“Open to me, so that I may open
Provide me your inspiration
So that I might see mine”
- Rumi
Poor or average performing teams cost organizations billions every year and this doesn’t have to be the case. What makes the difference between a poor and high performing team is successful collaboration?
For teams to be consistently high performing, it’s important that there is a culture of collaboration within the organization. This can take time, energy and money to create but it ultimately pays off in terms of ROI. It’s also important that the organization’s leadership is on board and that the leaders themselves are role models of collaboration.
Collaboration literally means ‘to work together’. You can think of collaborative teams along two dimensions: relationship and task. Whether leading or participating in a team you need the ability to balance these two factors, for your teams to be able to collaborate effectively and achieve high performance. Another way to think of this is being able to balance your Social & Emotional Intelligence skills with your Project Management skills.
Making it possible
Three conditions must be satisfied for people to collaborate effectively:
1. They must want to collaborate
2. They must have the skills to collaborate
3. They must be given the opportunity to collaborate
Challenges
You can use the term ‘team’ to refer to your immediate colleagues in your department. However, today teams are frequently formed to solve large organization-wide problems and implement solutions. Introducing a new IT system often involves a team of hundreds of people working together for an extended period of time. Sometimes, you form a large team for a one-off event such as a Trade Fair. The same principles apply.
Today, many teams share these characteristics:
· Large
· Virtual
· Diverse
· Specialized
What to do
Here are 7 ways to ensure collaboration and high performance:
1. Invest time up front in building relationships to build generative teams.
Traditional approaches, such as kick-off team-building workshops, are still essential. However, team members must also have the skills to build, maintain and regain rapport. Deep rapport is the bedrock of trust and trust is essential for virtual teams to function. To build deep rapport means working at the level of values, beliefs, identity and purpose as all behavior flows from this. So, ensure that your kick-off team building includes at least a day devoted to alignment on these dimensions. Research by change expert, Robert Dilts, has demonstrated that a generative team of 20 can out-perform an average team of 600!
2. Teach team members negotiation and influencing skills.
Each member should be able to present his/her ideas or suggestions in a way that preserves the relationship amongst team members, whilst getting things done. Skills such as rapport and being able to create a 3rd Point are valuable in this regard.
3. Ensure team members have the Emotional Intelligence skills to relate to others, respect diverse thinking styles and other’s working preferences.
Here, a knowledge of Systems Thinking and Meta Programs is useful. For example, a major source of conflict is when team members unknowingly mismatch each other’s styles. For example, knowing how to navigate the spectrum from Big Picture to Detail or vice versa are essential. Understanding what motivates colleagues is equally important.
4. Start with specifying Well-Formed Outcomes and then create clear roles and responsibilities.
Collaborative Project Management has evolved with some useful distinctions from traditional project management. Research by London Business School Professor, Lynda Gratton, found that large teams operating in ambiguous contexts perform much better when roles are clearly defined. One of her examples was a television network team of about one hundred people successfully producing live coverage of the Football World Cup.
5. Ensure that, at least, team leaders have coaching and mentoring skills.
Preferably, all team members should know how coaching works. Coaching and mentoring are often confused and here is one way to distinguish the two. In Coaching, to move forward the coach has the questions and the person needing help has the answers. In Mentoring, to move forward the person needing help has the questions and the mentor has the answers. Coaching creates empowerment. Mentoring can sometimes create dependency.
6. Model Collaborative behavior. When you have high performing teams it’s important to model how they think and behave so that this learning can be transferred to other teams in your organization in the form of coaching, training materials and workshops. A main benefit of this approach is that any training is 100% tailored to your culture and highly cost-effective. Therefore, buy-in will be higher, what works well in your culture will be preserved and you get a tangible return on your investment.
7. Make use of collaborative tools to build communities.
Many of these exist in the realm of the Social Web and there are service providers who offer in-house collaborative online tools that can be tailored to your needs. With flatter structures, how we interact is becoming increasingly social, and building online communities is essential to collaboration. As teams are formed and disbanded, people often need to maintain their internal networks and learning, which can be leveraged for future projects.
*This article was featured in our newsletter “Performance Matters”, February 2013
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