Collaboration

“Good collaboration amplifies strength, but poor collaboration is worse than no collaboration at all” says Morton Hansen. Great collaboration makes for unexpected good results and eventually a great company … but knowing we should collaborate does not help us at all to somehow, magically, implement the practice.

Yes, if our staff knew how to collaborate well, our workplace would just operate so much better. Yet the sad fact for many of us is we’ve come to understand that bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration at all. Disappointment is one operative word that comes up repeatedly as our good ideas vaporize. When ill prepared for collaboration on any given project, squabbles and dogfights frequently emerge, thereby supercharging surrounding stuff with disinterest or even cynicism. Further, if collaboration is required between departments or divisions, egotism and turf wars can easily take over. Bad collaboration can be from:

  1. Misguidance
  2. A lack of a unified force behind the corporate vision, or
  3. A not right spirit of competition ruling instead of cooperation.

We all know collaboration doesn’t come easy, anywhere, anytime. Do we understand why?

The Basic Principle

The most critical lesson about collaboration is that it occurs in a corporate culture that is by design operated in a spirit of cooperation – - an environment where people want to work together, take pride in what they do together, and celebrate our successes in big and small ways at each progressive inch of progress towards the project’s goal.

The most basic principle about collaboration is that it occurs in a corporate culture that is by design operated in a spirit of cooperation – - an environment where people want to work together, take pride in what they do together and celebrate in big and small ways at each progressive inch of their successes.

Sony and Apple

To understand why collaboration does or does not work we could look at corporate culture. Some workplaces encourage cooperation but perhaps many more promote an awful spirit of competition. A classic example of this was the two cultures at Sony and Apple, when the iPod was being developed. At Apple there was a clear goal in mind with each division devotedly focused on that single goal. Information sharing was high and there was clarity of purpose as each group went about their business. At Apple collaboration pre-existed their products and in fact flourished as they went about their work.

By contrast each of Sony’s divisions had its own ideas about what to do on its product - - Connect It - - it was as if they were contraindicated (to borrow a medical term) to each other; they were so conflicted in how to develop the product they seemed to be working against each other. Sony’s mess turned into a market disaster whereas the iPod became one of the success stories of the decade. The iPod’s progression transformed Apple from an average company to an amazing story. The fruit of their collaboration became a world-changing product that has become an ordinary part of everyday life for so many users around the globe. Sony’s people worked against each other, in fact Sony had long thrived on a hypercompetitive culture where everyone was encouraged to outdo each other, not work together. By contrast, Apple’s people energized each other and have been producing amazing products ever since the iPod success (and foundationally even much earlier than that).

If only we could cooperate together better at work, it just might make it a better place to have fun and be more productive.

Bad Collaboration

Bad collaboration is characterized by high friction and a poor focus on end results. It comes from collaborating in hostile territory where people take pride in competing against each other. Competition and independence is the opposite of cooperation.. Yet collaboration can go bad when it turns into a collaboration, from too much cooperation, too many meetings, overdoing the togetherness thing in an almost codependent type of relating.

When to collaborate also needs to be carefully considered. The cost of any collaboration or joint effort is always high in terms of both time and money (1) requiring high levels of discipline to resolve conflicts that inevitably arise and (2) to keep everybody on point, organized, and coordinated as well as (3) appropriately communicating in multiple methods at every level of the project. We need to know when to collaborate and when to operate independently.

The collaborative project also needs to be worthy of the effort. Is the potential return going to give him enough value for all the work required? Collaboration is fun and produces huge synergy but it must not be only for its own sake. It must produce multiple benefits and significantly advance the core values and competencies of our organization. Both innovation and collaboration goes off track and often turns into a huge waste whenever it moves away from our collective competencies.

Another trap in collaboration can come from either misdiagnosing the problem or implementing the wrong solution to the problem. Often our assumptions are wrong, or we are blinded in a cultural self-deception, or we too hastily and lazily don’t carefully think through every one of the key factors in our marketplace. The traps we have to deal with are anything but obvious and the subtleties involved need to be detected. Each organization can build a disciplined framework that will help it to clearly see the difference between good and bad collaboration.

Collaboration Defined

Collaboration can be defined as a cross functional meeting of the minds towards a common purpose and goal, and most importantly, towards a specific end result. By cross functional we mean people of different professions or disciplines, different departments or units or functions, different levels in the hierarchy of the organization, and different backgrounds in terms of neighborhood culture, ethnicity/race and gender; it means putting people together that have very different perspectives, ideas and desires.

One subset of collaboration is Great Collaboration, or as Warren Bennis calls it, Great Groups. Recruiting the right genius for the job is the first step in building great collaboration. Great groups are put together by leaders who are unafraid of hiring people better than themselves. In such recruiting they look for two things in particular: (1) industry excellence and (2) the ability to work with others.

A connoisseur of talent looks both for intellectual gifts and the ability to work collaboratively that it is people who “play well in the sandbox with others”. Such recruits may not be of high stature but they consider themselves to be some kind of “an enviable elite” however overworked and underpaid these greatly gifted people might happen to be. There are definitely the best person for the job at hand. Further they are usually young in their 20s or early 30s. Their enthusiasm, optimism and ignorance (or lack of experience) means they do what everyone thought couldn’t be done. Such unseasoned recruits “do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible”.

Virtually every great group also has a strong visionary head along with a champion or two who can clear the obstacles of stifling bureaucracy and corporate politics. The “dream” is the engine that drives the group. The visionary details the task and its meaning; the champions keeps the recruits free to do their best most imaginative work. The focus is not on money or other tangible rewards but rather “the project is all” that matters. They fall in love with it. The thrilling process of discovery to bring new insights is everything. For the participants that process is its own ultimate reward. They live for the excitement of pushing back the boundaries, of doing something superbly well that no one has ever done before. Such genius is rare and the chance to exercise it in a dance with others is rarer still.

These collaborating knowledge workers cannot be managed but can only be facilitated, guided and inspired. The leader finds greatness in the group and in turn helps members find it in themselves. Together they are able to achieve something that no one could achieve alone. “None of us is as smart as all of us.” These great groups reshape our world in very different and enduring ways.

Disciplined Collaboration

  1. Disciplined Collaboration stands on two fundamentals:
  2. Properly assessing when to collaborate and when not to,
  3. Instilling in our staff both the willingness and the ability to collaborate on the high-value projects we choose as worthy. There are three steps involved:
    1. Evaluating opportunities for collaboration
    2. Identifying the relevant barriers
    3.Tearing down those barriers.

In the first step we evaluate the worthiness of our opportunities. How great will our gain be as we choose one project or another? Collaborating for the sake of collaboration is a rabbit chase defocusing and frustrating everybody. We need to pick areas that will solve our customers’ (external and internal) deepest frustrations. Value needs to be created both qualitatively (improve functionality or usability) and quantitatively (increase cash flow).

Secondly we need to spot barriers to our collaboration. People don’t collaborate well for a number of reasons; there may be a lack of motivation or willingness and a large number of people simply lack the innate ability to collaborate easily. Four of the most common barriers are:

  1. an unwillingness to reach out to other people, often from a cultural not-invented-here syndrome;
  2. staff are unwilling to provide help – they hoard their resources;
  3. workers are not able to find what they are looking for, they don’t know how to search;
  4. people are not able to work with others they don’t know well either because of social skills or attitudes. Rather than jumping too quickly into an assumption about what is interfering with collaboration, the barriers simply need to be identified and listed.

Then in the third step we tailor our solutions to turn down those barriers. Different barriers require different solutions. Often the solution is found in lifting workers into a state of unity by articulating the dream or vision, setting out common goals and preaching the strong value of cross organizational teamwork. That means moving our staff from their narrow interests towards our common mission. In most cases the high achievers have to be moved towards shared achievement, while the social butterflies have to be moved towards achieving measurable results. If employees cannot or will not learn to both make cross organizational contributions as well as focus on their own individual performance, then they probably need to be replaced. There are some who are naturally both collaborators and individual achievers but most require at least some skill acquisition. They might need to learn how to build nimble interpersonal networks across the company while others need to learn what the thrill of achievement is all about.

Good collaboration emphasizes both performance from decentralized work and performance from collaborative work. Everyone can grow to be more collaborative leaders from the example they set and the attitudes they transmit. Just a little guidance is needed in most cases. We need to cultivate collaboration around us by transforming ourselves, our organization and the people working with us. Collaboration or mutuality leads to everybody’s better performance. Our job is to unite together towards our common mission. We need to think about what Peter Drucker said:

“Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant. …. Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals.”

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