Collaboration is key

Team leading / 12 October 2011

While you might have your head around teamwork, organisations now want employees that can collaborate across departments and even organisations. Nic Paton investigates

We are constantly exhorted to be more collaborative at work. Whereas once you might just have been expected to get on with your immediate team, nowadays – in a 24/7, global working world – the priority is increasingly to be working across teams, across geographies, even across organisations.

At one level, as Andrew Campbell, director of the Strategic Management Centre at Ashridge Business School points out, collaboration and joint working ought to come naturally, especially in a modern, consensually managed workplace. "We enjoy collaborating and working with people. We are social animals and therefore collaboration is a natural orientation,” he explains.

Within many organisations there has been an exponential rise in project workload, agrees John Blackwell, chief executive of management consultancy JB Associates.

It’s not uncommon now for individuals to be juggling 10-12 projects at a time, which will often overlap across different divisions, business units or functions, while more business process outsourcing has added to the imperative for cross-organisational management and co-ordination.

 “So there is a real need for collaborative working; it is just part of the changing nature of work. People need more and more to be able to collaborate across boundaries, something that is hugely challenging and difficult, and can mean overcoming different cultures, ethnicities and working practices,” he says.

As Campbell argued in the Harvard Business Review in September, while managers and organisations may speak a lot about wanting greater collaboration and collaborative working, in fact getting people to work effectively in this way can be harder than it seems.

People will often be serving two masters. So, even though people are oriented towards enjoying working together they often do find it very difficult.

Andrew Campbell, Director, Strategic Management Centre, Ashridge Business School

There can, for one, be confusion about the distinction between “collaboration” and “teamwork”.

Conflicting goals

Teams, Campbell argues, tend to be created to work towards achieving a specific outcome. Collaborators, conversely, may nominally have shared goals but may be members of completely different teams and have competing goals pulling at them; the shared goal is just one of their responsibilities.

“People will often be serving two masters. So, even though people are oriented towards enjoying working together they often do find it very difficult,” he says.

“You need to recognise that this is a tricky form of relationship. You need to set it up with caution. Putting some structure behind it can be helpful too,” he adds.

“Increasingly organisations are trying to differentiate themselves, to gain a competitive advantage, one of which may come from individuals who can work across organisations rather than simply working to departmental targets,” agrees business psychologist Dr Rob Yeung, director of consultancy Talentspace.

However, one problem can be that people often still tend to be incentivised by and brought up to think in terms of loyalty to those departmental targets.

“Effective collaboration has to be a combination of leadership and culture, but it is also about recruiting the right people for your culture. The leaders have to role-model it, too, that is important,” Yeung adds.

Collaboration works best when there are four things in place, recommends Jon Cowell, director and corporate practice lead at business psychologists Edgecumbe Consulting Group.

These are having explicit, shared and agreed goals; ensuring some value is placed on the achievement of that goal by all participants, in other words it is something that will further everyone by being achieved; ensuring there are shared expectations about how the different teams of the group will behave toward one another, the explicit roles, norms, behaviours, codes and ways of working and so on; that there is a level of underpinning trust in the relationship.

In it together

Communicating and reinforcing shared values and ensuring there is genuine trust are key, agrees Jonathan Winter, founder of consultancy Career Innovation.

“No collaboration can occur without establishing some shared goals and being transparent about this. People need to be interested in the end-result rather than just taking positions,” he advises.

“So it is important not to rush into it or impose it. From an early stage proper trust and understanding needs to be established,” he adds.

Yet it is also vital to recognise that, while collaboration will inevitably require agreement and often compromise, it does not always mean having to soft-soap everything.

In fact, collaboration can work best where the level of trust and respect is such that the relationship is strong enough to be robust and, if necessary, constructively critical, recommends Diarmid de Burgh-Milne, lead development strategist at JCP Consultancy, which specialises in organisational alliances and partnering arrangements.

“What can often be misunderstood about collaboration is the assumption that everyone always has to be nice to each other or that it has to be all soft and fluffy. It can be a really hard-nosed business relationship but one that is built on a level of trust and respect,” he says.

“It can be a relationship where feedback can be positive but challenging and where it is about meeting demanding standards, getting it right. It is not ‘you are my friend so I cannot tell you there was a cock-up’,” he adds.