by Louis Carter
GE and other large organizations are moving to embrace a more collaborative approach—in this case, The Lean Startup approach5—that brings people together in new ways. Nick Perugini, GE’s head of commercial digital technology, put it this way: “We all cross the finish line together, or nobody wins.”6
Judging by these and other companies that are embarking on radical change efforts, collaboration has become an aspirational path to renewal and reinvention. In fact, it has become a catchphrase for everything from Agile software development, crowdsourcing, and cocreation to old-fashioned teamwork. It is also just as much about working together virtually, as is so often the case today, instead of the traditional scrum that starts in a conference room. All of these concepts present useful best practices to pull ideas from, but what we really need from collaboration is something far more focused. With that, I would argue that emotional connectedness may prove to be collaboration’s biggest benefit by far.
Why Collaboration Connects Us
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Stated simply, collaboration is when two or more parties work together jointly toward a common objective. This occurs less often face-to-face and more often cities and countries apart. It also occurs less with traditionally siloed departments and more with multifunctional teams or informal groups bound together by a shared interest. Instead of delivering pure consensus, collaboration catalyzes innovation and enables people to be more creative and productive. It is that—working together to be better—that the individuals in my study told me they wanted. I heard loud and clear in my research that people are In Great Company in an open and transparent environment where employees have equal airtime and can abide by simple rules for delivering more value to customers.
These basic deliverables pack a powerful punch. Ample research makes a strong case for collaboration. An ethnographic study conducted by Cisco, for instance, showed that employees value collaboration because the “collective intelligence and diverse perspectives of people working together” creates better overall results.7 Similarly, a study from Stanford found that working collectively on a task can improve performance. Participants who collaborated persevered 64 percent longer to find solutions than peers who worked individually. They also reported higher engagement and lower fatigue, and they self-reported greater rates of success.8 On an organizational level, a finding by the Institute for Corporate Productivity, working with social networks expert and Babson College professor Rob Cross, found that high- performance companies are up to 5.5 times more likely to value and reward collaboration.9
Whether it’s truly a silver bullet for organizational performance or not, collaboration links up nicely with a number of key workforce trends that reflect the way people want to work. Demographics, for one, support streamlined collaboration. Generation Y workers are connected, informed, and solutions focused. They respond universally to coaching and feedback over traditional command-and-control dogma. If they have a problem, they collaborate to solve it, or they extrapolate and find their own fast fix.10 (Interestingly, even as each new demographic comes colored with a new and different context, so much remains the same—including the challenges of collaboration and every person’s need and desire for growth and development.) Next, everyday social networks and collaborative software tools—although themselves always evolving—enable baseline collaboration almost automatically. People using these tools are informed and able to share information instantly. Finally, and directly to my point, unadulterated collaboration works because by definition it connects us to each other.
Research shows that from a human standpoint, we perform best when we work together in small groups. Our brains are wired to focus on a limited number of relationships at a time.11 We naturally congregate in small groups and collaborate with people we trust. The result: no matter who the organization chart says is in charge, more work gets done in collaborative groups. As organizations realize this, they will find ways to collaborate efficiently.12
Collaboration Killers
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With all of its utility as a key component of emotional connectedness, many times I still see attempts to collaborate that have the opposite effect—employee engagement takes a hit, and productivity declines commensurately. Why? Collaboration gone wrong can be time-consuming, unpopular, costly, unfocused, and inefficient. No one likes to be “forced” to collaborate, nor does anyone like to submit to a change that only makes things worse. The so-called collaboration paradox (when working together yields weaker results)13 is a negative by-product of several dysfunctional team dynamics.
The first, most pervasive barrier is a lack of trust. As the first of five dimensions in emotional connectedness, collaboration is arguably the element that is most dependent upon trust. It became clear to me based on my study that collaboration can connect people effectively only when individuals feel secure enough to innovate, share ideas, and offer advice without fear of reprisal. This core finding correlates with the noted two-year study conducted by Google in 2015, mentioned above, that looked at 250 attributes of Google teams and found that psychological safety was one of the main dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google. They found that the safer team members felt with one another, the more likely they were to admit mistakes, partner, and take on new roles.14
In my own collaborative experiences, I have seen that the deepest sharing occurs within groups where trust is a key component. For example, the BPI Talent Consortiums session I conducted in Lower Manhattan on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, mentioned in the Introduction, is a case in point. The group opened up their hearts and described vulnerable moments in their lives to each other and what they learned. A key component of that session? Establishing a bond based on trust. We spent the first part of the day laying out ironclad ground rules, discussing the common experiences that brought us together, and creating a level playing field where everyone agreed to participate and respect opposing feelings and perspectives.
Indeed, psychological safety frees us up to contribute fully and openly. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term “psychological safety” in research she published in 1999, has said that it brings about “a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.”15 With psychological safety comes not only trust but also inclusion and diversity, as more of us are willing to be fully present in groups and express diverse perspectives. Without psychological safety, and all that it yields within teams, attempts to collaborate will fail every time.
A second barrier to collaboration is weak or inexperienced leadership. On the one hand, this includes leaders who are unable or unwilling to delegate. Control-obsessed leaders struggle to exhibit emotional intelligence, sometimes to the point of being pathologically opposed to including others in the process or considering an opposing argument.
Deborah Lipman Slobodnik, my mentor and a noted executive coach and expert in team leadership and culture change, told me: “One of the big killers of collaboration is leaders who are only going through the motions in terms of creating an inclusive process,” she said. “They say they want to hear from their peers, but they have already made up their mind, and usually the entire team knows that.” The effect is a team that is demoralized and disillusioned.16
The flip side of this negative scenario, on the other hand, is leaders who fail to communicate the rules and who neglect to set up a team structure or clarify decision rights. Lack of proper process leads to drawn-out debates, endless meetings, lack of closure, and the hopeless quest for consensus. At a minimum, team members need to know the purpose of the team, the roles and responsibilities of the people on the team, and how decisions are made. Some organizations have formal team guidelines to clarify structure and settle disputes; others have informal mentors or advisors who can share best practices. No matter how it’s accomplished, teams need enough structure to remain on track and get things done.
The final barrier to collaboration I will mention is poli
tical maneuvering, bullying, and similar bad behavior created by abusing unequal power dynamics. Tom Kolditz, retired brigadier general and head of behavioral science and leadership at West Point, told me about team dysfunction in the theater of combat training during his work with U.S. and South Korean soldiers in South Korea in the late 1990s.
At the time, Kolditz was leading an organization of about 800 people, including 100 South Korean soldiers assigned to train with the U.S. forces. The South Korean soldiers, he said, were “super bright and extremely good with computers and automation. And every one of them was a black belt in Taekwondo. But they didn’t enjoy high social status compared to the U.S. soldiers.”17 The South Koreans were in the minority in the unit, and the U.S. forces tended to be more physically fit and heavily muscled, both of which are important in an artillery unit. The result, Kolditz told me, was that the South Koreans were systematically marginalized and ridiculed.
“When you’ve got different types of people working in an organization, it’s pretty easy for cliques and barriers to get thrown up,” he said. “But it’s clearly dysfunctional, and on a team of this nature it can be catastrophic.”
Kolditz addressed the situation by creating a more even power dynamic.
“I required certain segments of training to be conducted in the native Korean language. It changed things by making American soldiers completely dependent on the Koreans. Suddenly, the Korean soldiers became the top commodity in every one of my hundred- person subunits,” he said. The result? “Over a span of about two or three months, they went from being second-class citizens in a dysfunctional relationship with the U.S. soldiers to being really close, cohesive members of that team.”
While combat training on foreign soil with multiple nationalities expected to collaborate is team training to the extreme, politics and power dynamics can create a disruptive, dysfunctional situation in any environment. Kolditz turned the tide by elevating the status of the individuals who were being treated as outsiders. He also instituted a “zero tolerance policy for disrespecting people on the team and their abilities.” These are the same types of policies and training norms that organizations create to avoid bullying, harassment, and discrimination.
As with other “rules of the road” for collaboration, respect needs to be explicit, enforced, and modeled from the top down. As we will see in the Best Practices Playbook below, coaxing the magic from collaboration is about balancing structure and flexibility, and it’s about giving people guidelines but allowing them to learn from the mistakes they make.
Systemic Collaboration: The Best Practices Playbook
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Collaborating in a way that keeps people connected may seem a little like harnessing alchemy. It is impossible to fully predict what combination of players will produce the creative spark to make collaboration great, but you need some science or structure to protect people from unexpected outcomes. This balancing act gives you the latitude to improvise, even as it calls for an effective game plan.
Atlassian, the Australian enterprise software firm that makes collaboration tools, is an example of a company that seems to have struck the right balance within its own workforce. It gives employees a large dose of freedom and independence by virtue of its flat management structure and team-of-teams approach, and its core values include “the courage and resourcefulness to spark change.” Yet, it also provides employees with a video playbook to help steer teams to solve problems, forge forward, and operate according to Atlassian’s high-achievement, ultra-collaborative culture.
In a recent interview, Atlassian’s cofounder and CEO suggested that maintaining the company’s culture comes down to hiring people you trust and setting the right priorities, including “making sure people know experimentation is important, making sure they know the bounds of the strategy and the company, what’s acceptable and not acceptable.”18
In my research, as well as in my everyday work coaching executives, I have seen that this combination of freedom and control enables collaboration when these guiding principles, discussed below, are put into practice across the company (Figure 3.1).
FIGURE 3.1
1. Equal Airtime
In the beginning of Barack Obama’s first term as president, the majority of the top White House staffers were men who had worked on the campaign. Female aides were outnumbered, and their voices were drowned out in important policy discussions. When they tried to get a word in, their ideas were talked over or hijacked. Ultimately, the female staffers solved their problem by adopting a strategy they called “amplification.” When one woman in their group made a key point, another woman would repeat it, emphasizing the idea and giving credit to its author. Their tactic forced the men in the room to listen up and give everyone equal airtime.19
These female power brokers managed to solve their own problem by supporting each other, but the example also goes to show that dysfunction can manifest in any group and at any level. Social scientists agree that diverse teams yield greater creativity and output than homogeneous teams—but only if everyone has a chance to participate. Interestingly, I’ve found people feel they are In Great Company when they are afforded a chance to speak up. They feel emotionally connected to each other when their voices are heard, even when their perspective is not always heeded.
In an interview, Helen Russell, chief people officer at Atlassian, succinctly explained how equal airtime yields emotional connectedness within their culture: “At the beginning of each executive meeting [at Atlassian], everyone has the mic for two minutes, and we each have a minute to say what’s top of mind from a personal perspective and a minute on what’s top of mind from a business perspective. Since we started this practice, it is unbelievable what I’ve discovered about my peers. You just have no clue what’s going on in your colleagues’ lives until that moment when they disclose things. It evokes a completely different level of empathy and connection. Having those moments to just situate what’s going on with colleagues enables us all to be more trusting and to interact from a more humane and empathetic point of view.”20
As simple as it sounds, equal airtime requires setting corporate politics aside and adopting norms that enable equal sharing of ideas with no tolerance for monopolizing discussions. The practices mentioned below signal respect for all and create a work environment where people feel safe taking risks and thinking creatively.
Make Equal Airtime a Management Priority
Like many things, leaders set the tone for how collaboration occurs. For instance, Atlassian’s custom of giving every person time to talk at the outset of executive meetings is likely to spill over into how all of their teams interact.
Leaders can send the message in numerous ways, but the best option is to model open, inclusive behavior and make collaboration more about ideas and implementation and less about grandstanding and deferring to job title.
Address the Collaboration Killers
There are three team archetypes that need to be neutralized in order to create an atmosphere of equal airtime. The first, the Steamrollers, are the people who hijack a team discussion. They proceed with their ideas in a single-minded manner without pausing to include others or yielding to objections, questions, or comments. Oftentimes, Steamrollers get a lot accomplished quickly, but their progress is detrimental to the larger group dynamic.
The next archetype, the Alpha Bullies, make a habit of intimidating or marginalizing colleagues. They show little respect for others in the group, particularly those they deem to be weak, and the net effect is that collaboration comes to a halt when psychological safety breaks down.
The third archetype, the Slackers, sit back and let other people do the difficult work of debating ideas, options, and solutions. They have little to add because either they are disengaged, or they have not done the requisite preparation.
Establishing ground rules can eliminate some of these collaboration killers, but that’s not enough. Equal airtime is just one positive by-product of having a culture tha
t is open and inclusive. When that culture is in place, these archetypes either opt out or are weeded out to make room for people whose values are aligned with the organization.
Use an Icebreaker
The immense benefits of equal airtime—including better ideas and more creative solutions—only materialize when people actually participate. Even when collaboration killers are neutralized, not everyone is willing to express themselves. Whether it is because they are extremely reserved or because they don’t feel safe interjecting themselves, they may need some extra encouragement. This is often the case when a cross-functional team is first formed and some members outrank others in terms of job title or hierarchy.
One tactic to change the dynamic is to ask an open-ended question that everyone can answer. Another is to respectfully call on people who don’t volunteer, thereby demonstrating that you are genuinely interested in their perspective. Or you can plan opportunities to socialize and get to know each other, to create camaraderie and elevate everyone’s comfort level. These and other icebreakers knock down emotional barriers between people and start to create connections.
Ensure a Balance of Team Roles
Teams can veer out of control when there is not a balance of power. My mentor, Deborah Lipman Slobodnik, taught me about the four players in a team who are essential for coming to a decision and executing effectively. Too much of any role (or the absence of it) creates an imbalance of power.