How to build healthier collaboration and stronger stakeholder engagement
Written by Dan Parry • 1 June, 2026
Interpersonal Communication Skills Article
Effective communication skills lead to stronger collaboration and healthier client relationships. Why then do many organisations feel that communication is tongue-tied and bogged down in difficulties that are hard to explain?
Businesses try to balance two competing priorities: emerging tech, and essential human skills such as communication, trust, and decision-making. The rush to adopt AI is fuelling expectations that people will deliver more work, more quickly. But the speed of this can lead to difficult consequences.
New reliance on AI is contributing to old communication problems associated with heavy use of messaging apps. Digital communication challenges disrupt collaboration, rattles cohesion, and opens the door to poor stakeholder engagement.
In recent months, L&D teams have been coming to us with two common requests. Up to March, these focused on bringing AI into communication practices. Since then, there’s been a shift towards questions about people, including concern about less in-person communication, less collaboration, and less confidence in decision-making.
The growing commitment to AI potentially comes at a cost. For example, now that everyone has access to the all-knowing power of chatbots – perhaps offering more support and encouragement than a search engine (…or a colleague) – individuals feel they can work alone more easily, with less need to talk to anyone else.
This trend against in-person communication fits in with a pattern of behaviour that began with the way we use social media. At work, messaging apps and AI increasingly encourage people to communicate at distance, if at all.
In pre-Covid days, when the whole team worked in the same place at the same time, there was a need to be able to readily communicate, in person, with the people alongside you.
Today, teams are often scattered across time-zones and locations (including people working from home). In this fragmented working environment, messaging apps scratch an itch, allowing us to feel that we’re genuinely interacting with the world. However, this feeling is an illusion. Research suggests that social media supports human connection, but can’t properly replace it.
Chat channels (eg, Teams, Slack, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snap) allow us to feel part of the team, as if we’re connected. We’re in touch. Tick. You can feel you’re collaborating simply by responding to messages.
One client – young 30s, male, very successful – told us that he does not have any interaction with friends or family individually, only through large WhatsApp groups. He described this as ‘completely normal’ – perhaps (in his view) typical of what might be regarded as a new approach to communication. However, how far does this support workplace trust, collaboration, and cross-team relationships? This question provokes some of the current concerns among L&D teams.
Businesses encourage tech, they’re committing to AI. They also operate at full stretch. Headcount is minimal, resources are stretched, targets are high. Busy people are told to use tech – which speeds up workflows and productivity but also distances individuals from others and leaves little time for the patience needed to build genuine cross-team relationships with other overly stretched people. Requests to share talent and assets with internal ‘competitors’ don’t always go down well.
Relationships – in which people give space and time to others – develop slowly. Trust builds over time, but it leads to measurable results. Teams whose members show trust, respect, emotional intelligence, and psychological safety, have been shown to have stronger collective intelligence than teams of high-calibre individuals who excel in all things apart from the ability to connect.
High-trust teams encourage accountability. As a member, you need to be prepared to give up something of yourself. Whether you’re giving up the time to listen, the space for other people’s opinions, or a bit of ‘me’ for the sake of collaboration, giving up some of yourself encourages others to do the same.
When people feel connected via messaging apps, they might feel less need to do much else in the way of communication. They’re responding to requests – so why chat in person or even pick up the phone? To go beyond social media, and communicate in person, involves additional layers of effort, time, and risk.
For some people, in-person communication has a habit of wandering. It can stray towards additional requests: ‘actually, could you also… ’. It can stumble into misunderstanding, or take you on a prolonged marathon of lengthy explanations. In short, in-person communication can run away with you. Communication – and people – can be better controlled when confined to a text.
Communication is easier when it’s largely one-sided. Messages can be ignored, replies delayed, and texts kept as short as you like. Voice notes get your point across, (though offer no opportunity for the other person to do the same).
In this de-humanised form of communication, there is less presence of the other – less effort and less risk of getting it wrong. When you message someone, you don’t need to see them, talk to them, or even think about how they might feel about your message. They are less present to you. You can think less of them and feel less accountable to them, all of which undermines trust.
By looking in detail at common communication challenges, it becomes easier to develop a strategy to tackle them. At Working Voices, we help clients develop a learning culture that focuses on essential human skills in communication and critical thinking.
In-person training develops long-term behavioural change, supporting cohesion, and strengthening stakeholder management. Research on buyer–seller relationships found that effective communication improves trust, commitment, and satisfaction between organisations.
Developing a few little habits could change the way people connect:
1. Chat at the start of the day: before you log in, spend a moment talking to people, not about how their evening was but about work – what are they involved in, how’s the market looking, is the pipeline shaping up?
2. Team before tech: when facing a decision, talk it over with someone in your team, before you run it through AI. Stress-test it with someone whose knowledge and experience will give you a relevant response rather than generic advice dredged up from distant corners of the internet.
3. Think of three projects or tasks: choose those that would benefit from extra help – ie people from another team. What is the expertise you’re looking for, who are the people who could help you, which teams are they in, how can you arrange a conversation?
Teams might want to try:
1. Treating members of other teams as potential allies, rather than as potential competitors. This helps to break down the silo mentality that leads to tribalism.
2. The biggest rival is always the team closest to yours. Rather than thinking in terms of in-groups and out-groups, better to think bigger by focusing not on groups but on wider objectives.
3. Look at the targets of other teams: what are they trying to achieve? How can you help them? Your support for them will lead to them supporting you, perhaps in ways you hadn’t thought of.
A common reaction to tips such as these might be what’s in it for me? By taking a proactive lead in opening up cross-team discussions, you or your team become associated with trust and opportunity. By breaking down ‘otherness’, teams pull together in support of organisation-wide objectives.
Senior leaders will want to take a lead in developing a culture of collaboration – building skills through in-person training programmes and deconstructing the feeling that teams are competing with each other.
In the long run, the darker side of hyper-efficient, dehumanising communication isn’t helpful to anyone. With a few simple adjustments, communication can become more effective, opening the way to stronger collaboration and healthier stakeholder engagement. And that sounds like something worth chatting about.
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The founder and CEO of Working Voices, Nick Smallman has been at the top of his profession for 25 years. Advising global blue-chip clients on engagement, productivity, and retention, he counsels leaders on increasing revenue via simple cultural adjustments.
Overseeing the successful expansion of Working Voices across the UK, the US, Asia, and the Middle East, Nick supports the leadership and communication capabilities of clients in a wide range of sectors. In particular, he has advised companies such as JP Morgan, Barclays, Sony, Nomura, M&S, and Blackrock for more than 15 years.
Developing his reputation for thought leadership, in recent years Nick has been leading work on The Sustainable Human, the subject of his forthcoming book. A concept unique to Working Voices, The Sustainable Human offers a package of solutions focusing on leadership enablement, future skills, and cultural harmony.
Working closely with HR specialist Mercer, Nick has developed solutions to four key modern workplace challenges:
“I’m excited to share the conclusions of three years of research that, if implemented, can make an immediate practical difference to leaders and their organisations.”
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