Take a moment to reflect on the last time you collaborated with your team, a partner, your customer. What stands out? The benefits or the challenges?
I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s the challenges that come to mind.
The miscommunication.
The resources that you thought you had, but turned out to have been re-allocated.
The ‘debate’ that turned into animosity between colleagues.
The constant meetings to clarify what you thought had been agreed upon.
The painstaking engagement with another team, because their KPIs weren’t aligned with yours.
Collaboration is really hard! And sometimes, you may well think it’s easier to work solo or in departmental silo.
The fact is that for our whole working lives, especially in organisations, we’ve been told to collaborate. Just do it. And now, with the growth in virtual meetings, we’ve been told to collaborate less.
But within this rhetoric there are certain presumptions:
Collaboration should just ‘happen’.
Collaboration is about being in a virtual/physical room, holding meetings – and that’s enough.
Collaboration via communication platforms is getting in the way of actually doing the work.
But what if our collaboration presumptions were wrong? What if shifting perspective changed how we looked at value creation, engagement, innovation and productivity?
I have been working with companies for over a decade from Fortune 500, start-ups, not-for-profits to government, as well as completed my thesis on organisational collaboration – and here’s the truth that nobody speaks about.
- Collaboration is not a soft skill, it is a hard skill but it can be developed. It needs work but getting it right produces compounded benefits. Global research demonstrates collaboration –with/between teams, with partners or customers – drives innovation, value creation, productivity, engagement and profit. It also saves your business significant hidden costs.
- Collaboration isn’t just about behaviour, it’s also about the infrastructure that enables behaviours and mindsets to thrive (or not). How you design your organisation, team, processes, all impact how people collaborate.
- Collaboration is not a tech stack. Tech is an enabler but it isn’t collaboration. Just because you’re messaging on Teams doesn’t mean you are collaborating. This focus on tech is one of several reasons why fragmenting tech stacks are giving collaboration a bad name.
Let me ask you this: have you specifically designed how, when and why your teams use particular technologies together and norms around these? … I’m guessing not….
When you get collaboration right, the work gets done more efficiently and to a higher quality than if done in silos. The result? Improved employee experience, customer satisfaction, innovation and a difference to the bottom line.
But why is it so hard?
Great question. Because collaboration is a systems issue. Because we think we can put individuals together and expect them to produce great outcomes automatically – but cognitive biases, fear, ego can get in the way. Because teams are in fact a completely different entity, influenced by personal dynamics.
Why does this matter?
Shifting our view on collaboration from soft skill to a multi-faceted entity means that it needs to be deliberately designed. That’s right, you can design for better collaboration. Our organisations, and even our lives, depend on how we come together with people who think differently from us. The result is both hard and soft: improved profitability and market share – of course! But when we harness the insights of our people, our people grow through shared purpose. This sparks meaning and joy. And we all deserve to feel joy at work (it’s something we’ve forgotten).
Now is the time.
We’re better together but nobody taught us how.
