You have a marketing strategy, a sales strategy, a corporate strategy; but do you have a collaboration strategy?
Just imagine: a strategy for how your organisation works together, as well as with customers and partners. A strategy for the real backbone of your organisation.
“Not another strategy!”, you sigh. But hear me out, a collaboration strategy is actually the missing connector – the facilitator – for all your other strategies to be successful.
Without it, you are literally strategically building silos into your thinking and working.
How many times have you heard: our sales and marketing teams (for example) are not aligned, or both “own” the customer?
Collaboration is a systems issue- structure, processes, policies, behaviour, mindsets are all interlinked. This means you need a strategy to help manage the system, not the symptoms that occur due to the separation of each part.
What is a collaboration strategy?
In essence, this is a strategy outlining the core elements of how your organisation works together. It is a core mechanism, driving sustainability and growth, that is complementary to your organisational strategy.
It should be a living document, co-created with your people.
The key components
A collaboration strategy should answer the following questions:
- Why is working better together important to us?
- What’s the vision of being better together?
- What are the mindsets and behaviours that enable us to be better together?
Then, you need to explore how to operationalise the above, by asking:
- Where do we want drive collaboration?
- What structure and processes enable us to work better together?
- What capabilities do we need to build to drive capabilities?
- How do we empower our people and collaborators?
- What are the signals for when we’re not collaborating well and need to adjust our approach?
Where does it sit?
A collaboration strategy should nest under your organisational strategy. It should also facilitate the success of your other key drivers, including people, sales and marketing strategies.
The benefit
Focused strategies across the business are important. But you also need to factor in how you engage across departments. How customer experience is enhanced by connecting all the internal pieces. And how your partners fit in as well.
The missing element of collaboration helps you zoom out to see how all the pieces fit together
By co-creating with your people, customers and partners, you create buy-in, underpinned by real data from you people and collaborators.
Because how you work internally affects your external relationships. Getting this right builds more integrated operations, productivity and engagement. Better experiences internally and externally will also increase revenue.
Your collaboration strategy will make all the pieces of the puzzle fit.
