Opinions Good Thinking Collaboration – Harvard Business Review reviewed
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Good Thinking
By John Canfield
Management Consultant
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My last article, “Collaboration — Raise the bar” (July 11, 2011) suggested that collaboration is currently all the buzz. Right along with creativity and innovation, everybody’s talking and writing about it. Well, not to be outdone, the Harvard Business Review dedicated their July/August edition to just this with the title “Collaborate — Build a culture of trust and innovation.”
I will repeat from my last article, “while it may be a great idea, the challenge and the enormous business opportunity is to learn to actually do it, to actually collaborate. And to actually collaborate in a way that it actually a makes a very positive difference to you and your business.” What can we learn from HBR, and what can we add?
I will suggest to truly collaborate company-wide, which will include your business partners, you need to address and implement support at all three levels of your organization’s system which includes all the people and non-people components that make up your business world. The three levels of support are high level (between organizations), mid level (within organizations) and face-to-face (between people doing the real work).
In the first article, “Are You A Collaborative Leader?” Herminia Ibarra and Morten Hansen wonder how great CEOs keep their teams connected. This is the high level view. As written, the idea in brief is that leaders must have a style that can harness the power of connections, replacing command-and-control styles with collaborative styles. These collaborative leaders do the following:
The global connector is an active adult learner with a confident growth mindset. Engaging diverse talent. i.e. a mix of very different thinkers, makes for very interesting and productive junk drawers, the selection of ideas generated before a team is ready to select a few to carry forward. Collaborating at the top honors people follow the leader. Like honesty, a leadership team has no business telling others to do something unless they can do it themselves. Done well it will be very contagious. Showing a strong hand, in my experience, is counterproductive. Sort of like saying, “I won’t be command-and-control unless I think I need to.” Peer pressure focused on goals and results can be a more powerful and sustainable motivator than a heavy hand.
I am pleased to see in their chart titled “Comparing Three Styles of Leadership,” they include the lead characters of my first book, Think or Sink: Command and Control = Louise, Consensus = Mark, and Collaborative = Chuck. No surprise, we’re talking about the same corporate-leader phenomenon.
A second article, “Building a Collaborative Enterprise” by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher and Lawrence Prusak, addressed the mid level needs of a successful company-wide collaborative skills implementation. They speak of four keys to creating a culture of trust and teamwork:
A shared purpose can best be developed with a team brainstorming and organizing their ideas about their goals into a scoreboard with the use of Post-Its and flipcharts. Contribution is manifested when people lean into their work. This is so much easier when the work environment does not punish people for coming up with new ideas. As Deming proclaimed, stamp out fear in the workplace. The interdependent processes and collaborative infrastructure topics are the closest the article series come to my world of supporting teams with dialogue tools that help teams build both great decisions and great buy-in.
I will add and emphasize the third level of support necessary, the face-to-face support. To affect performance, organizations need to help their employees continually learn how to make better decisions and build buy-in in their day-to-day work. Good decisions with poor buy-in are a waste of time. As is buy-in for weak decisions. To promote the better decisions and buy-in, organizations have to help employees learn to think in a wide variety of ways to consider and select the best ideas to turn into good decisions and buy-in.
My experience suggests structured dialogue tools and techniques promote or provoke collaboration by guiding the thinking of a team to focus on building great decisions in such an interactive way, that the team simultaneously builds buy-in. As mentioned in the second article, “people support what they help create.” The work in the meeting rooms is responsible for the decisions and buy-in that actually generates the results available from productive collaboration.