Think back to a meeting when you had a handful of people gathered around a whiteboard and one person is drawing and talking, explaining what she means. In mid-flight, a colleague grabs another pen and adds to the drawing, suggesting another perspective. A new train of thought emerges. Everyone pitches in and the conversation is electric with ideas, and with each word progress is made toward their common objective. This is a typical example of “collaboration” at work.
You might be one of those executives who might intercept and say, “Excuse me, I never heard this term used in our company. We have coordination and cooperation extensively used and practised. Is there anything more in collaboration?”
Yes, there are differences.In cooperative endeavours the focus is primarily on sharing information and expertise. In this type of relationship participants are loosely connected so their contribution to the relationship is low. Each participant remains completely independent from the others. There are only minor changes in how each participant does business, but they have the advantage of learning from others and being able to modify the way they work.
In coordinated approaches, the parties realise the need to work together to meet a set goal. This process requires participants to tightly align resources and effort. Although involved in set joint policies and programs, organisations retain control over their own operations.
Coordination requires a higher level of contribution and commitment as well as stronger relationships between participants.
Collaboration is characterised by strong and highly interdependent relationships. Participants realise that to achieve outcomes they have to agree to radically alter the way that they think, behave and operate. Collaboration is not about making adjustments at the periphery; it is about systems change and as such participants are involved in a high-risk, high-stakes and volatile environment that can produce results significantly different from those originally intended.
In Business world, today we face an entirely new environment for innovation and getting things done. The days of the lone genius quietly toiling away in pursuit of that spectacular success in his organisation are all but over. We are now in the days of asking and listening to our customers and working with them in our innovation cycles.
And, innovation demands collaboration. So does sales, production, finance and administration. In the past we could focus on a single task in an assembly-line fashion, handing our completed activity to the next person who would in turn do the same, until the job was finished. Now the jobs change fast, requiring learning new skills rather than merely repeating the old. We have to seek out people who have other pieces of the puzzle and work with them to tackle increasingly complex issues at a much faster pace. Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a hit-or-missfashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless. Our challenge doesn’t stop there.
An organisation’s ability to support collaboration is highly dependent on its own organisational culture. Some cultures foster collaboration while others stop it dead in its tracks.
Conditions
How do we get more collaboration in the workplace? To do so, we need to understand the necessary conditions that will result in collaboration occurring. There are two conditions that are necessary for collaboration.
* First, collaboration can only be expected when efforts are focused on clear, high- stakes issues. We cannot expect people to collaborate on trivial matters. If ream members are told to collaborate on simple issues, they will quickly become frustrated. This often happens when a task force or committee is organized to address a simple matter.
* The second condition is the existence of good interpersonal relations between the people collaborating. For collaboration to occur, team must feel comfortable with each other. They must be able to work closely together and trust each other. This level of trust only comes with good interpersonal relations among the parties.
Trust must be established first, then collaboration is possible. If there is a poor relationship and no trust, people will quickly revert to a competitive, self- serving approach to any problem.
Tips
It’s tough to keep everyone motivated and collaborating on your team every hour of every day. Here are 7 essential rules to help you along the way.
- Communicate effectively
If you’re not communicating with your team, then you’re not collaborating.
Open and continuous discussion between team members can open the door to new ideas and concepts that would otherwise be left unturned. Communication is not limited to long emails or meetings— instant messaging and group messaging services are a great way to keep communication constant and passive.
- Encourage ideas
Are your team members or clients encouraged to share their ideas? Sometimes your team or customers are not sure if their ideas will be deemed productive — let anyone working with you know their ideas are always welcome and collaboration is one of your principles in your company. A good exercise is to encourage ideas at different stages in a project, to make sure it’s ways headed in the right direction.
- Value opinions
If you have opened up the door to ideas from your team, clients, or customers, be sure to value that opinion. Not all ideas are going to be gems, but by showing that you value other people’s opinions, you’re allowing a constant stream of collaboration within your organization that will be worth it in the end. A simple ‘thank you for your ideas’ is sufficient and allows flexibility when it comes down to making an important decision.
- Group decisions
It’s hard making a big decision on your own. It’s normal to rely on someone else to help you make a decision, but it is even easier to make those decisions in a group. Even though it’s not possible to make every decision in your company as a group, by allowing some minor decisions or details to be made as a group, you’re showing your team members that you value their opinion and you may increase collaboration as a result.
- Magic number
The magic number has enough people to develop great ideas, but not so many that it’s hard to keep up with all those ideas. If you find the magic number, you’ll introduce a whole new level of collaboration within your team.
- Young and experienced
Try and open up collaboration to as many different age groups as you can. Your team members in their 20s aren’t smarter than your team members in their 30s, and vice versa. Every age group has a different level of knowledge and experience, so don’t pick one group over the other when communicating or collaborating.
- The bossfactors
If you’re a senior manager or ‘the boss’ you may consider sitting out a few conversations and watch from the sidelines. By keeping your voice out of the start of a conversation, your team members may feel free to continue exploring their ideas without feeling the wrath of your power. If you get involved in the conversation too early, you may stump the growth of great ideas; by letting the seeds grow on their own, you’re able to jump in at harvest time and reap the rewards (or destroy the crop if need be).
Digital trajectory
Companies are at different points on the digital trajectory; some are beginning their journey, some are implementing changes in a phased manner, while a few early adopters are already seeing quantifiable benefits. But one thing’s for sure: digitalization is dramatically altering the way businesses are transacted globally. Consider the example that really grabbed my attention recently: erstwhile competitors are now collaborating for industrial growth – and this is certainly a game changer.
Previously, one used to hear about suppliers and end users collaborating to disseminate information and understand new technologies. Supply chain linkages were also linear; but this does not work in today’s complex and integrated supply chains. In the digital world, where there are different levels of connectivity, suppliers are forging bonds with each other to simultaneously expand their combined global footprint and help the customer grow.
New workplace
We are witnessing the end of the dominance of the PC and a shift to a post PC world. The workplace has assumed an astoundingly mobile nature - one that has given employees the flexibility of working from home or any remote location.
This next generation workspace empowers employees across the world to collaborate, communicate and create. Sitting at the heart of this new workspace are four critical elements- mobile, social, visual and virtual. These four together marks a sea change in the way in which businesses operate. Mobile: As communication becomes more “people centric”, the explosion of mobile devices has made it possible to communicate from any device irrespective of technology or operating system.
Social: Recent times have witnessed a proliferation of social media applications in organizations of every size, across every part of the world.
Visual: Video is becoming pervasive and is no longer just used in conferencing and training, but in areas such as remote healthcare and banking, live problem resolution in manufacturing, global interviewing in HR and many others. Virtual:Organizations are taking applications to the cloud and making it available to users wherever they are. Virtualization is expected to become the top networking investment over the next five years as organizations continue to focus on reducing IT costs.
(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired Company Director and freelance writer. He can be contacted on [email protected])
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