The July/August issue of HBR focuses on the issues around building collaboration into the workplace. It’s required reading for all of us.
If you’ve spent any amount of time inside the walls of an organization, you understand the promise and perils of collaboration. Great things can happen when we reach across silos and boundaries and seek to work together in pursuit of shared interests. However, as team guru Prof. J. Richard Hackman offers when talking about the potential of teams, “just don’t count on it.”
I’m going to set aside my usual focus on project teams and raise my sights just a bit to the rarefied air of the senior levels of organizations. In both my executive and consulting experience, I’ve observed or have been a part of situations where otherwise really smart people crash and burn on the shores of potential internal (strategic) collaboration. In many of these cases, there’s good money and important marketplace moves that were left on the table as a result of a failure to collaborate.
Two Common Senior Level Collaboration Pitfalls:
1. Navigating the rocky waters of moving investment emphasis to emerging and new opportunities.
How many of you have seen this movie before? The legacy business got you here and even made you great, but the new businesses are essential for survival and future success. However, no one can agree to reduce investment in one area and ramp up in another. After all, this would require executives to sublimate their egos and potentially risk displaying to their direct reports that one area is more or less important than the other. Horrors!
This issue derails just about every management group I’ve encountered. A few get through it, but most flounder until they endure a shock to the system or a metaphorical clubbing across the head.
2. Leveraging disparate products and varied pockets of internal expertise to deliver a systems offering to clients.
There’s typically a great deal of talk about the potential customer benefits or competitive differentiation that might result through internal product and service integration (i.e. across business units), but without true senior level advocacy, the ideas and talk fail to gain traction. And while more than a few of the internally generated “integration” ideas are just that…internally generated ideas with no real basis…some of them are potentially valuable. Unfortunately, most never reach the point where they are properly vetted.
And Then the CEO is Left to Steer Through the Rocky Shoals of Potential Collaboration:
Both of the situations described above often achieve lip-service interest or token compliance. People see the potential opportunities or the underlying logic. However, more often than not, both fall victim to overt or passive-aggressive behaviors driven by egos, turf-wars, loss-of-control fears, politics and any other human issues that drive our behaviors. Frequently, the CEO is stuck alone, attempting to steer the ship of state through these rocky waters without crashing.
A good number of these Captains on the Sea of Collaboration are focusing on trying not to fail…instead of trying to succeed.
While this isn’t a defense of the CEOs who struggle to navigate these internal and strategic collaboration opportunities, it is at least empathy. They are most definitely trying to keep the plates spinning for all stakeholders, from the board and market (investors) to direct reports and entire groups of people. It is understandably difficult. Of course…that’s why they earn the big bucks.
Helpful Thoughts from “Are You a Collaborative Leader?”
Herminia Ibarra and Morton T. Hansen writing in the July/August issue of HBR, offer the following on the complexity of driving collaboration:
“Part of the problem is that many leadership teams, composed of the CEO and his or her direct reports, actually don’t operate as teams. Each member runs his or her own region, function, or product or service category, without much responsibility—or incentive—for aligning the organization’s various projects and operations into a coherent whole.”
and:
“Persuading people to contribute countless hours of effort in partnership with people they don’t necessarily like to solve important problems requires consummate leadership skills. Managing egos so that each person’s commitment, energy, and creativity is unleashed in a way without disadvantaging others demands an impresario personality.”
In addition to their research supporting what we already know…that the challenge to foster collaboration is a difficult leadership task, the authors offer that the skills required to succeed in this endeavor can be learned and strengthened:
“It requires strong skills in four areas: playing the role of connector, attracting diverse talent, modeling collaboration at the top, and showing a strong hand to keep teams from getting mired in debate. The good news is, our research also suggests that these skills can be learned—and can help executives generate exceptional long-term performance.”
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While it’s possible to head down a slippery slope of collaboration paralysis, most organizations and most leaders I’ve encountered are in no danger of that slide. Perhaps some new measures of accountability for strategic collaboration are required. After all, what gets measured gets learned and gets done.
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