Collaboration
Collaboration, a skill in workplaces that is truly under-developed.
Espousing collaboration and creating a collaborative culture is critical in developing a Growth Mindset in your organisation. The value of Humility is key to success as collaboration involves working with others to solve problems, share ideas, co-create new ways/future direction/new products and get tasks done together; making best use of talent across the organisation.
Why Focus on Collaboration?
Creating synergy and collective experiences in solving problems and delivering against strategy creates leverage as the combined effort is much stronger than the sum of the individuals and/or individual teams.
Our world today is globally complex, with a global economy presenting real, intellectual and practical challenges like never before. Some examples being: supply chain, talent strategy, compliant product development, taxation and exchange rate impacts.
Careers are now built with breadth, not depth. How to engage and retain top talent when breadth of experience really matters should be a key concern of organisations.
Silos to be broken down to enable alignment to the one vision and a collaborative culture is key to this cross functional working and delivery against strategy.
Cohesion, inclusion and being heard boosts morale and job satisfaction, reducing turnover and increasing productivity.
The Leadership Toolbox
What can we do to build a Collaborative Culture?
a) The senior leaders of the organisation should be establishing cross-functional teams having joint ownership of key strategic pillars. The organisation’s team share common goals which support these strategic pillars. Organisation structure should also enable collaboration.
b) Move leaders out of the organisation that don’t align to the values underlying your collaborative culture.
c) Build team meeting facilitation capability, with a focus on all leaders and project managers; which is critical in challenging team dynamics. All team facilitation involves: creating space for everyone to be heard not just the extroverted or senior members of the team; noticing both verbal and non-verbal cues; challenging behaviours where necessary; and preparation for the meeting is key to success.
d) Cross functional teams are established for key business challenges.These teams should be very diverse including: all levels and functions of the organisation, age diversity, and gender diversity. This results in creative and divergent thinking.
e) Create systems that build collaboration such as buddy system for new starters, mentor program, learning and development events, ‘A Day in the Life Of’ programme; where all participants are socialising and learning cross functionally, not vertically.
f) Establish cross functional events where teams are created horizontally such as: Sport events, hackathon days, innovation sessions and cross functional work teams on strategy.
g) Create expertise in innovative thinking, blue sky thinking, brainstorming and enable all employees in using systems such as Miro, Lucidspark; and, establish collaborative spaces.
h) TRUST is key; creating social opportunities where personal relationships are enhanced.
i) Use focus groups as a tool to keep building on your success and to focus on the one or two things you can change to really make a difference.
j) Leadership culture where humility is central to their words and actions.Humble leaders listen, they focus on the ‘we’ not the ‘I’ and deliver against their promises every time. Humble leaders focus on building and developing their employees and teams.
k) Value teamwork and cross functional team achievement through compensation strategies and in looking at high performance teams and promotion opportunities.
l) All employees need to choose humility over self – they need to take time to listen and put biases on hold.Take time to ask questions to truly understand the other’s perspective which is often driven by real experiences and/or cultural orientations.
m) All employees work on understanding themselves and understanding their impact on others. How will employees work with other styles more effectively? Does the employee want to work with others, with different styles and viewpoints?
Consider ‘style’ team building activities where we understand the value all employees bring to the table.
n) Leaders working from a position of humility, seeking always “What can I learn from others?”, “How can I enable others?” and “Why am I thinking this way?”.
o) A focus on effective communication both organisation communication strategies and messaging; and building communication capability at the employee level. The employees should try to understand what the other person has said and understand their meaning – with a focus on the why and how.