Why collaboration is the real engine behind revenue growth

Revenue is a team sport. I know that sounds like something you'd see on a motivational poster, but stick with me, because the evidence backs it up and so does my experience across some of the most complex organizations I've worked in.

I've spent my career in large, matrix-structured businesses. Unilever, BT, various financial services firms, a major global gambling group. And for the past seven months, I've been at Post Office, which is arguably one of the most complicated organizations you could walk into right now.

Three hundred years old, eight thousand postmasters in our network, roughly 290 products spanning retail, financial services, government services, mail and parcels, and a very public transformation agenda following the Horizon scandal.

Collaboration isn't just a nice idea in that environment. It's the only way anything gets done.

So I want to share what I've learned, some of what's worked, some of what hasn't, and the practical frameworks I've been building to make cross-functional alignment actually stick. Nothing I'm going to say is groundbreaking.

But the number of businesses I've seen that know these things and still don't do them is genuinely surprising.

Why the pressure to collaborate has never been greater

Think about how much faster everything moves now compared to even 15 years ago. When I started out selling shampoos and bleach at Unilever, you could turn your laptop off at the end of the day and go home. No ecommerce dashboards to check at midnight. No constant stream of operational alerts. It was, by comparison, pretty pedestrian.

Now, every role I've had for the past decade and a half has felt like a constant sprint. Markets are volatile. Consumer behavior shifts faster than most businesses can respond.

The technology landscape keeps evolving, and every time you think you've caught up, something new arrives. I can remember when ecommerce was the new thing, then cloud, then app-based businesses, then big data, and now AI. The treadmill never stops.

Customers aren't comparing you to your direct competitors anymore either. They're comparing you to the best experience they've had anywhere. That raises the bar considerably, and it means the pressure to stay ahead is constant and unrelenting.

All of that creates a simple truth: no commercial leader can do this alone. You need the whole organization moving in the same direction, and you need it to move fast. That's why collaboration matters, and that's why getting it right has been central to everything I've been trying to build at Post Office.

McKinsey research suggests that companies that collaborate well are typically 20-25% more effective. Gartner has found that organizations with well-aligned objectives perform better at both winning and retaining customers. And there's a mountain of Harvard Business Review research pointing to the same conclusion: businesses where people actually work well together have a meaningful advantage.

None of that is a surprise. What is surprising is how rarely it happens in practice.

The orchestrator and integrator mindset

When I think about my role as a commercial leader, I think about it in two parts: orchestrator and integrator.

The orchestrator piece is about the what and the why. Creating a compelling vision of where the business is going, articulating a growth story that people can believe in, and then walking that story around the organization until people genuinely feel connected to it.

That last part matters more than most leaders give it credit for. Belief is the foundation of collaboration. If people don't think you can actually get where you're saying you're going, they're not going to come with you.

At Post Office, after years of negative press, significant public scrutiny, and pretty anemic growth, getting people to believe that strong double-digit growth was possible took real effort.

It meant going into conversations at every level - functional, team, individual - and helping people draw a clear line between what they were doing day to day and the bigger growth story. That's not a one-time communication exercise. It's an ongoing commitment.

The integrator piece is about the how. And this is where a lot of commercial leaders, myself included at various points in my career, fall short. Because integration can't just be a mindset; it has to be structural. It has to be built into the way the organization actually operates.

I see my role at the exec table as one of the few people who can hold the commercial lens across the whole business. The CEO needs someone who can look at the full picture and consistently bring it back to commercial imperatives, because those should be the primary filter for prioritization across the group.

But holding that lens is one thing. Building the architecture that makes it real is another.

Building an architecture for collaboration

This is the part that people tend to skip, or at least underinvest in, because it feels bureaucratic. It's not the exciting stuff. But it's the stuff that determines whether collaboration actually happens or just gets talked about in leadership offsites.

Integrated plans. Post Office, when I arrived, was a fantastic example of siloed thinking in action. Every function had its own set of initiatives, most of which didn't connect to anyone else's.

The first and most obvious fix was bringing everything into a single visible plan so that everyone could see what everyone else was working on. The reaction was telling.

People were saying things like, "I didn't know you were doing that," or "Please don't do that while I'm doing this; you'll ruin my project."

Projects had been overlapping for years, creating huge inefficiency and opportunity cost. Bringing it together surfaced all of that and created the starting point for genuine alignment.

Objectives and KPIs. If you've got a growth story, you need to translate it into objectives that people can actually understand and get behind. Not corporate jargon. Just clear, straightforward language that connects to what people do every day.

One of the best examples I've seen of this was at Capital One, where I worked in financial services. Every year, without fail, four objectives. Clearly articulated. And every function was expected to align to those four things, regardless of their own agenda. The rule was simple: if you can't draw a line between what you're doing and one of the four objectives, you don't do it. Powerful in its simplicity.

At Post Office, I've been trying to reorient the whole business around three measures: volume, value, and mix. If we can drive volume and value, the top line follows.

Getting everyone thinking through those three lenses has been harder than it sounds, because cultural inertia is real and people hold tightly to the metrics they've always used. But the simplicity is the point. The simpler the KPIs, the easier the alignment.

Processes and cadences. I'll admit I wasn't a process geek at the start of my career. I had to learn the value of mapping out who does what, where the decision points are, how risk gets managed, and what happens in what order. But once you see what happens when processes aren't documented or followed consistently, you become a convert pretty quickly.

At Post Office, we were seeing big commercial wins that we couldn't replicate because nobody followed the same process twice. The lack of repeatability was directly hurting commercial performance.

Mapping those processes, getting clarity on sequencing and ownership, and then building the right cadences around them to make sure the right people were in the right conversations at the right time, that's been a significant unlock.

Alongside that, getting the right people in the room and only the right people. I've come across meetings with 80 people on a staircase call, which is as unproductive as it sounds. Slimming down the number of people involved in any given process is just as important as making sure the right ones are there.

RACI frameworks. Nobody loves doing a RACI. It's one of those things that feels incredibly tedious and bureaucratic, and that's exactly why it so often doesn't get done. But when it is done well, it removes a huge amount of friction. The most important question in any RACI, for me, is who sets intent. Who calls the ball? Who says what we do and when?

At Entain, the global gambling group I worked at before Post Office, we had four different departments who all believed they were the ones setting direction.

Commercial, Marketing, Pricing, and Technology were all operating with their own agendas. The most important thing we did was establish clearly that Commercial drives intent, because Commercial is accountable for the outcome.

Everyone else enables that intent. Once that was settled, the hobby projects stopped, the misaligned priorities started to clear, and the organization could actually move in a consistent direction.

Enablers. The final piece of the architecture is the tooling and infrastructure that makes everything else work without requiring enormous manual effort. Analytics platforms, data visualization tools, workflow tools.

At Post Office, even getting basic trading reports in front of the right people was a meaningful step forward, because people could finally see what was happening and respond to it. Building out the data and analytics capability properly is going to allow faster decision-making, more agility, and a significant reduction in the administrative overhead that currently takes up far too much of people's time.

Collaboration doesn't stop at your front door

One thing I've seen consistently across the businesses I've worked in is that leaders invest a lot of energy in fixing internal ways of working and then treat the external ecosystem in a much more relaxed, organic way. The rigor doesn't extend to partners, suppliers, and joint ventures in the same way it does internally. And that's a mistake.

At Post Office, we have white label financial services relationships, partnerships with major retailers like Tesco, Asda, and Morrisons, and a network of eight thousand postmasters. Managing all of that effectively requires the same intentionality you'd apply to internal collaboration.

The questions you need to answer are the same: who are you working with today, who do you need to be working with in two, five, or ten years, and how are you going to structure those relationships to actually deliver value?

And because we operate under public procurement law, where bringing on a new supplier can take 15-20 months, thinking long-term about the external ecosystem isn't optional. It's a requirement.

Once you've got your partner landscape mapped, apply the same collaboration architecture externally that you've built internally. Are you thinking about RACIs with your partners? Do you have clear processes and cadences for how you work together? Is there a shared view of what success looks like and how you're going to measure it?

If you can build that foundation of predictability and delivery in your external relationships, you create the conditions to genuinely maximize value from those partnerships over time. Adding services, evolving the relationship, finding more value in the contract. That's where the real upside lives.

Where to start: auditing your current capability

If you're reading this and thinking about how to apply any of this in your own organization, the first step is an honest audit of where you are right now.

Look across all the dimensions we've talked about: the direction-setting and vision communication, the frameworks and processes, the cadences and decision-making structures, the external ecosystem. What's working? What's clearly broken? Where are the biggest gaps between what you know you should be doing and what's actually happening?

Then, and this is the bit I'd really emphasize, don't try to fix everything at once. Pick the one thing that will generate the most visible impact and start there. That tentpole activity creates momentum and, crucially, it creates belief. People see something change for the better; they hear from colleagues that the new way of working is actually useful, and suddenly you've got the mandate to go further.

For me at Post Office, that first step was simple: bringing people from outside the commercial function into trading conversations and planning sessions. Legal, product, compliance, people who'd never been part of those discussions before. The effect was immediate. Better decisions, because we had more perspectives in the room. And a clear signal to the organization that something was genuinely shifting in how we operated.

From that starting point, broader changes became easier to introduce. People were already seeing the value. The skepticism that greets most change programs was significantly reduced because there was evidence, not just rhetoric, that the new approach was working.

Incentives shape behavior, full stop

One question that came up in the room when I shared these ideas was about salespeople who are deeply individual in their orientation and resistant to team-based ways of working. It's a real challenge, and one I've seen in multiple organizations.

My first question is always: how are they incentivized? Because if the reward structure is entirely individual, you'll get individual behavior. That's rational, not a character flaw. If you want people to collaborate, you need to build collaboration into what they're rewarded for. That means balancing individual targets with company-level outcomes in the incentive structure.

It's not easy to do, especially in sales cultures where individual commission has been the norm for a long time. But if the incentive structure only rewards individual performance, you'll keep getting individual performance. The structure drives the behavior.

Accountability and authority go together

The other question that came up was about who should actually be in charge when multiple functions all believe they have a stake in the direction. My answer is straightforward: whoever is accountable for the outcome.

If you're the person who has to stand in front of the board and explain why targets weren't hit, you're the person who should be setting direction. Accountability and authority need to be aligned. When they're not, you get the worst of both worlds: people with authority who aren't on the hook for results, and people on the hook for results who can't actually control what happens.

As a commercial leader, I moved into general management partly because I wanted to be the person saying yes or no, not the person asking permission. If you carry the jeopardy, you should carry the power.

The bottom line

Pretty much everything I've done in my career that I'm genuinely proud of has been done with a team. The numbers I'm most satisfied with, the transformations I remember most fondly, the problems that actually got solved properly. All of it was collaborative.

That's why I believe this matters, and why I've spent the first seven months at Post Office building the foundations for it. Collaboration can be a genuine source of competitive advantage.

The research supports it. The experience backs it up. And for anyone carrying heroic growth targets this year, getting the architecture right, internally and externally, might be the most important thing you do.

It won't happen by accident. It rarely does. But if you build it deliberately, with the right frameworks, the right incentives, and the right starting point to generate momentum, it can be the unlock that everything else depends on.