Collaboration works… until it doesn’t. In a work setting, when collaboration breaks down, staff are often encouraged to join training courses on how to collaborate better. The underlying assumption is that people who don’t collaborate well don’t know how to.
But what if the problem lied somewhere else? Our insight is that when collaboration breaks down, it’s often because people have different views on why they should collaborate. And why they shouldn’t.
For example, members of global HQ teams often take global collaboration for granted. The benefits are obvious to them and so they assume that local teams see things the same way. Wrong assumption. Often, different teams have very different reasons to collaborate, or not.
In global / local collaboration issues, like in many others, the first question to ask is why? Why should people collaborate, not how they should collaborate. The how comes later and is pretty easy to find if the why’s been clarified.
But like with many other worthy endeavours, powerful forces work against collaboration. For example, talented leaders can find collaboration unnatural according to the Harvard Business Review. “After all, rugged individualism set them apart and propelled their careers. (And for many, that same focus on distinguishing themselves later becomes their demise)”.
We also often hear that collaboration will “slow us down”, “water down our project” or “give someone else the lead”. What’s the common denominator here? Fear. Fear – a powerful emotion – of losing out when collaborating.
So, why should we collaborate? Probably the main reason is that “Most of an enterprise’s competitive value is created and delivered at organizational “seams,” where functions come together to form capabilities”. Think marketing and R&D coming together to develop new products, or local and global teams to market a service. Whole functions, not just their leaders, need to collaborate across silos to succeed.
While this argument makes complete sense, if people don’t feel it, it’s not real and the need to collaborate will quickly evaporate. The key to successful collaboration is to find your why, your essential reason to collaborate, and to dramatize it.
You might try this: collaboration is often classed as being something ‘soft’ and, therefore, it’s all-the-more important to turn into something ‘hard’. How? By attaching a financial value, a cost, to non-collaboration. Just look back a year and add up the costs of duplicated initiatives, delayed projects, sick days of demotivated staff, hiring costs to replace them, and of course, leadership time spent unravelling tricky situations. It will certainly be a big number, framing collaboration is a new way, from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must do’.
To conclude, a few key takeaways:
Don’t assume that collaboration happens naturally. It rarely does. Plan time to create and maintain it.
A lack of collaboration is a structural problem. Therefore, it’s management responsibility to initiate a solution. Too many organisations still leave it at the individual’s level.
Start by identifying your ‘why your team should collaborate’. Only switch to the how once the why is clear.
We often think of collaboration in a binary ‘on’ or ‘off’ manner. But there are many options in between. So, don’t view minimalistic collaboration as a failure but as a start to something bigger.