Most global firms say they collaborate. APCO Worldwide built a structure that requires it.
Here is what I have observed across decades of working with leadership teams and studying what separates organizations that sustain performance from organizations that merely talk about it. Collaboration is the most commonly claimed cultural value and the least commonly built organizational habit. Most firms that say they are collaborative have individual offices, individual P&Ls, and individual incentive structures that reward people for protecting their piece of the business. Then they are surprised when people protect their piece of the business.
APCO Worldwide runs differently. Thirty-plus markets. Eleven hundred and ninety employees. Independent for more than forty years. And one shared global P&L.
That last item is not a financial detail. It is a culture decision.
The Observation
Most professional services firms, especially those operating across multiple geographies, are held together by a shared brand and divided by everything else. Individual offices have their own revenue targets, their own cost structures, their own leadership priorities. When a client in London needs expertise sitting in Singapore, the structural question is not “how do we serve this client” but “how do we account for this internally.” That accounting conversation happens in every firm. The firms where it dominates are the firms where collaboration is aspirational rather than operational.
Here is what that produces. The junior consultant in one office who happens to know exactly what a colleague in another office needs never makes the call, because nothing in the incentive structure rewards the introduction. The client relationship that should deepen globally stays shallow regionally, because deepening it requires giving something up. The institutional knowledge that would make the whole firm smarter stays local, because sharing it does not help the office that holds it.
I have seen this pattern in organizations of every size. The structural incentive is almost always stronger than the cultural aspiration. You do not fix it by writing better values. You fix it by changing what the structure rewards.
APCO changed the structure.
The Mechanism
A single global P&L means every office participates in every other office’s outcome. When the Washington team wins, Nairobi shares in that result. When the Brussels team builds a client relationship, Singapore has a reason to support it. The financial structure removes the boundary that, in most firms, makes collaboration a choice rather than a default.
That is not accidental. It is intentional design.
The SPARK framework, developed by Best Practice Institute through the Love of Workplace Index research, identifies Systemic Collaboration as the dimension that distinguishes organizations where collaboration is embedded in the operating model from organizations where it exists in the values statement. Systemic Collaboration measures whether the structures, incentives, and information flows of the organization actually reward cross-functional and cross-geographic work. A single global P&L is one of the most direct structural implementations of that dimension that I have encountered.
Most boards would call that a financial architecture decision. It is actually a culture intervention. The single P&L does not just change how revenue is accounted for. It changes the daily calculus that every employee in every office runs when they are deciding whether to invest time in a colleague halfway around the world. The answer to that question, under a shared structure, is almost always yes.
Why That Changes Behavior
You cannot protect your silo when there is no silo to protect.
This is the part that most discussions of collaboration culture miss. The problem with siloed behavior in most organizations is not that people are selfish or ungenerous. The problem is that the structure makes silo protection rational. When your performance review is tied to your office’s numbers and your office’s numbers only, protecting your office’s resources is the sensible thing to do. The culture problem is actually a structure problem wearing a culture costume.
Remove the financial boundary and the behavioral calculus shifts. The colleague who would have competed for the client budget is now the colleague whose win you share in. The office that would have duplicated work rather than ask for help is now the office whose efficiency makes your numbers better. The incentive structure and the cultural value point in the same direction, which is what makes both of them real.
Here is what I have observed when organizations align structure with stated values. The values stop requiring enforcement. They start operating as descriptions of what people already do. That is the difference between a culture that is managed and a culture that is built.
APCO has been independent for more than forty years. Independence is not just a governance status. It means every structural decision the firm has made, including the decision to operate on a single global P&L, was made by leadership that intended to stay. That long view shows up in what they built.
The Outcome
APCO Worldwide earned Most Loved Workplace® certification across 1,200+ employees in more than thirty global markets. That result does not happen without structural investment. It is the result of an operating model that makes collaboration the path of least resistance rather than the path of most virtue.
The firm is majority women-owned. It has been independent for over forty years. Neither of those facts is incidental to the collaboration story. Majority ownership by women in a professional services firm that operates globally correlates with demonstrated investment in the relational infrastructure that makes distributed teams function. Forty years of independence means the collaboration architecture was chosen deliberately and maintained over time. That is not a coincidence.
Based on Best Practice Institute research, validated across 1,800+ companies, organizations that build loved cultures see 48% lower turnover and consistently out-innovate their competitors. In a global professional services firm where client relationships are built on continuity and expertise is the product, 48% lower turnover is not a human resources metric. It is a revenue protection figure. See more from Best Practice Institute.
What This Tells Leaders
Collaboration culture is a structure problem, not a communications problem. The firms that are genuinely collaborative are the firms that have made collaboration structurally rational. Not just encouraged it. Not just rewarded it in the values statement. Built a financial or operational architecture that makes working across boundaries the sensible choice.
Most organizations have not done that. They have written the value, trained for the behavior, and then wondered why the behavior is inconsistent. The behavior is inconsistent because the structure is inconsistent with the value.
The question worth asking in your own organization: is there a single mechanism, one structural feature that makes collaboration the default rather than the exception? Not a program. Not a initiative. A mechanism. If you are not sure, start here. The assessment will show you where the structure and the stated values are pointing in the same direction, and where they are not.
Congratulations to APCO Worldwide on earning Most Loved Workplace® certification, and to every employee across thirty-plus markets who showed up honestly in the process. This is what it looks like when collaboration stops being a value and becomes an operating system.
If your organization is doing this work and has not yet made it visible, the next step is to get certified. More this week.
Frequently Asked Questions
In most professional services firms, collaboration is aspirational: leadership talks about it, values documents describe it, and the operating model quietly works against it. A genuine collaboration culture in a global firm looks different at the structural level. Offices share in each other's outcomes rather than competing for the same client budget. Cross-geographic introductions are the norm rather than the exception, because the person making the introduction has a financial reason to do so. Institutional knowledge moves across borders because the incentive to keep it local has been removed. In practice, the signal is this: when a junior employee in one office spontaneously connects a colleague three time zones away to a client opportunity, and that behavior is unremarkable because it is simply what people do, you are looking at a collaboration culture. See how Most Loved Workplace® certification measures this dimension.
A shared P&L removes the financial boundary that makes silo behavior rational. In a firm where each office carries its own P&L, protecting your office's resources is the sensible thing to do when organizational interests and personal performance metrics are misaligned. A shared global P&L changes that calculus: when every office participates in every other office's outcome, a colleague's win is your win. The structural incentive and the cultural value point in the same direction, which is what makes the behavior consistent rather than dependent on individual generosity. This is not primarily a financial architecture decision. It is a culture design decision that happens to have a financial expression.
A company that values collaboration has written it into its culture deck, included it in its leadership competencies, and trained managers to exhibit it. The behavior is encouraged, rewarded in performance reviews, and modeled by senior leadership. A company that has built collaboration into its operating structure has made collaborative behavior the path of least resistance regardless of individual motivation or leadership emphasis. The distinction matters because the first version depends on continuous management attention to sustain, and the second version sustains itself because the structure makes it rational. Most organizations operate in the first category. The ones that reach the second category, and stay there across leadership transitions and market cycles, have done something harder: they have changed what the organization rewards at the structural level, not just the cultural one. See how the Love of Workplace Index measures this.
