Many teams don’t fail at collaboration. They fail at the handoff.
The meeting goes well. Everyone is aligned. Responsibilities are clear, or at least they seem clear. Then Tuesday arrives, and two priorities collide, and no one is quite sure whose job it is to resolve it.
That’s not a communication problem. That’s a Solidarity problem.
Collaboration is the agreement you make in the room. Solidarity is what shows up when the room isn’t there anymore and the work gets complicated.
Solidarity isn’t about how well you work together when it’s clear. It’s what happens when it’s not.
What most people think Solidarity means
Many teams think they’re strong partners when they communicate well. Good meetings. Shared updates. They loop each other in. They even like each other.
That’s collaboration. It’s necessary. It’s not enough.
Solidarity is how you behave in the moments between the agreements. When the scope gets blurry. When priorities conflict. When someone has to do the hard thing that wasn’t explicitly assigned.
The gap between those two is where most execution breaks down. Not from lack of desire to work together. The team simply hasn’t defined what working together actually requires when conditions get hard.
What Solidarity actually looks like in leadership
Solidarity shows up in three places.
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Running toward the ambiguous middle instead of waiting for clarification
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Making commitments visible and specific, not assumed
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Owning the seam between two roles instead of stopping at your edge
When Solidarity is real, scope gaps get closed by the people closest to them, not escalated to leadership. The team doesn’t wait to be told who owns the hard thing. They run toward it.
A pattern I have lived through
In a sports academy I purchased, the turnaround required two leaders to work in territory that crossed between their roles. One owned operations. One owned the coaching staff and program quality.
The work that mattered most was exactly in the middle, the customer experience that lived between what operations set up and what the program delivered.
Both were strong at their jobs. Neither thought the middle was theirs.
What I kept seeing was that the most important work, the work that actually determined whether we’d turn the business around, kept stalling at the seam. Neither leader was wrong. They were both stopping at the edge of their defined role.
What changed wasn’t authority. It was the expectation. I made it explicit. Solidarity means you own the seam, not just your side of it. You don’t stop at your edge when the outcome is at stake. You run to the middle and close it.
You see this in relay racing. The most technically precise handoff doesn’t happen when both runners are fast. It happens when both runners practice the exchange, the moment where the baton moves from one hand to the other. Many teams practice their legs. Few practice the handoff. That’s where races are lost.
The discipline leaders must practice
Solidarity requires leaders to own the seam, not just their side of it. Three disciplines make that real.
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Name the seams. Identify where your responsibility ends and a colleague’s begins. That boundary is where Solidarity either shows up or fails. Make it visible and explicit before a problem lands in it.
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Run toward the ambiguous middle. When something falls in a gap, the default is to wait. For clarification, for someone to assign it, for a meeting to resolve it. Solidarity means moving toward it before you’re asked to.
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Make commitments specific and visible. “We’ll stay in sync” is not a partnership commitment. “I’ll flag you before Friday if this changes” is. The more specific the commitment, the more accountable the partnership.
Actionable application
Pick a current initiative and ask three questions.
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Where are the seams in this work? Where do handoffs between roles happen, and who owns them?
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In the last 30 days, did you stop at the edge of your role or run toward the middle when something was unclear?
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What’s one commitment you made to a partner that was assumed rather than stated?
Then pick one seam and name it explicitly with the relevant partner. Define what “owning the middle” looks like for both of you. That conversation, done before the problem arrives, is what separates partnership on paper from Solidarity.
What usually gets in the way
Leaders stay inside their lane. That’s where they’re measured. Their goals are scoped to their function. Their reviews are tied to their deliverables.
Running toward the middle carries risk. You might do work that isn’t recognized. You might create conflict with a peer who sees the territory differently. You might overstep.
So many people stop at the edge of the clear thing and wait.
The cost is that the seam, the place where the most important work often lives, goes unowned. And unowned work doesn’t sit still. It erodes.
Closing challenge
Think about the most important initiative you’re part of right now. Where are the handoffs?
If you drew a map of the work, where would the baton exchange happen? Is anyone actually practicing that exchange?
Solidarity isn’t a relationship. It’s a discipline. It lives in the moments between agreements, not inside them.
Find the seam. Own it.
One Word Leadership is our way of teaching leaders the disciplines that make growth less chaotic and more sustainable.
Pat Alacqua is a business growth strategist and Amazon best-selling author of Obstacles to Opportunity. He helps leadership teams think, plan, and execute differently so they can fix or prevent what growth breaks.