Volume 7, #5 September 2009
The 10 Worst Practices in Collaboration
… and why you need to avoid them
"Collaborate or die" has become popular as a phrase to impart a sense of urgency about everything from the death of traditional media to unrest in various global hot spots. As I began contemplating collaboration in preparation for Frost & Sullivan's upcoming
Growth in Leadership (GIL) conference in September my thoughts turned in a less drastic direction: focusing on how internal collaboration can boost the health of your business to help it grow and flourish in any economic environment. (I'm not referring to external collaboration with partners, suppliers, or customers; that's another story altogether. We covered customer collaboration in
a previous issue of Discoveries.)
This is collaboration as corporate culture -- an approach that emanates from the top. Cultivating a culture of collaboration takes leadership that's confident enough not to insist on being the main conduit for information from group to group. Astute leaders foster communication, promote sharing of information, and wisely apply review processes and structure.
To highlight the key ingredients of this leadership approach, I've come up with my "Top 10 Worst practices in Collaboration." If any of these sound familiar, perhaps it's time to rethink how you're doing things.
Want to nominate your own idea for the Top 10?
E-mail me.
Sincerely,
Sheila Mello
Top 10 practices not to adopt if you want to foster a corporate culture that uses collaboration to the utmost:
10. Choose team members because you like their clothes and the songs on their iPods.
Adults don't act this way -- or do they? Personal relationships are important in business. However, filling your team with friends and people you get along with won't necessarily get the job done. You need objective skills criteria (and assessment) to make sure you have the right talent in the group.
9. Don’t share the strategic plan – why would developers need it?
There's a poster available at the satirical site Despair.com titled "Ignorance," which reads " It's amazing how much easier it is for a team to work together when no one has any idea where they're going." It may seem that the engineer or product designer, who is several steps down from top management, has no need to see the big picture. After all, designers only have to do the job they're assigned. This breaks down in two areas: motivation (why work on something when you don't see the point or where it fits into the bigger picture) and efficiency (without a sense of overall goals, individuals have no guiding principles for making day-to-day decisions and course corrections, and must always move decisions back up the hierarchy).
8. Stick doggedly to existing ways of doing things – it's my way or the highway.
Not only does this also de-motivate staff, it stifles any impulse to try new ideas or come up with innovative approaches to problems.
7. There is no consistent process – chaos leads to simplicity.
Just because you don't have a perfect process doesn't mean you should abandon any attempt at creating a process. Start where you are and refine. While natural systems may tend toward entropy nobody wants their business to decay into a completely uniform mass. Entropy may lead to simplicity, but it's not very useful.
6. Build walls around your organization.
News flash: We do not live in the Middle Ages. Fortresses are no longer necessary. In fact, erecting them prevents progress and impedes communication. Managers need to be confident enough to open doors and windows and tear down walls so information can move freely from one part of the organization to the other.
5. Hold secretive meetings and don’t share minutes – keep everyone in the dark.
It may seem expedient to have some planning meetings attended by only a few key individuals. After all, it takes effort and energy to include people, listen to ideas and concerns, and arrive at consensus. But keeping secrets around a project only undermines trust and impedes the quick progress that can be made when everyone has the information they need at their fingertips.
4. Laugh at other people’s ideas – criticize ideas that don’t sync with your own.
We all are taught basic respect in kindergarten. But while grown-ups in business might not laugh out loud at others' ideas, be on the lookout for more subtle forms of criticism. Body language and other types of both explicit and implicit communication can shut down a brilliant idea faster than you can say "innovation." Train yourself and your staff to listen to all ideas and put a process in place to winnow the ideas only after they've all been aired.
3. Reward people on based on the success of their individual function (rather than on cross-functional success – "not my job").
It's true that you don't want your janitor designing your next laser printer – or do you? Old-style management designates a function for everyone and everyone in their function. Today's competitive environment might call for input from the unlikeliest of sources. If you reward jobs rather cross-functional accomplishments, you'll get a lot of people doing jobs and not many accomplishments.
2. Throw deliverables over the wall.
This assumes the various functions in the company have built walls (see #6). If this is the case, then rather than being the output of a cross-functional collaborative process, a new product moves along from department to department as a widget moves along the assembly line, from market research to development to outbound marketing to sales. Once the "toss" is made, there's no opportunity for gathering feedback or creating an information loop for continuous improvement of the product – or of the process.
1. Encourage developers to rely on intuition to figure out users’ needs.
You probably recognize that a project without a road map and destination gets you to an unknown place at an unknown time. Much better to decide on a destination (product) based on user needs. You'll need to avoid the temptation to rely on the developer to decipher user needs. Developers may seem to be experts, having worked for years or decades in a particular field. But there is no substitute for deep, open-ended research into current customer concerns. Listening -- without preconceived notions about what customers need -- is the best first step on the path to creating valuable product offerings.
