Effective Collaboration Is More than Deliverables
04 May 2010 Tweet Effective Collaboration =
Achieve Project Goals + Promote Future Collaboration
What is effective collaboration? Well, it depends! The short and sweet answer is that a collaboration effort is effective when it achieves its goals: high quality deliverables, on-time, every time during the project and within budget. Note that this description of effectiveness focuses on the destination only, and not the journey. This is a good enough answer, if the collaborative effort is a one-off, discrete occurrence. What if there were many more journeys to be had, in the enterprise, to reach many more destinations, for success of the business! Now the journey becomes as important, if not more, as the destination.
In our recent study, Assessing the State of Collaboration: Return to Essentials, 45% respondents said that collaboration is Essential Across the Board for business success TODAY and 77% believe that collaboration will be Essential Across the Board in the FUTURE (Figure below).
Figure. How would you rate the value of collaboration to the success of your business?
;)
When collaboration is a key to creating value for business success, it must become a core capability – something you intentionally and deliberately nurture, develop and practice. Thus effective collaboration must not only achieve its objectives, but also promote future collaboration. So how does one do that? Let us remind ourselves that collaboration is about people, not technology, before we propose our recommendations.
- Make the journey pleasant: We recognize that work is not entertainment; you get paid for the former but pay for the latter. Thus clichés such as “Have fun!” are not particularly helpful. It is not about having fun, but about an acceptable level of stress due to project expectations and demands on the individual. There is a huge difference between stress and distress. Stress can be rather productive, and you know about distress. Noting this, set expectations that the collaborative journey- the experience - is just as important as the collaboration outcomes, and follow through. Some basic tools like “temperature check” (Feeling good, bad or indifferent) or “traffic light” test (Red-intolerable, Orange- caution and Green-happy) can used throughout the effort to monitor the experience of collaborators. Identify issues and correct course, when necessary.
- Promote success stories of experiences and outcomes: Create ambassadors for creating a culture of collaboration. By this we do not mean just promoting the successful outcomes but also experiences (the journey) of collaborators. Demonstrate that the collaborator is as important as collaboration. Avoid over-enthusiasm; keep it real. Admit challenged encountered and share how collaborators overcame.
- Learn from past journeys: A part of the collaborative effort plan should include learning from experience, to make future journeys more pleasant. Particularly at the end of the project, learn from what worked and what could be done differently to make future efforts more pleasant.
- Highlight the value of collaboration to the business: Since collaboration is not a one-off occurrence in the enterprise, provide business and organization culture context for the project. Clearly link the impact of project goals and outcomes to real business impact and the importance of the pleasant journey. As we know, people feel good when they “make a difference.” They are more willing to collaborate, find ways to make collaboration more effective and work hard for a demonstrably worthy goal, particularly when their well-being in the journey is valued.
- Keep the individual in mind: Clearly link the impact of project goals and outcomes to real and positive impact on individual collaborators. This goes back to the old saying of WIIFM (What’s in it for me?). The design of collaborative efforts should include explicit focus on: learning, professional and personal growth, and recognition. This focus on the individual, combined with the importance of the journey, feeds into the culture of collaboration.
What would you recommend?
Lokesh Datta
See Related Posts:
- Collaboration: Building and Sustaining Trust
- The ALL ONE (TAO) of Collaboration
- The Four Ps of Effective Collaboration
- The 4Ps of Effective Collaboration - Redux
- Collaboration Is More than Team Building and Management
- What We Can Do to Improve Collaboration
- Get Teammates to Move "Towards" Rather than "Away"
Reader Comments (4)
I love this post! I completely agree with everything you wrote above. I definitely believe in making the individual successful and focusing on the people in the collaboration process before the technology behind it. Wonderful post Lokesh, just wonderful.
I posted this question on LinkedIn: What is your reaction to: “Effective collaboration is more than deliverables”? How can we achieve effective collaboration?
I received interesting responses that I would like to share.
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Shannah Whithaus, Lecturer at UC Davis
I set up collaborative groups all the time, since my students work in groups during each class I teach at UC Davis. To me, if you think only of the "deliverable," groups become impossible to manage productively.
Consider this, though: Group work (collaboration, if you will) does more than just produce a finished product. It builds trust among group members, allows for people to learn from each other (and from the mistakes they're sure to make), and provides opportunities to push one another to achieve so the group succeeds as a whole. In my classes, a group works together for the entire course (10 weeks), so I get to experience both the process and the product over and over. Here are some of the insights I've gained over the past five years working with collaborative groups:
- Focusing exclusively on the final product when putting together and managing a group means that everyone involved in the project loses. After all, if you want the best product, why not put all the best students into one group, and just let them go to it? (And here's a question for you... how do you know if a given student/employee will drag a group down? If process is considered important, might this "weak link" end up being the grain of rice that tips the scales in your favor?)
- Being product-driven leaves no room for active listening and learning, which must be at the heart of a thriving collaborative group. Paying attention to the process from the start results in an improved final product every time.
- Working in collaborative groups means letting members participate fully in every area of the project, whether they’re experts or not, and valuing their insights during each step toward the goal. Valuing input from every team member may mean you spend a bit more time on a given step in the process. You have to be willing to allow for that time if you want to maintain a positive group dynamic.
- Encouraging my students to stress the process and product equally means they end up producing a better "deliverable" 100% of the time
In conclusion, you’re unlikely to “achieve effective collaboration” if you focus on the product (on time! under budget!) alone. Think “grain of rice,” “active listening and learning,” and “valuing insights” if you want to develop successful, long-term collaborative groups.
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Marc Aniballi, Technology Literate Project and Team Leader
I agree; Collaboration has always shown impressive results over individualist or competitive approaches. Effectiveness is simply the goal of any pursuit.
Effective collaboration is delivered in many places. Using that as a template is often how it can be introduced into less effective environments.
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Jon Nakapalau, CHSO, CPO, Physical Security Consultant
To me this means that you do not just collaborate when you have to meet a "goal". Collaboration is a process that must be in place before there is a deliverable, so that you are aware of the group and what each member needs to do to meet that goal.
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Ken Jackson, at Data Realm Software Inc.
Collaboration isn't always more effective than individual work. A recent article published in the INFORMS journal Management Science entitled "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea," shows that collaboration might not be as effective as some individual work for the generation and selection of a few high quality ideas. In addition, they found that the number of ideas generated is higher when individuals work by themselves, and the average quality of ideas is no different between individual and team processes."
See: http://mansci.journal.informs.org/cgi/content/abstract/56/4/591
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Michael Van Luven, President and Managing Director at Amplio Group Inc
A lot of the projects I undertake are generated due to the lack of effective collaboration. From my experience, the critical issues that severely reduce effectiveness (often only achievable with cross-functional collaboration) are lack of mutual awareness, knowledge deficiencies and a lack of coordination of objectives and leadership/communication of said objectives.
It is always interesting (and somewhat frustrating) for me to see people in inter-related functions who may know one another but have minimal knowledge of what each other actually does. This often results in duplication of work (or in some cases working counter to one another) or assumption that a specific issue has been handled by the other person.
Compartmentalization - either due to organizational design impacted by deficient communication or due to a lack of overall organizational education and development programs is a serious impediment to collaboration and maximization of results/effectiveness.
From my perspective, collaboration (true and ongoing) is a major undertaking that requires breaking down barriers (sometimes through the stimulation of productive conflict), opening dialogue between adversarial functions and having a shared vision of roles, goals and benefits. The structural, psychological and communicative aspects of team building cannot be overlooked. It's hard work to get disparate groups to collaborate but when it finally happens (often after years of mutual disdain) it is especially rewarding to the organization and the stakeholders who make it happen.
In assessing whether any organization is collaborating effectively, it's important to keep in mind the inherent limits in social networks (whether in the enterprise or life in general).
As Clay Shirky so cogently discussed in "Here Comes Everybody", participation in social networks follows a standard power law distribution, in which the most active contributor adds much more than the second-most-active contributor and so on. Specifically, the median contributor may only post on very rare occasions, yet still make a significant contribution to the discourse, and to the organization.
So yes, collaboration is more than deliverables, but it doesn't have to look uniform throughout an organization to be effective.
The mansucript "Cultivating Collaborators: Concepts and Questions Emerging Interactively From An Evolving, Interdisciplinary Workshop" asks "how a person becomes skilled and effective in contributing to the desired outcomes of collaboration. This issue has been illuminated by a series of interaction-intensive, interdisciplinary workshops to foster collaboration among those who teach, study, and engage with the public about scientific developments and social change. Review of the workshop evaluations suggests that people are moved to develop themselves as collaborators when they view an experience or training as transformative. Four R's–respect, risk, revelation, and re-engagement–point to the important conditions for interactions among researchers to be experienced as transformative." The full ms. is at http://ptaylor.wikispaces.umb.edu/4Rs where comments are welcome.