By
Elisabeth Watson
I don’t have it. Being a typical Type A consultant, who is supposed to know something about any problem tossed in my direction, I don’t collaborate. I hunker down and noodle things through. I don’t come up for air until I have something that is ready for prime time – or at least the day time soaps. You know the old “don’t complain unless you have a solution?” That sounds good, but it does have a basic flaw. It ignores the impact, creativity and ideas that the other six billion people on the planet already have or will come up with. Or, more practically, the other 20 people on the project.
Twyla Tharp, the famous choreographer, has just written a book,
The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together, about the 40-something years that she has spent collaborating with the best dancers, musicians, designers, and producers of our time. (At the risk of dating myself, including David Byrne. How cool is that?) The book is on its way to me, but the title alone has made me think. We all talk about collaboration at work. We get reviewed based on our ability to be a “team player” (although that seems to refer to ‘taking one for the team’ more often than not). The technology tools that enable collaboration are some of the few survivors of the economic downturn.
Great. We’re sharing our information, reusing our knowledge, leveraging our expertise, and working like a team, thanks to all this good stuff. Except we’re not, or not as well as we’d like to. We all have those colleagues who never update the CRM, and those who dump enormous useless stuff on it. We can’t ever find what we need on the portal. Worse, someone calls us and asks us to find it for them. We stay up all night on a proposal or a problem only to find out that someone over in another division sold it/solved it last year. We put the customer through unnecessary cycles because we are unprepared, uninformed, and detached from the rest of the organization.
Maybe we have a little way to go on collaboration. Maybe part of the problem is that we need Twyla’s collaborative habit. When I told
Jim Horan, President and CEO of The One Page Business Plan Company and author of
The One Page Business Plan, about the book, he said,
“If all those artists and cultural types can set aside their star status and collaborate, you’d think that we can do it in business.”
“I don’t know, Jim. Our egos are bigger than theirs.” Perhaps ego is commensurate with exec/movie star compensation. But that is an issue for another day.
What does collaboration mean? It probably doesn’t refer to the discussion you’re having with the guy down the hall who works in your division and went to your university. More likely, collaboration challenges occur:
- Across geography and time zones
- Across business functions
- Across cultures, both societal and business
- Across hierarchies
- Across technologies
Worse, misplaced competition between functions or sales reps—or anyone—can remove any motivation to meet these challenges. It seems to me that if we want to gain the benefits of collaboration, even those as simple as avoiding duplicate effort (or as complex as strategic account management), we need to look first at these organization barriers to collaboration.
We also need to really understand what we expect to gain, how we communicate those expectations, and how we’ll know if we’ve met them. We have to be able to answer the essential questions, like:
- What specific benefits does your organization expect to get from collaboration?
- Does everyone know about those expectations?
- Is there an incentive for collaboration?
- What projects, content or knowledge development do you expect people to collaborate on?
- Do your people know how to collaborate? Do they know how to disseminate and find powerful information?
- Are your collaboration tools/technologies tuned to enable the benefits you expect?
Once we’ve looked at those questions, we can review each of the obstacles and look at some solutions. Over the next weeks and months, my colleague, Pete Krammer, and I will be doing that here and inviting you to help us take this problem apart and solve it.
In the meantime, think about this: Do you have the collaborative habit? If you do, how does it change your behavior? How does it impact your organization? And, most importantly, how does it impact your customer?