THEATRE

Reasons Collaboration Fails

Organisations need collaboration more than ever, but it’s often confused for teamwork, or overlooked as simply cooperation. If done well, truly collaborative teams can have the ability to develop and bring products to the market much more quickly, improve organisational flexibility through breaking down silos, and enable productive, energised meetings.

Collaboration should be a process ingrained in the very fabric of your organisation, helping to leverage collective intelligence globally.

We understand it’s not easy, though, and often fails if:


Productivity is valued over creativity
Employees can feel pressure to be productive, rather than creative, in group discussions, which encourages them to agree quickly. This inhibits them from considering other ideas, or risking putting their own forward even if they might have more potential. This can lead to poor, underdeveloped decisions, groupthink, and employees feeling as if they do not have a voice.

To cure this, build trust in your teams by encouraging meetings to be a safe space; share vulnerability, welcome all ideas and allow employees to openly express their fears, disagree and think creatively.

Achievements go unnoticed
When teams are working together on projects, individual expertise can seem to go overlookedand undervalued. This takes away the incentive for employees to work hard, and can lead to resentment.

By sharing with your employees the organisation’s vision and creating actionable targets, the team can more deeply understand how their personal talents and skills will help the organisation reach broader goals. This helps by providing a shared purpose, but rewarding team members by showcasing their talents to the rest of the team and stakeholders can also help them feel more valued.

Employees are not trained equally
Organisations often focus their resources on training only those in leadership roles on how to collaborate effectively. This may seem logical, but all team members need to know the importance of collaborative behaviours to create a truly collaborative team. Restricting resources can also spark unhealthy competition and resentment among team members, which can stifle creativity.

If global training is not feasible, your role as a leader is vital in order to inspire your team from the top down, through sharing and encouraging collaborative habits to strengthen your team.

Communication is poor
For employees to share and build ideas, as well as to take on feedback, strong communication is vital. Without it, silos can form, morale can dip and organisation expectations go unmet. For your team to collaborate, all members need to know what’s expected of them, and how best to share their contributions.

Agreement on what needs to be shared, when and by what means, can revolutionise poor communication and allow everyone to be on the same page.

Remote teams are not supported
Now that the workplace is no longer fixed, your teams are free to work across countries and time zones. This can make collaboration a little harder, depending on the digital tools you have in place to support them.


Poor Relationships
You don’t have to be best friends to collaborate well, but you do need to have mutual respect and be able to communicate. If this is the first time a team has worked together, it may take a while for the different personalities to gel. It’s normal to have teething problems, but to succeed you must recognize them – and resolve them – early. If you’re panicking about deadlines and juggling different tasks, it’s easy to forget how important your team’s connection is… but do this at your peril!

So how do you keep relationships warm? Try to bring the team together as much as you can, so long as it’s actually helpful (nothing is more annoying than too many check-in meetings!). As long as you’re meeting frequently and sharing the latest developments, you won’t run the risk of communication breakdowns – and morale will remain high, too. Team members should see each other as collaborators and not competitors, so take time to build up relationships before work starts, if that’s possible.


Lack of clarity
Lack of clarity is a big one, because it can involve so many different variables. Let’s look at two of the most common issues that stem from a lack of clarity:

Goal uncertainty: To succeed in their objectives, a group working collaboratively needs to share the same vision and aim. If you have a group of people and everyone wants a different result, the collaboration will fail. You need to ensure everyone’s individual goals align with the team’s overarching aim. This means getting rid of any egos that might influence the end goal! A good way of getting your team on board is ensuring they’re involved when you first set these goals; then they’re invested and following the vision from day one.


Uncertain leadership: Lack of clear coordination and ownership is another killer. Large projects often have several team leads, and it’s not uncommon for each leader to have their own agenda and objectives. As long as the end goal is shared by all, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but an indistinct allocation of responsibilities between leaders can result in dissatisfaction and dysfunction. Yet again, it’s super important to be clear from the beginning: set roles, give ownership and establish workflows. You can’t collaborate effectively without this structure.


Tech overload
Tools are an essential part of the job, but too many of them is overwhelming and disruptive. If you’re using Buffer for social media, Slack for interaction, Trello for project management and Zoom for video, it’s easy to see how communication can become chaotic – and without effective communication, you can’t achieve effective collaboration.

So choose a select amount of simple, lightweight tools. Use only one project management or collaboration tool, and ensure everyone knows how to use it. Cut out what you don’t need and establish expectations for the tools you do use so everyone is on the same page. Once you’ve defined the purpose of your tools and how everyone should use them, you won’t run the risk of fragmented or lost communication.


Lack of visibility
It’s absolutely essential to have full visibility over your team’s progress; what everyone’s doing and whether you’re on-track. The problem is, the further you go along the collaboration path – and the more people who get involved – the harder it can be to keep that visibility. So what to do?

Get a task tracking tool that lets you quickly see project progress and team availability. You’ll want to know individual capacity, workload, activities, time spent on tasks and availability. But it’s also good to know how much time people spend on different types of work, so you can better plan and forecast resources and deadlines for future collaborations. Automate this data flow as much as possible so you don’t have to manually track your performance, and make sure it respects employee data privacy. Without trust, your tracking efforts will fall completely flat.

Levels of Collaboration

There are several degrees or levels of collaboration, each requiring different amounts of energy, effort and focus. It’s worth understanding these levels so that you can look at your team, assess the level of collaboration you are seeing and decide if it is optimal or not. If necessary, you can then make adjustments to how your team is collaborating using the levels in the graphic below as a guide. 



THE ORIGIN OF LEVELS OF COLLABORATION 

CO-OPERATION AND BENIGN NEGLECT

The first two levels, which are closely related, Co-operation and Benign Neglect.

Co-operation occurs when people are in the same location at the same time, probably working for the same person and maybe even working on related projects. But, for whatever reasons, they don’t interact all that much. They are working individually but in parallel, operating in the same space and at the same time - that’s what it means by Co-operation. 

Benign neglectis similar to Co-operation but it occurs when people in the same group or team are working at a distance from each other in different locations, often in different countries and time zones. They don’t see each other very much so relationships tend to be weak. They get along and like each other, hence the word benign. But they focus on what’s in front of them, generally neglecting relationships with their remote teammates. You see little actual collaboration at this level.


COORDINATION AND REACTIVE COLLABORATION

People on the same team but not needing to work together a lot. It’s not wrong, it’s just not highly collaborative. When communications among team members are sound these two levels can and often do lead to the next two levels, Coordination and Reactive collaboration.

Coordination: Let’s say you and I work in the same office, but we aren’t sitting near each other. One day we run into each other at the coffee machine. We’re chatting as people do. I’m talking to you about project A and you’re all excited about project B. Then we realize that these two projects are related. They don’t overlap but they are similar and might intersect at some point. We decide we should keep talking, to coordinate with each other just in case. Coordination doesn’t consume a lot of time or energy, and it’s not creating great value. But it’s more collaborative and has more impact than the previous two levels. The greatest value in Coordination lies in its potential to create the next level up.

Reactive Collaboration grows directly out of Coordination There we are again, you and ,I at the coffee machine. I am working on project A and you are now working on project C. It turns out these two projects have a lot in common, they do overlap. We realize we must work together to account for this overlap. It’s collaboration after-the-fact, we didn’t plan on it and that’s why it’s called Reactive. Regardless of what it’s called, our bosses will expect us to work together. We quickly go into fire-fighting mode. We address the overlap, collaborating as required. Then, typically, we go back to our desks returning to Co-operation mode.

INTENTIONAL COLLABORATION

Intentional Collaboration is the next and highest level, the one with the most potential for value creation. We sit down as a team in January, look at our work for the year and ask ourselves, “Where, in the coming months, will we need to collaborate?”  We think ahead about how our work intersects and overlaps, where we will need to combine our efforts, and, just as importantly, where it makes more sense to work separately. This is what it means to be intentional about collaboration. We can now plan for and deploy our resources accordingly and spend less time in fire-fighting mode, reducing the stress that that way of working creates.