Collaboration Killed My Company

For most of my life, I believed I was a strong collaborator.

If you had asked me a week ago whether I co-create with the people around me or build things with them rather than through them, I wouldn’t have hesitated.

Of course I do. I’m a visionary. I bring people in. I want their ideas.

I was full of shit.

I wasn’t lying to anyone. I believed it completely.

I just didn’t have this distinction.

Here it is.

A collaborator is someone with authorship. They have real input into the strategy and the priorities. They own the creation of the “where” and the “how.” The outcome is theirs because they helped write it.

A participant is someone with responsibility for the “how.” They execute your vision. They are accountable for doing. But the strategy stays yours. The stake stays yours. They are along on a ride you designed.

Both are legitimate. There is nothing wrong with wanting participants. Some of the best companies in the world run on brilliant participants executing one person’s vision.

The problem is not wanting participants.

The problem is wanting participants while telling yourself, and them, that you want collaborators.

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That was me. For years.

I built a company to roughly $3.5 million in revenue. Eight people on my leadership team. Eighty employees. I would have described the culture as collaborative to anyone who asked.

What was actually true is tougher to swallow; we collaborated right up to the line where someone disagreed with me.

I invited people to help set the strategy, as long as the strategy they helped set was the one I already had. I wanted their input the way you want applause. I called it co-creation. It was acquiescence wearing nicer clothes.

I never noticed. From the inside, it feels identical. You ask for ideas. People give them. You pick the ones that match yours. Everyone nods. You walk away certain you ran a collaborative process.

You didn’t. You ran an approval process and called it collaboration.

Let me give you a real one.

Every year, we ran a leadership offsite. Two days. Whiteboards. I would open by telling the room I wanted their vision for where the company was going. I meant it as an invitation.

Then someone would put a direction on the board that wasn’t mine, and I’d feel it in my body. A tightening. A quiet no. I’d nod, thank them, and steer. By the afternoon, the plan on the board was mine again, and every person in that room had watched it happen.

They didn’t stop contributing because they were weak. They stopped because they’d learned the lesson I was actually teaching. There was one right answer in the room, and it had my name on it.

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I know what it cost me now, because I can finally hear what my people were saying.

If you had pulled one of my best employees aside back then, someone genuinely capable, and asked them how it felt to work for me, some of them would have told you the truth:

It’s my job. But it’s not my work.

Sit with that line. It’s the sound a capable person makes right before they check out.

It’s my job means I am responsible. I will deliver. I will hit the number.

It’s not my work means none of it is mine. I have no authorship in it. I am executing someone else’s story and getting a paycheck for it.

Responsibility without ownership.

That is the trade you force when you want participants but insist it’s collaboration.

You give people accountability for outcomes they had no hand in designing. And the good ones, the ones with something real to say, feel it immediately. The worst part is, they don’t fight you for long. They just quietly stop bringing the part of themselves that made them worth hiring.

Then they leave. Or worse, they stay, and you slowly fill the place with people who are content under those conditions. People who never wanted authorship in the first place.

That is not a hiring problem. That is a mirror.

It’s what capped my company. Then it’s what killed it.

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For a long time I thought the lesson was that I needed to become more collaborative. Force myself to share the wheel. Run better meetings. Solicit more input.

That is not the lesson.

You cannot fix this by performing more collaboration. More input-gathering on top of the same behavior only makes the dishonesty more elaborate.

The fix is the truth.

Get honest about which one you actually want.

If you want really good participants, say so. Out loud. “I want people who take my vision and execute it brilliantly. I’m not looking for co-authors on the strategy. That part is mine.”

There is nothing shameful in that. Said clearly, it’s a gift. It lets the person who needs authorship to feel alive raise their hand and say “then this isn’t the role for me,” and go find one that is. You swap cleanly. No resentment. No slow death.

And if you want collaborators, then the behavior has to change. Not the language. The behavior.

That means actually sharing strategy creation. Leading with where, and letting capable people own the how. Giving someone an open problem instead of a finished answer to carry out. People who want authorship don’t want to be told how it’s going to go and asked to run it. That isn’t ownership. That’s being a well-paid executor. They want the vision and the room to figure out the how themselves.

You can’t invite someone into authorship and keep the pen.

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I don’t think I’m unusual in this. I think it’s the most common blind spot there is for people who build things.

We can see it. We can see it so clearly that anyone else’s version looks like a watering-down of the real thing. So we pull everything back toward ourselves and call the gravity “high standards” or “clarity of vision.”

And we mean it. We are not villains. We are just certain.

If you are reading this, certain it isn’t you; I understand. A week ago, I was just as certain.

Your certainty is the thing that either slows your company down or kills it.

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Ok, now it’s your turn.

Look at your own behavior this week. Not your intentions. Not the story you tell in the all-hands. The behavior.

When someone offered an idea that wasn’t yours, what did you actually do with it?

When you say you want ownership from your team, do you mean authorship? Or do you mean “do what I say, and own the outcome”?

Who around you is quietly living inside it’s my job, but it’s not my work right now? And how long do you think they’ll stay?

And the one worth carrying all week:

Am I inviting authorship? Or just agreement?

I didn’t have the distinction for most of my career. Having it now doesn’t restore the company I lost. But it has changed every room I’ve walked into since.

I’d love to hear what you see when you look honestly.

Loving you,

Townsend