, budget setting, and pricing of member level contributions.

GAD’s collaborative relationship

GAD’s role is to make use of historical data, taking into account both external and internal factors, with input from experts across NHS Resolution, to develop and update the corresponding models with suitable assumptions.

GAD presents its proposals to NHS Resolution’s Reserving and Pricing Committee which has overall ownership of decisions in respect of these areas and any assumptions underlying those decisions.

GAD and NHS Resolution continue to build on the relationship with the embedding of the actuarial advisers to enhance the quality of service and insight delivered.

NHS Resolution reports its liabilities within their annual accounts. GAD’s expertise helps the organisation ensure the provisions adequately reflect all potential claims incurred before the accounting date.

We undertake an annual review of all provisioning assumptions, with a particular focus on quantifying areas of uncertainty. This review includes, but is not limited to assumptions in respect of:

• the projected number of claims for each incident year
• the average cost at settlement
• claims inflation
• the expected time that elapses between incident, reporting and settlement of a claim
• the probability of a claim being successful
• the timing of future claims

The personal injury discount rate also affects the size of some claim payments, and therefore affects how much provision to set aside. However, this assumption is prescribed by the Lord Chancellor and will be reviewed again during 2024. 

Cashflow projection and pricing

GAD uses modelling to project cashflows over many years, with a particular focus on short term budgetary forecasts.

Due to the pay-as-you-go nature of funding, this projection is used to set a total collect from NHS Resolution’s members for the next financial year. This is then distributed between members based on their risk and previous claims experience.

This pricing calculation considers the riskiness of different types of NHS activity, also takes into account the historical claims experience of members, both of which impact members contributions.

Embedded support

GAD and NHS Resolution continue to strengthen the relationship, with GAD developing a deeper understanding of NHS Resolution’s business and data, NHS Resolution encouraging us to challenge where we think it could improve and thereby enabling us to deliver better results and more insight (such as, for example, in relation to data capture and quality).

With this in mind, GAD is also working with NHS Resolution on designing and implementing a new operational IT system and supporting NHS Resolution manage risk from changes in the health and legal market by developing innovative and robust approaches to quantifying the impacts on the provision.

GAD also provides additional embedded support through the provision of a secondee, who works solely within and for NHS Resolution’s finance team. This arrangement has helped to identify specific areas where we can add further value.

Michaela Talbot’s NHS Resolution’s Head of Finance (Indemnity Schemes) remarks on the close relationship between both organisations and the importance of GAD as a strategic partner. “We have worked with GAD for a number of years. With the development of embedding our collaboration has increased further. GAD work in an integrated and yet independent way with us and is a true strategic partner to NHS Resolution.”

This is echoed by GAD actuary Andy Jinks, who leads GAD’s oversight on this client: “As one of GAD’s most important clients, we have established a strong working relationship with NHS Resolution over a number of years. We continue to develop this as GAD’s contribution to the organisation increases further.”

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Essential Conditions for Partnership Collaboration within a School-Community Model of Wraparound Support

• Original Paper
• Open access
• Published: 22 August 2024

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• Jessica Haight   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9623-2073 1 ,
• Jason Daniels 2 ,
• Rebecca Gokiert 1 ,
• Maira Quintanilha 1 ,
• Karen Edwards 1 ,
• Pamela Mellon 1 ,
• Matana Skoye 1 &
• Annette Malin 3  

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Children and youth often face barriers that hinder their ability to engage in school, such as poverty, family challenges, and maltreatment. For this reason, children require additional supports if they are to be set up for success in school and life. Collaborative school-community models of wraparound support have been demonstrated as effective approaches for supporting vulnerable children and families to foster positive outcomes. Such models rely on collaborative partnerships between schools and community agencies to coordinate services for children and families. Accordingly, there is a need to understand factors that influence this collaboration in school settings. This study explores partnership collaboration between school and community partners through the case of All in for Youth, a school-based wraparound model of support in western Canada. Focus groups of n = 79 partners across eight schools were analysed, guided by qualitative description methodology. Five essential conditions were identified for partnership collaboration, including value-based training , mutual recognition of expertise , school leadership , established and flexible communication channels , and appropriate staff resources . These conditions can be used to help inform the implementation of similar school-community models of support to foster collaborative partner processes and promote positive outcomes among children, youth, and families.

Explored factors that impact partnership collaboration in school-community models of support.

Focus groups conducted with 79 school-community partners across eight schools.

Identified five essential conditions for school-community partnership collaboration.

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Graduating from high school is associated with employment, income security, and health in adulthood (Belfield & Levin, 2007 ). However, children and youth often face barriers that hinder their ability to engage in school. Poverty and food insecurity are prevalent issues faced by children and youth, with an estimated 8.5% of children living in poverty in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2022a ; 2022b ). Other barriers include neglect, abuse, or trauma (Blodgett & Lanigan, 2018 ), family discord (Fryers & Brugha, 2013 ), and mental health or learning challenges (Duncan et al., 2021 ; Hale et al., 2015 ). These issues have become a growing concern (World Health Organization, 2022 ), and children and youth affected by challenging circumstances require supports beyond basic academic instruction if they are to be set up for success in school and life (Yu et al., 2020 ). Collaborative school-community models of wraparound support have been demonstrated in the literature as effective approaches for supporting children, youth, and families who face added vulnerability and complex behavioural health needs in order to foster positive outcomes (Eber & Nelson, 1997 ; Hill, 2020 ; Yu et al., 2020 ).

The term “wraparound” reflects a values-driven and collaborative process of coordinating and delivering supports for children and families with complex needs (Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). There are a number of models and approaches under the wraparound umbrella, and in the school context, supports can be coordinated through large-scale school-community partnerships. Accordingly, this research focuses on wraparound supports operationalized through school and community agency collaborations; in which, wraparound teams are comprised of the child and family, school personnel (e.g., teachers, educational assistants, and administrative leadership), and agency service providers (e.g., social workers, mental health professionals, community organizations, and cultural brokers). These school-community partners work with the student and family and together to identify and coordinate targeted supports that wrap around children experiencing vulnerability (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ).

Central to wraparound is the recognition that children and families often have needs that extend across multiple sectors (e.g., education, healthcare, welfare, justice; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). Traditionally, agencies operate independently of each other in different sectors; however, this can limit their scope of impact and decrease program efficiency (Anderson-Butcher & Ashton, 2004 ; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). Families may struggle to navigate different social service systems and receive fragmented support (Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). Alternatively, with intersectoral school-community partnerships, holistic supports can be coordinated for children and families based on needs (Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). This collaboration can also benefit schools, which are frequently underresourced and struggle to address multifaceted student challenges (Anderson-Butcher & Ashton, 2004 ). By leveraging shared resources, schools and community partners can better address unmet needs and set children up for success (Anderson-Butcher & Ashton, 2004 ; Yu et al., 2020 ).

Partnership collaboration is critical to school-community models of wraparound support (Walker et al., 2003 ). Intersectoral school and community partners must work with the family and together to coordinate supports, and if they are unable to collaborate effectively, this will limit the model’s impacts (Walker et al., 2003 ). However, there is dearth of research on partnership collaboration in school settings. Accordingly, this study addresses this gap by exploring All in for Youth (AIFY), a collaborative school-community model of wraparound support in a large city in western Canada. Based on discussions with frontline school and community partners, five essential conditions were identified for partnership collaboration, which will help to inform the implementation and operation of similar school models of support and foster the wellbeing of children, youth, and families.

School Wraparound Supports

School wraparound models are promising for addressing the complex needs of students and families (Eber & Nelson, 1997 ; Yu et al., 2020 ). Literature shows that such models are associated with improved school outcomes (Fries et al., 2012 ; Olson et al., 2021 ; Yu et al., 2020 ), reduced school dropout rates (Lee-St. John et al., 2018 ), and improved socio-emotional wellbeing (Cumming et al., 2022 ; Hill, 2020 ; Suter & Bruns, 2009 ). School support interventions have also been demonstrated to be cost effective (Bowden et al., 2020 ). When schools and agencies work together, they are able to leverage existing resources in more effective ways than they would through independent efforts and reduce service duplication (Anderson-Butcher & Ashton, 2004 ; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). Information sharing also allows for richer knowledge of local contexts and more targeted supports (Anderson-Butcher & Ashton, 2004 ). Furthermore, early interventions can reduce later socio-economic spending over the long-term (Bowden et al., 2020 ). In fact, a cost-benefit analysis of a comprehensive school support model in Boston found that the benefits of the support model exceeded the costs, with a return on investment of $3 for every $1 spent through reduced spending on healthcare, welfare, and criminal justice (Bowden et al., 2020 ). With adequate supports early on, children are better positioned to graduate, become employed, pay taxes, and contribute back to their communities as adults (Belfield & Levin, 2007 ; Bowden et al., 2020 ).

Along with wraparound, there are several other similar intervention approaches that provide comprehensive supports in schools (e.g., integrated student supports, comprehensive school supports, and community schools; Bartlett & Freeze, 2018a ; Bowden et al., 2020 ; Maier et al., 2017 ). Although related, wraparound is unique in its care philosophy and person-centred approach to service provision (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ).

Wraparound History and Principles

Wraparound originated in the field of behavioural health as a system of care for children with acute emotional and behavioural challenges (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ). It can be traced back to the 1960s Brownsdale programs in Canada, where group homes with individualized supports were established for children experiencing emotional problems, as an alternative to institutionalization (Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). By the 1990s, programs utilizing wraparound approaches were implemented more widely across North America (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Sather & Bruns, 2016 ), with schools becoming key sites for wraparound due to their central role in children’s lives (Eber et al., 2002 ; Yu et al., 2020 ).

Wraparound is grounded in a philosophy of care that takes a holistic and person-centred approach to service care planning (Burns & Goldman, 1999 ; Yu et al., 2020 ). Ten principles were developed to operationalize wraparound (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). In practice, wraparound initiatives may be defined and applied more flexibly (Prakash et al., 2010 ; Walker et al., 2003 ); however, research shows that higher quality services are associated with adherence to these ten principles (Bruns et al., 2005 ). The ten guiding principles include: family voice and choice, team based, natural supports, collaboration, community based, culturally competent, individualized, strength based, unconditional, and outcome based (see Bruns & Walker, 2008 ). Notably, these principles speak to the collaborative and integrated nature of wraparound, which involves child and family engagement, as well as teamwork among different professional and community supports (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ).

In the school context, wraparound is often implemented through large-scale school-community partnerships, as well as a multi-tier system of support according to the Positive Behavioural Intervention System (see Eber et al., 2002 ; Eber et al., 2021 ; Scott & Eber, 2003 ). Coordinating highly individualized wraparound supports for each student in a school is costly and time-consuming, and often unrealistic to achieve (Scott & Eber, 2003 ). With a multi-tier approach, students and families receive an escalating degree of support based on identified and evolving needs (Prakash et al., 2010 ; Scott & Eber, 2003 ). At the primary level, universal or school-wide supports are implemented, involving collaboration across partners on the delivery of services (Scott & Eber, 2003 ). At the secondary level, increased supports are provided for students and families with greater needs, such as small group interventions (Scott & Eber, 2003 ). At the tertiary level, highly targeted and individualized wraparound supports are coordinated for students and families with the highest levels of complex need (Scott & Eber, 2003 ).

School wraparound models have been adopted widely in the United States and to a limited extent in Canada and internationally (Bartlett & Freeze, 2018a ). Despite the expansion of wraparound models and their potential for fostering positive outcomes among children, there remains a lack of research on the implementation of such models in school settings and on collaboration between school-community partners; therefore, more research is needed to guide the operation of these models (Bartlett & Freeze, 2018a ).

Partnerships within Wraparound

Wraparound models rely on partnership collaboration to coordinate supports for child and family success (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Walker et al., 2003 ). Within school-community models, wraparound teams are comprised of intersectoral school and agency partners who must work with the child and family and function together to plan, administer, and monitor supports and services (Prakash et al., 2010 ). Guidelines have been developed for the practice of wraparound models, all of which emphasize the importance of a collaborative team approach (see Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Burns & Goldman, 1999 ; Coldiron et al., 2016 ; Walker et al., 2003 ); however, in practice, there are barriers that can mitigate optimal partnership collaboration (Prakash et al., 2010 ).

Specifically, wraparound literature shows that a lack of shared team expectations and goals can impede partnership collaboration (Prakash et al., 2010 ; Bruns & Walker, 2008 ). It is difficult to leverage different partner resources for integrated student support plans if partners do not share an understanding of the wraparound purpose or feel an ownership in the work (Prakash et al., 2010 ; Bruns & Walker, 2008 ). Implementation science literature similarly emphasizes the importance of a shared commitment among (Fixsen, 2005 ; Moir, 2018 ). Specifically, to support the high-quality implementation of programs and practices, stakeholder buy-in is needed; otherwise, a program may not be implemented to its full extent or achieve sustainability (Fixsen, 2005 ). A lack of a shared team commitment may occur due to insufficient knowledge and training on an initiative’s values and practices (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Fixsen, 2005 ; Prakash et al., 2010 ). Additionally, a lack of strong leadership for an initiative can undermine its implementation and partner collaboration (Fixsen, 2005 ).

Disparate policies and approaches among intersectoral partners can also make collaboration more difficult to achieve (VanDenBerg & Mary Grealish, 1996 ). Different organizations are beholden to specific organizational protocols and funding mechanisms, which can make it challenging for partners to integrate their policies and procedures to jointly administer wraparound supports (VanDenBerg & Mary Grealish, 1996 ). In fact, some authors argue that different partners may be too independent in their approaches and institutional policies to fully partner in collaborative intiatives (VanDenBerg & Mary Grealish, 1996 ). Additionally, institutional barriers can be a particular challenge in school settings, which are subject to specific guidelines for student conduct and procedures.

Due to the importance of partnership collaboration, a closer analysis is needed of factors that impact it within school-community models of wraparound support, comprised of intersectoral agency and school partners. Accordingly, this study explores collaboration within the context of All in for Youth (AIFY), a school-community wraparound model in western Canada. The analysis focuses on teamwork between frontline school and agency partners who are involved in direct service provision at a professional level, as opposed to collaboration between service providers and families or within organizational leadership.

The All in for Youth Initiative

AIFY is a school-community model of wraparound support in Edmonton, a large city in western Canada. It is intended to support children and families who have been systematically underserved and have experienced added vulnerability to achieve positive outcomes, including wellbeing and resilience, school engagement, and high school completion (Community-University Partnership [CUP] & AIFY, 2020 ; 2021 ). It is implemented in eight high-risk school communities in Edmonton, which consistently rank as some of the most socially vulnerable, experiencing high rates of poverty, food insecurity, mobility, and single parent households (CUP & AIFY, 2022 ; 2023 ).

AIFY was established in 2016, when local school divisions and community organizations working with vulnerable children and families determined that they would have greater impacts in the lives of children and families if they worked together in partnership. Consequently, the AIFY school-community partnership was formed, comprised of school divisions (Edmonton Public and Catholic Schools), local agencies responsible for the provision of supports in schools (Boys and Girls Club Big Brothers Big Sisters of Edmonton and Area [BGCBigs], Edmonton City Centre Church Corporation [e4c], and The Family Centre), operating partners who support program management (The United Way of the Alberta Capital Region and REACH Edmonton), and backbone funders (The Edmonton Community Foundation and the City of Edmonton Family and Community Support Services Program). Program costs are also supported by private and corporate fundraising, as well as in-kind donations from the agencies. Together, all partners collaboratively plan and deliver school-based wraparound supports and contribute to the functioning of the model.

To support children and families, six primary areas of support are provided: (1) Nutrition supports, with in-school meals and snacks; (2) Mental health therapy, with one-on-one or group therapy for students and families to address complex needs and support socio-emotional development (see Haight et al., 2023 for research on the impact of these mental health supports); (3) Success coaching, with coaching to support students with school success, socio-emotional wellbeing, and resilience; (4) In-home family support, with in-home support to promote overall family wellbeing and access to needed resources; (5) Student mentoring, with peer, community, and corporate mentors to support academic and/or socio-emotional growth; and (6) Out-of-school time care, with programming on arts and culture, emotional and physical wellness, leadership, and/or academics. These supportive domains were developed based on school systems literature on common areas of vulnerability in the lives of children and best practices for addressing these areas (see CUP & AIFY, 2020 ). Three AIFY partner agencies deliver these services in schools (i.e., e4c provides nutrition supports, The Family Centre provides mental health supports, and BGCBigs provides mentoring and after school programs). Beyond these primary services, AIFY partners have also built formal and informal community networks to connect students and families with additional or more targeted supports as needed. All school-community partners also receive value-based training to foster shared school cultures of strength-based care and positive child-adult engagement (CUP & AIFY, 2020 ; 2021 ; 2022 ; 2023 ).

At the school level, supports are coordinated in collaboration with the student and family by school wraparound teams, comprised of frontline school administrators (principal and assistant principal), AIFY agency staff (mental health therapists, success coaches, family support workers, mentoring facilitators, and out-of-school time coordinators), and other partners (e.g., teachers, school staff, and other community partners). These wraparound teams connect through weekly meetings, referred to as “huddles,” to collaborate on targeted supports for students. Service plans are developed with the student and family based on their individual preferences, and are facilitated by agency staff with the larger wraparound team. School administrators oversee the wraparound process by providing strategic direction for the wraparound teams and building infrastructure to support wraparound processes.

Specifically, service provision operates through a multi-tier framework (Scott & Eber, 2003 ), in which supports and services are triaged in response to individual needs. Universal supports are provided for all students at the primary level (i.e., students are supported by a school culture of strength-based and positive development practices and nutrition supports), while targeted supports are triaged for individual students and families with greater needs at the secondary and tertiary levels (e.g., mental health therapy, success coaching, mentoring, out-of-school time programming, in-home family support, and/or other additional supports needed). Frontline school and community partners work with families and together closely through these integrated and intersectoral wraparound teams to identify and coordinate targeted supports and services.

At the organizational levels of the AIFY model, agency supervisors oversee the work of frontline agency staff and provide guidance and support. Agency supervisors and school administrators meet regularly to discuss school community needs and best practices for providing supports. Key representatives from the agencies, school divisions, and operating partners meet monthly through an operations and evaluation committee to discuss the operations of AIFY in schools, evaluate practices and the impact of AIFY, and identify and address challenges. Finally, a steering committee comprised of key representatives from each of the 10 AIFY partners (agencies, school divisions, operating partners, and funders) review operations and evaluation findings and provide high-level strategic direction for AIFY (see CUP & AIFY, 2020 ; 2021 ; 2022 ; 2023 ).

The present study explores professional partnership collaboration between frontline agency and school staff within AIFY, a school-community wraparound model of support. Annual evaluations have been conducted on the impacts of the AIFY initiative since inception, according to its theory of change and logic model to foster success in the lives of children and families in school and life beyond school (see CUP & AIFY, 2020 ; 2021 ; 2022 ; 2023 ). As part of these evaluations, interviews and focus groups were conducted with key school-community partners each year (i.e., families and frontline school and agency staff and leadership). For this study, qualitative data generated with school and agency staff participants during the 2021–2022 school year were analysed. Qualitative description was used to guide this study (Sandelowski, 2000 ; 2010 ). The concept behind qualitative description is to provide a comprehensive description of events, embracing “everyday language” and adhering closely to the data or meanings of participants, rather than taking a highly conceptual lens (Sandelowski, 2000 ). This approach is ideal for the purpose of this study to develop a thorough and complete description of partnership integration with a program (Sandelowski, 2000 ). Institutional ethics approval was obtained from the [University of Alberta] (Pro0007079) in 2017 and renewed each year since, including 2022 and 2023. Written informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Participants and Data Generation

Group debriefs and focus groups were conducted between April and June 2022. Overall, data from n  = 79 individual participants were analysed. First, group debriefs were conducted with the team of agency staff, school administrators, and other partners who took on the primary role of coordinating and delivering supports and services for families at school. Group debriefs were short sessions which took place immediately following school-community partner team meetings (referred to as “huddles”). This design allowed for the day-to-day process of collaboration and decision making to be better captured. Following group debriefs, more in-depth focus groups were conducted with agency staff, school administrators, and relevant partners. These sessions typically built on group debriefs and provided an opportunity for a more focused discussion. Separate focus groups were also conducted with teachers, other school staff (e.g., education assistants, special education teachers, librarians), and school administrators. Most research participants attended multiple data generation sessions. For instance, most agency staff attended multiple sessions at their school (i.e., attended an initial group debrief and a follow up focus group). Some agency staff also worked at two schools and attended sessions at both schools (i.e., attended a group debrief and focus group at two schools). In these cases, staff were able to give unique and valuable insight into how processes differed across school sites. The total numbers of data generation sessions and participants for each partner group is provided in Table 1 .

Data generation sessions took place at all eight AIFY schools, including four elementary schools (kindergarten–grade 6), two combined elementary-junior high schools (kindergarten–grade 9), one junior high school (grades 7–9), and one high school (grades 10–12). It was important to include perspectives from partners at each school to capture both common and site-specific strategies and experiences. Furthermore, three schools were new to AIFY as of 2021 and brought unique perspectives of being in the early stages of consolidating partnership processes. Most schools participated in three to four staff data generation sessions (6 schools), while some schools participated in one to two sessions (2 schools). Nine sessions took place in person, whereas 13 sessions were held virtually, using the online video-chat platform Google Meets.

Group debriefs and focus groups were semi-structured, which meant that facilitators asked preplanned questions on the topic of the AIFY model and partnership functioning, while also having the flexibility to diverge from the guide to explore participants’ contributions in more detail (Gill et al., 2008 ). In all sessions, participants were invited to share their insights on AIFY more broadly, such as the perceived impacts of the support model on their work and the lives of children and families. They were also asked more specific questions related to partnership functioning and the process used to coordinate supports and services. Staff participants were purposefully sampled based on their role or experience with wraparound supports in their school (Mertens, 2020 ); a technique that aligns with qualitative description (Sandelowski, 2000 ). This purposeful sampling process was primarily facilitated by school administrators and sessions were arranged for times that would not be overly disruptive to school activities. Focus groups were facilitated by the research team. Some school administrators also co-facilitated sessions with the research team to build the evaluation capacity of school partners. Group debriefs lasted an average of 25 min, while focus groups lasted an average of 50 min. All sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by the lead author with the assistance of the transcription service Otter.ai ( 2022 ).

Data Analysis

Reflexive thematic analysis was used for data analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006 ; 2019 ). Reflexive thematic analysis is an approach to qualitative data analysis which places value on the researcher’s reflexivity as a strength for building data interpretations (Braun & Clarke, 2019 ). Thematic analysis is also well-suited to use with qualitative description (Sandelowski, 2010 ). Specifically, data analysis was implemented according to Braun & Clarke’s ( 2006 ) multi-phase process of (1) immersing yourself in the data, (2) generating initial codes, (3) developing preliminary themes, (4) reviewing themes, (5) defining themes, and (6) writing out findings. Additionally, data were analysed across two broad stages. First, data were analysed by session type (i.e., agency group debrief, agency focus group, and school staff focus group) and then data were assessed for divergence and convergence and integrated together.

To become immersed in the data, the lead author transcribed the group debriefs and focus groups, with the assistance of Otter.ai, and re-read the transcripts multiple times. Following this, coding was completed by the lead author on the software platform NVivo 14 (QSR International, 2023 ). Codes were assigned to data segments that represented the meaning of those data (Braun & Clarke, 2006 ). Coding was based on an inductive approach, in which observations were primarily data-driven as opposed to being guided by a pre-existing framework (Braun & Clarke, 2006 ). Analyses were also guided by underlying assumptions corresponding to constructivism, which propose that knowledge is socially constructed by the researcher and participants (Allen, 1994 ; Mayan, 2016 ). Codes were then organized into emerging themes, using tables to visually represent and organize the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006 ). Emerging themes were iteratively reviewed by the lead author for internal homogeneity (i.e., the data fit well and represent a theme) and external homogeneity (i.e., the data are distinct from other themes) (Mayan, 2016 ). Emerging themes were discussed and peer-reviewed by the research team (second author, fourth author, and fifth author) to promote researcher reflexivity and the richness of data interpretations, as well as the verification and dependability of themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006 ). Additionally, an audit trail was maintained of key decisions throughout the data analysis process to enhance the trustworthiness of the research (Lincoln & Guba, 1985 ).

School-community partners (i.e., teachers, school staff and administrators, and AIFY agency partners) provided valuable insights into professional intersectoral partnership collaboration within a school-community model of wraparound support. Based on qualitative data, five themes, termed essential conditions, were identified to be essential for successful partnership collaboration. In the descriptions provided below, participants are only identified by their role, using the terms “school administrators” to refer to principals, assistant principals, and key administrative staff, “school partners” for teachers and other school staff (i.e., education assistants, special education teachers, and librarians), and “agency partners” for AIFY agency staff and relevant community partners.

Value-Based Training

School-community partners frequently discussed the importance of value-based training for fostering a culture of supportive, strength-based, and collaborative practices. Within the AIFY model, training is provided to school and agency partners on value-based practices that are trauma-informed and foster family resilience, reflecting core principles of wraparound. Specifically, partners receive training on understanding family trauma, fostering child resilience, providing strength-based care, supporting positive child-adult interactions, and the wraparound values for AIFY. Partners shared that this training not only benefits students and families through the integration of supportive practices, but also serves to facilitate a shared investment in student care, leading to greater collaboration among school-community partners.

It was acknowledged that individual partners come to schools with different backgrounds, and for some, the AIFY model of strength-based and collaborative wraparound supports may be a departure from previous experiences. Therefore, value-based training was frequently described to produce a shift in school culture. As one school administrator explained, “our vocabulary, the way we work with kids, has greatly changed, because we have that trauma informed viewpoint.” Another agency partner commented, “I see…staff changing the way that they have conversations with kids, changing the way that they are using their language or their activities to meet the needs of the kids in a more holistic way.”

Accordingly, partners made it clear that when all partners in school buildings receive value-based training, collaboration is easier to achieve because partners hold shared values, knowledge, goals, and expectations regarding student care. An agency partner described this, “[by] learning about [trauma and resilience], it became all our work, and our collective why and our how to support these kids and how to wrap around them.” Specifically, school partners described feeling better equipped to identify student concerns and collaborate with agency partners, “it also built my own professional capacity to support my students” (School Partner). Additionally, through working with school partners, agency partners felt that they were embedded in school practices and were able to make a greater contribution to student care, “we’re part of it [school community]. We’re not just like oh, You’re over here…It’s like we’re all together.” A school administrator described this shift in collaboration following value-based training:

As we began…learning about [trauma and] resilience, we began to think about okay, in what ways can the teachers also support the work? So, it moved towards the AIFY [agency partners] and teachers working together to provide for the students. … So then it became about, ‘I could do this in my classroom,’ and ‘they the AIFY [agency partners] can do this to also support [students]. So then it became that collaboration of working together based on what teachers were noticing, what [the] admin was noticing about students…or the AIFY [agency partner] team.

Another agency partner added:

I started here the year after the [AIFY] project started. …And I remember…frustration with our [agency] team. …There was this feeling of ‘yeah, like they’re [school partners] coming to us for the answer.’ But the shift with [training]…was so incredible, because it went from, you know, this sort of [school partners] come to us [agency partners] for the answers to an empowerment model. …Instead of, you know, us trying to solve it, we’re going to work as a team. We just added, you know, teachers to our team. So, they’re empowered to help, they’re part of the conversation. …And that shift I felt like was amazing.”

Consequently, value-based training empowered different school-community partners with shared knowledge, expectations, and tools to collaborate on student care and support, so that work “became very shared” (School Administrator). Due to the importance of value-based training, partners stressed that gaps in training made collaboration less straightforward due to disparate expectations and approaches. Therefore, partners indicated that training needs to be widely available to all partners in schools on an ongoing basis.

Mutual Recognition of Expertise

As described above, value-based training was identified to be essential for fostering shared understanding and expectations among partners. However, in the same vein, school-community partners also emphasized the value of their different backgrounds, which offer rich and diverse expertise and experience when it comes to student care. Partners expressed that coordinating wraparound supports for students and families was most successful when different partners recognized one another’s mutual expertise and experience, as this encouraged partners to reach out to each other and work in collaboration.

Partners often discussed the value of one another’s different specialized backgrounds and expertise for collaborating on student care (e.g., teaching, psychology, child development, human services). Specifically, school partners discussed reaching out to agency partners for input in areas of child and family wellbeing. One school partner explained, “I’ve had students disclose things to me that have been really hard for myself to hear. …But I’m not qualified in the way that like our therapist is…to support those kids…so it’s been really fantastic working in partnership.” Another school partner shared:

Every week I’m dealing with some type of crisis in my classroom and to, you know, be able to just pop over to the therapist and get her advice on a situation is incredibly helpful. …Like it’s hugely, hugely important that we have these workers [agency partners] so close to us and so accessible, and you know, help kids deal with things that sometimes as teachers we’re not equipped to deal with, you know, we’re not social workers, we’re not therapists.

Similarly, agency partners explained that school partners play a central role in the lives of students and are often the first to observe student concerns and changes in student behaviour. Therefore, agency partners emphasized the importance of collaborating with school partners, “the teacher is always the first stop. Like [if] I noticed some something [with a student]” (Agency Partner). Additionally, school partners can bridge agency relationships with students and families, as described by an agency partner, “teachers, [they’re] always bridging me with parents. …A lot of teachers have close relationships with the parents so they can introduce me to the parent.”

As illustrated above, when different school-community partners recognized one another’s experience, they were more likely to reach out to one another to discuss student concerns, collaborate on wraparound plans for student care, and learn from one another. Alternatively, if partners did not feel that their expertise was recognized, they said their input and contributions were more limited. An agency partner commented on this, “our team [is] a tool…when they pick the tool up and you go here, thrive and have a voice and be a part of the community, it really, really makes a huge difference.” Consequently, partner collaboration was best supported when all partners’ expertise and experience was recognized, sought out, and honoured.

School Leadership

Beyond the training, knowledge, and experiences of school-community partners, structural factors such as school standards and procedures were described to impact partnership collaboration. Specifically, partners emphasized the key role that school administrative leadership (i.e., principal, assistant principal, and office administrators) plays in building a culture for collaboration. Partners said that school administrators are able to both remove barriers and create platforms for shared collaboration by adopting standards and procedures that foster access and communication across students, families, teachers, school staff, and AIFY agency partners.

The student referral process (i.e., referring students and families to support) is a good illustration of school leadership. Partners shared that referral processes were most efficient when families and school partners were able to directly speak to agency partners to refer students for support and collaboratively plan student care. Alternatively, at some sites, administrative procedures required referrals to go through administration first for approval, as described by an agency partner, “the admin really wants the teachers to go to the admin and the admin bring it to this [agency] team, they discuss it, and then the admin takes it back.” This process was described as impeding partner collaboration and delaying the process of implementing student care, “principals are busy people and so that slows down the process a lot” (Agency Partner). Another agency partner shared:

Direct contact with the kids and the teachers would help me, and I’m sure most of the team, better support new students. …Getting referrals through was a very hard process. …I wish I could have supported way more students. I had the capacity to support so many more kids than…I did end up supporting. …That’s a huge thing to be able to do my job, [to] build that capacity through teachers and students.

Alternatively, through direct referral processes, agency partners were able to engage in firsthand conversations with school partners to understand unique student concerns as observed in the classroom and discuss appropriate plans for support. Referrals were also streamlined and addressed in a timelier manner. A school administrator described the benefit of implementing direct referral processes at school:

Teachers know that they’re going to go where the support is [agency partners]. And they do not have to come through myself [principal] or [the assistant principal] before that can happen. I just don’t see how that would be effective. …We have that culture where staff are always talking to each other. Teachers are always talking to our AIFY [agency partners].

As illustrated above, school leadership is able to optimize partnership collaboration by adopting standards and procedures that remove barriers and empower relationship building and connection among school-community partners. In cases where school leadership implemented processes that promoted school-community partnership collaboration, such as with direct referral processes, partners recognized and appreciated this. One agency partner emphasized, “I think the biggest thing is our admin sets the tone for that relationship.” Another agency partner also spoke about the value of effective school leadership, “I feel very trusted and empowered by the admin here. And I think everyone on the [agency partner] team does, to do our work and be a part of the school community.”

Established and Flexible Communication Channels

Communication channels embedded in school practices were identified as essential for school-community partnership collaboration. Participants shared that channels for communication in schools need to be both established and flexible in order to best support partnership collaboration. Established channels of communication refer to formal touchpoints or meetings for contact between partners. Within the AIFY model, formal partnership meetings (referred to as huddles) take place on an ongoing basis, with different school and agency partners (i.e., school administration and agency partners, and some teachers, school staff, and community partners). Partners said that these formal meetings are essential for the high-level coordination and management of wraparound processes in their schools. One agency partner explained, “Our huddle keeps things organized, it keeps everybody in the loop. … It’s just a place marker for us, which is really helpful.” Another school administrator shared:

Our huddle is our main mechanism as a team where we really talk through, and essentially, triage needs. …We do sometimes more of…an inventory of what’s happening. Where do we need to go? What’s our goal? …What are those needs that we’re triaging right away? …Our huddle…is where we align things. And where we ensure, collectively, we’re all on the same page. (School Administrators)

Despite the importance of formal meetings for anchoring high-level decision-making, partners also emphasized that partner contact should not be limited to only taking place in formal meetings. Specifically, partners said that flexible modes of communication outside of formal meetings, such as day-to-day hallway conversations, classroom check-ins, and email updates, are also essential for collaboration. One agency partner explained, “the team is talking constantly, as things are arising. …Certainly we don’t save it for the huddle.” Another agency partner shared:

We have such a collaborative relationship with the admin, the school, the teachers. And between huddles, as teachers and the [agency] team, we’re always talking. …So we’re always talking about kids and emailing or just having little conversations in the hallway.

Specifically, flexible communication channels were described to be important for enhancing the visibility of different partners. When the presence of agency partners is not known in the school, it is unlikely that school partners will reach out to collaborate with agency partners on student concerns, as described by a school partner, “we’re a very busy school with a lot of wraparound supports…it’s hard to keep track of it all if you don’t interact with them [agency partners] on a regular basis. …You don’t even realize this person could help.” Therefore, it was emphasized that agency partners need to be “visible” through informal channels, such as “get[ting] into classrooms” (School Administrator). In turn, this allows agency partners to become more integrated in the school, build trusting relationships with school partners, and create space and opportunities to collaborate. A school partner commented, “They make themselves known [agency partners]. They come into the class, they come and do things. …They’re always in the hall when it’s transition time. …And I think that’s huge.” A school administrator also shared:

The whole entire [agency partner] team, I think why it works so well here is because they’re here and they live with us. And they’re with us each and every day. And they’re just part of our community. They’re part of our staff. They’re a part of our school family. And I think that’s the key to success is that they walk alongside us every single day.

Furthermore, flexible communication channels were described to be essential for different partners to share information and coordinate student care. An agency partner explained that “closely emailing, communicating, checking in, in classrooms” with school partners is critical to, “get updates on kiddos, to know how they’re doing in the classroom. Just to be able to track their behaviours, understanding if the strategies are working, maybe we need to make some adjustments.” Another agency partner described working with a teacher on student care, “me and [student’s] teacher will meet every day, at the end of the day, and just talk about how [the] day went.”

Consequently, partners indicated that both established and flexible channels of communication are needed for partnership collaboration. Established channels are needed for the high-level management of wraparound and collaborative processes. In between these formal touchpoints, flexible channels, such as hallway conversations and updates, are needed for partners to build recognition and relationships with one another, as well as collaboratively implement, adjust, and monitor student care in practice.

The huddle times are a good opportunity for all of us to review and talk about what’s been happening and to do that touch base, but our staff [agency partners] are very good about reaching out and talking and communicating and visiting classrooms. I mean the AIFY [agency] team is in the classrooms all the time talking to kids, talking to the teachers, and I think that’s so amazing about our school culture. (School Administrator)

Appropriate Staff Resources

Finally, partners discussed the impact that staff resources have on student support and partnership collaboration. Partners explained that their work and partnership collaboration is best supported when staff resourcing is proportionate to the level of student and family needs in schools. Unfortunately, partners said this was not often the case and they discussed struggling to meet high student needs and limited capacity among agency partners to support students. One agency partner explained, “The need is there but the access and the availability of it [support] is not where we need to be.” Another agency partner commented, “the AIFY schools need like double the amount of staff.”

When there is limited staff capacity, partners explained that the overburden of demands can lead to burnout among school and agency partners, “It becomes a challenge for staff too, right? …It’s heavy work” (School Administrator). In turn, this burnout may result in the departure of staff from the school, “We have lost so many great staff because the toll of this job, people leave. And I get it, I understand. And vicarious trauma is real” (School Partner). In fact, one school administrator shared, “we had this cycle of this person’s here [agency partner], this person’s not…I think we had averaged three people a year.” Partners explained that this is concerning because high staff turnover makes it more difficult to build relationships with students and families, as well as to establish collaborative teamwork among partners. One agency partner commented:

The team constantly keeps switching and switching. And even like the first few months, it took a lot it took a bit for some of the kids to adjust. …From my end, that’d be nice to see AIFY [agency partners] kind of have the consistency with the workers that are going to be in this position.

Specifically, with high turnover, school partners may not know who they can go to coordinate supports for struggling students. This is described by a school administer, “We’ve had inconsistent staff. And I think that’s made it hard. So right now we’re on our third mental health therapist. …I mean, staff don’t even know who that person is, at this point. Right?” Additionally, school partners may view supports as too unreliable to use. One school partner shared, “I haven’t had one person in AIFY working with any of my students, because we’ve attempted a few times, but they tried to take them once, and then they don’t work there anymore.”

Alternatively, when there are sufficient staff resources and stability among agency partners, this was described to promote connectivity and partnership collaboration on student care, as described by a school partner, “I think the success piece is consistency.” A school administrator also shared:

When you have sustainable support, you’re able to create consistency of practice, you’re able to build capacity of practice for new educators, but you’re also able to be responsive in veteran educators’ classrooms, you’re able to use your environment strategically.

Consequently, adequate staff resources were described to be critical for school-community partnership collaboration. As expressed by a school administrator, “you got to build capacity in order for that to work effectively.”

Together, all five conditions are essential for partners to work together in collaboration, within a school-community model of wraparound support. The implications of these conditions and recommendations for practice are discussed in the next section.

Partnership collaboration is critical to the success of school-community models of wraparound support as such models rely on intersectoral school and community partners to work together and with the family to identify and coordinate services for children and families (Walker et al., 2003 ). Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore factors that impact this professional partnership collaboration between frontline school and agency staff. Five essential conditions were identified, which included value-based training , mutual recognition of expertise , school leadership , established and flexible communication channels , and appropriate staff resources .

Value-based training was identified by all school-community partners to be essential for creating a shared foundation upon which professional partnership collaboration was possible. Within the AIFY model, school and agency partners receive training on value-based practices that are trauma-informed and foster family resilience, reflecting wraparound principles. Partners said that the shared knowledge and expectations that they acquired through value-based training made collaboration easier to achieve, whereas an absence of this training made teamwork less straightforward due to disparate values and approaches among partners. This finding builds on previous literature which similarly identifies the importance of training and shared understanding for inter-agency collaboration (Cooper et al., 2016 ; Morgan et al., 2019 ; Nooteboom et al., 2021 ; Walker et al., 2003 ). Wraparound literature affirms that training is needed to promote shared knowledge and understanding and a positive outlook towards teamwork (Cooper et al., 2016 ; Walker et al., 2003 ). Implementation science literature also emphasizes that shared knowledge and commitment among stakeholders improves the high-quality implementation and practice of programs (Aarons et al., 2011 ; Fixsen, 2005 ; Moir, 2018 ).

Specifically, the Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, and Sustainment (EPIS) framework focuses on factors that support the implementation of programs across different phases, as well as contextual factors that impact this implementation, such as outer contextual factors (e.g., service and policy environments and inter-organizational dynamics) and inner contextual factors (e.g., intra-organizational characteristics, leadership, internal policies, etc.) (Aarons et al., 2011 ). Notably, the EPIS framework identifies the culture of an organization, with expectations and values receptive to an intervention, as an inner factor supporting the implementation and sustainment of programs, consistent with this study’s findings (Aarons et al., 2011 ).

Although shared training and understanding is needed for collaboration, partners also emphasized the importance of their unique and diverse expertise and experience. Mutual recognition of expertise among different school-community partners was another essential building block for partnership collaboration. When partners felt that their expertise was valued, they felt that other partners were more likely recognize and seek out their input, fostering collaborative processes. Previous literature has also emphasized the importance of mutual recognition of expertise for partnership collaboration (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Cooper et al., 2016 ; Nooteboom et al. 2021 ; Rothi & Leavey, 2006 ; Walker et al., 2003 ). Specifically, wraparound literature underscores the importance of respect and equitable inclusion of all team members as integral to wraparound processes, with particular emphasis on the inclusion and respect for the child and family (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ). Additionally, a systematic review of inter-agency collaborations identified “mutual valuing, respect, and trust” as a key facilitator for collaboration (Cooper et al., 2016 , pg. 337). Another systematic review emphasized the importance of “trust, respect, and equality” for inter-agency collaboration (Nooteboom et al., 2021 , pg. 99). However, these values are not always upheld in practice (Cooper et al., 2016 ; Rothi & Leavey, 2006 ). For example, one study of an inter-agency collaboration found that some partners felt that their expertise was “undervalued,” and, in turn, these partners were not invited to fully participate in student care plans (Rothi & Leavey, 2006 , pg. 37). Therefore, a lack of this condition risks partner exclusion and has the potential to undermine collaborative partnership processes (Rothi & Leavey, 2006 ).

School leadership (i.e., principal and assistant principal) was described to be essential in setting the stage for collaboration among school-community partners. Partners said that school administrators are able to facilitate or impede partnership collaboration through the school procedures they implement for communication and protocols across partners. In the context of AIFY school environments, service plans for children and families are coordinated with the child and family by agency staff in collaboration with the wraparound team; however, it was made clear by partners that school administrators take on the key role of supervising and guiding this provision of wraparound supports among school-community partners. Although school administrators need to provide oversight of student supports provided in their schools according to institutional protocols, partners stressed that managerial procedures focused on administrative approval functioned to gatekeep available supports and mitigate collaborative procedures. Instead, partners explained that school administrators can promote partnership collaboration through the adoption of procedures that foster communication and contact among partners, such as direct referral processes and the inclusion of different school-community partners in collaborative spaces. This aligns with previous research which underscores the importance of supportive leadership for wraparound processes (Coldiron et al., 2016 ; Cooper et al., 2016 ; Walker et al., 2003 ), with particular emphasis on the influential role of school leadership in school settings (Bartlett, 2018b ; Cumming et al., 2022 ). The EPIS framework also emphasizes the importance of leadership as an inner context factor supporting program implementation; in which, leaders are able to support buy-in among staff, support collaboration, and set clear strategic directions (Aarons et al., 2011 ).

Communication channels embedded in school practices were another essential mechanism for partnership collaboration. School-community partners said that established channels of communication, such as formal meetings, are needed for the high-level management of student supports and wraparound processes (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ). Outside of these formal touchpoints, partners also emphasized the importance of flexible channels of communication, such as hallway conversations and classroom check-ins. Partners explained that in utilizing these informal channels, they felt that different partners became more visible in school spaces, which allowed them to build recognition and trusting relationships with one another. Previous research has recognized the importance of trusting relationships for collaboration, with one study identifying it as the “most important facilitator” for inter-agency collaboration (Morgan et al., 2019 , pg. 1028).

Partners also explained that informal check-ins also allowed them to collaboratively monitor student progress and make needed adjustments to student care. Monitoring and evaluation of student care plans is a best practice for wraparound models (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ) Although partners acknowledged that communication improved their ability to monitor student plans, it should be noted that school-community partners did not speaking directly to the importance of the evaluation practices or mechanisms to ensure accountability, a theme which has emerged in other wraparound literature (see Walker et al., 2003 ) and is a key inner contextual factor for program sustainability as outlined by the EPIS framework (Aarons et al., 2011 ). This may not have emerged as a theme because evaluation may be perceived by partners to be a standard practice rather than a unique aspect of wraparound, as it is incorporated in day-to-day practice and forms of communication (e.g., huddle meetings, and school agency reporting mechanisms) within the AIFY model. While not described by partners, it is notable that monitoring and reporting occurs at frontline and organizational levels of AIFY and an annual evaluation is performed on the AIFY each year on its impacts and adherence to its theory of change and logic model outcomes (see CUP & AIFY, 2020 ; 2021 ; 2022 ; 2023 ).

Finally, partners also emphasized the importance of appropriate staff resources for partner collaboration. Partners explained that when staff are under-resourced, they can become quickly overburdened by high needs, which may lead to burnout and turnover (Nooteboom et al., 2021 ). High turnover among school-community partners means that partners will have less familiarity with each other and are less likely to have established relationships. As described by one school partner, staff may even see community partners as unreliable and feel hesitant to work together in partnership. Therefore, partners explained that collaboration is best supported through stable, long-term relationships, which requires an investment of adequate staff resources (Morgan et al., 2019 ). Previous literature on wraparound and implementation science also emphasizes the importance of funding and resources for supporting programs (Fixsen, 2005 ; Morgan et al., 2019 ), with the EPIS framework identifying funding support as a key outer contextual factor for program implementation and sustainment (Aarons et al., 2011 ). Accordingly, insufficient resources for a program may undermine the effectiveness and continuation of otherwise high-quality programs, resulting in suboptimal outcomes (Moir, 2018 ).

In summary, these five conditions were identified as essential for partnership collaboration. When it comes to service provision under the framework of a multi-tiered system of support (Scott & Eber, 2003 ), these five essential conditions apply to all levels of support (Scott & Eber, 2003 ). Specifically, these essential conditions need to be active at the primary level of support to necessitate collaboration at secondary and tertiary levels (Scott & Eber, 2003 ). Furthermore, these essential conditions align with the key principles of wraparound support that underlay the importance of team collaboration (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ) and components of implementation science related to the implementation and sustainment of programs (Aarons et al., 2011 ; Fixsen, 2005 ).

Implications for Practice

Implications for practice were drawn from discussions with participants and informed by the literature. See Table 2 for a review of the five essential conditions and practice recommendations. Study findings underscore the importance of comprehensive value-based training, which is needed to develop shared knowledge and values to support partnership collaboration (Cooper et al., 2016 ; Morgan et al., 2019 ; Nooteboom et al., 2021 ; Walker et al., 2003 ). Due to this importance, value-based training should be available on an ongoing basis to account for staff turnover, as well as to actively refine practices and maintain accountability within the wraparound model. Findings also revealed that this training should include a focus on mutual valuing and recognition of expertise among partners and the child and family, to promote partner inclusion, trust, and respect in the wraparound process (Bruns & Walker, 2008 ; Cooper et al., 2016 ; Nooteboom et al., 2021 ; Rothi & Leavey, 2006 ). To further uphold these values, they need to be championed by school leadership, which plays a key role in setting values and shaping wraparound supports and partnership collaboration within school-community models. Specifically, to foster collaborative spaces, school leadership can adopt processes that promote partnership contact and communication (e.g., direct referral processes). One such mechanism that supports partnership collaboration was identified to be established and flexible communication channels. Partners stressed the need for established channels of communication to ground high-level decision-making, as well as flexible communication channels to build relationships and monitor and implement wraparound plans in practice. Finally, partners also identified the need for appropriate staff resources to support long-term relationship building and partnership collaboration within school models of support (Cooper et al., 2016 ; Morgan et al., 2019 ). Therefore, findings underscore the importance of investing resources into early intervention programs in order to promote inter-agency collaboration and ultimately promote positive outcomes among children and families (Cooper et al. 2016 ).

Strengths and Limitations

This study had strengths and limitations. In terms of strengths, the study sample size was substantial ( n  = 79 partners), representing a considerable number of school-community partners. Furthermore, the study sample included both new and well-established AIFY schools (i.e., three schools were new to AIFY, while five schools were in their sixth year of the wraparound model). This meant that partner perspectives were included from schools in the early stages of consolidating partnership processes, as well as schools with long-term partnerships, allowing for a more complete understanding of partnership functioning over time. However, a limitation of the study is that some schools were represented less in the data, with two schools participating in one to two data generation sessions (including one new school and one established school) and six schools participating in three to four sessions (including two new schools and four established schools). This is notable because the limited capacity of some schools to participate in data collection activities may be indicative of greater themes, such as school and agency staff feeling overburdened by student and family demand for support, and the ability of wraparound supports in schools to meet these demands. It would be beneficial for future studies to engage schools at equivalent rates to promote site-specific representation and address circumstances unique to different sites. Additionally, the present study focused on the perspective of frontline school-community partners in terms of professional inter-sectoral partnership collaboration. It would be beneficial for future studies to explore the perspectives of the children and families that these partners are collaborating with and serving. We have forthcoming manuscripts that will prioritize the child and family perspective. Finally, the study is grounded in the context of the AIFY school-community model of wraparound support in a large city in western Canada; therefore, the study findings should be applied to other settings with consideration for the unique context and strengths of different sites (Burns & Goldman, 1999 ). Furthermore, future studies should be conducted to confirm the importance of these five essential conditions for partnership funding in other school-community contexts.

Collaborative school-community models of wraparound support have been increasingly recognized in the literature as effective approaches for supporting vulnerable children and families (Hill, 2020 ; Yu et al., 2020 ). Due to the importance of collaboration for coordinating student care within these models, there is a need to understand the factors that impact this type of large-scale school-community collaboration (Walker et al., 2003 ). The present study identified five essential conditions for professional partnership collaboration among school-community partners which underscore the importance of comprehensive training and shared understanding, mutual recognition of expertise and partnership inclusion, administrative leadership support, regular established and flexible channels for communication, and adequate partner resources and workforce stability. These essential conditions can be used to help inform the implementation of similar school-community models of support to foster collaborative partner processes and ultimately promote positive outcomes among children, youth, and families.

Data availability

Study participants were assured raw data would remain confidential and would not be shared.

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This work was supported by the United Way of the Alberta Capital Region.

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Jason Daniels, Jessica Haight, and Maira Quintanilha contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and data collection were performed by Jason Daniels, Jessica Haight, Maira Quintanilha, and Matana Skoye. Data analysis and the first draft of the manuscript was completed by Jessica Haight, in consultation with Jason Daniels and Rebecca Gokiert. All authors reviewed and approved the final manuscript.

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Haight, J., Daniels, J., Gokiert, R. et al. Essential Conditions for Partnership Collaboration within a School-Community Model of Wraparound Support. J Child Fam Stud (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-024-02903-1

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Simulation model for a sustainable food supply chain in a developing country: a case study of the banana supply chain in malawi.

1. Introduction

Problem definition, 2. literature review, 2.1. food sustainable supply chain practices in developing countries, 2.1.1. awareness, 2.1.2. collaboration, 2.1.3. efficiency, 2.1.4. knowledge and information-sharing, 2.1.5. resilience, 2.1.6. governance, 2.2. modelling in sustainable supply chains, 2.2.1. simulation techniques, 2.2.2. design science research, 2.2.3. des and dsr in combination, 2.2.4. gap in the literature, 3. materials and methods, 3.1. dsr methodological approach, 3.2. model input parameters, 3.3. base model assumptions.

• Harvest is always available; therefore, the input is not starved at any point.
• Disruptions caused by resource breakdowns are not modelled (due to a lack of the required statistical data).
• The model operates 24 h, but all operations, up to truck loading, are completed within seven hours, a typical daily shift for the case study.
• A week has five working days, but operations can occur on an additional sixth day.
• Randomness simulation in operations is not performed (due to a lack of statistical data).
• Storage capacity is unlimited at any stage in the SC for the quantities typically harvested.
• Period randomness is evened out.
• There is stable market for the products

3.4. Base Model Validation

3.5. evaluation of alternative model designs, 4.1. standalone model, 4.2. integrated model, 5. discussion, 5.1. theoretical implications, 5.2. managerial implications, 5.3. practical and policy recommendations, 6. conclusions, 6.1. findings, 6.2. research limitations, 6.3. recommendations for future work, supplementary materials, author contributions, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

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Share and Cite

Moyo, E.H.; Carstens, S.; Walters, J. Simulation Model for a Sustainable Food Supply Chain in a Developing Country: A Case Study of the Banana Supply Chain in Malawi. Logistics 2024 , 8 , 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics8030085

Moyo EH, Carstens S, Walters J. Simulation Model for a Sustainable Food Supply Chain in a Developing Country: A Case Study of the Banana Supply Chain in Malawi. Logistics . 2024; 8(3):85. https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics8030085

Moyo, Evance Hlekwayo, Stephen Carstens, and Jackie Walters. 2024. "Simulation Model for a Sustainable Food Supply Chain in a Developing Country: A Case Study of the Banana Supply Chain in Malawi" Logistics 8, no. 3: 85. https://doi.org/10.3390/logistics8030085

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Where We Go Wrong with Collaboration

How our desires, expectations, and fears about what “showing up” looks like can end up backfiring.

Our beliefs about how we feel we need to “show up” for others can lead to extreme collaborative overload and burnout. For example, a desire to help others can lead us to jump into a project or debate without being asked. A need for status can prod us to drive collaborations back to ourselves. And fear can block us from saying “no” to a collaborative request that we know we can’t handle. The first step in reducing collaborative overload is becoming aware internal triggers like these. This article introduces nine common beliefs to reflect on; guarding against them will help you reclaim your time and redirect your efforts to where your contributions can add the most value.

Practically everything we do at work is a collaboration. Pre-pandemic, many people spent 85% or more of their time each week in collaborative work — answering emails, instant messaging, in meetings, and using other team collaboration tools and spaces. This number has only grown throughout the pandemic, with no end in sight as we move into various forms of hybrid work .

• Rob Cross is the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and a senior vice president of research at the Institute for Corporate Productivity. He is the coauthor of The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Add Up—and What to Do About It (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023) and author of Beyond Collaboration Overload (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).

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