The 6 Practices of a High Performing Team Collaboration
Why concepts aren’t enough to form high-performing teams. We need Practices to put them into action.
This post is one of a series of posts on High Performance Collaboration. In this post I’ll discuss how the Three Imperatives of Collaboration, covered in my last 4 blog posts, translate into what we call the Six Practices of High Performance Collaboration.
As I was doing the research that led to HPC, I was gaining insights and sketching out models based on those insights. The most important insight-cum-model I developed was the Three Imperatives: Clarity, Intentionality and Discipline. You may recall in my previous blog that Intentionality was the point, and what Mars teams needed more of. Clarity enabled Intentionality and Discipline supported Intentionality.
I had hoped, at that time, that the Three Imperatives would be the answer, that I could create techniques and tools around them that would enable teams to deliver on their collaborative potential. I realized, though, they weren’t enough.
Putting the 3 Imperatives into Action
Mars, like a lot of other companies, is full of achievement-driven people; they are innately motivated to get stuff done. The Three Imperatives are descriptions of what teams need if they hope to foster better collaboration in the face of strong preferences for individual working. For instance, they need to have more clarity about why collaboration matters so that can become more intentional about their collaboration, and so forth.
As accurate as it was, those descriptions of team needs weren’t going help people who just wanted to know what work had to get done, and how they ought to go about it. So I wondered, “How could I augment Three Imperatives so we would have something teams could use to generate collaboration and teamwork?”
That’s where the six HPC Practices come in. I referred to the Practices in an earlier blog post when I talked about how Mars is a doing-focused organization. Allow me to describe describe the six Practices at a high level and how each aligns with the Imperatives. Let’s begin with Clarity?
Clarity Imperative Practices: Clarify Context; Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent
There are three Practices associated with the Clarity Imperative. First, teams need context for why their collaboration matters. We call this Practice Clarify Context. Clarify Context directs groups, teams, councils, or whatever to understand their organizational reason for being. What customers, internal or external, are they meant to serve? What results are expected of them? If a team has a strategy, a vision or mission they probably have adequate context for their collaboration. Its always worth reviewing, of course, but those things are a good start.
The other two of the three Clarity-related Practices are Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent. Inspire Purpose describes what HPC users often describe as the Big Why of the team, i.e., why is the team’s collaboration team important? More accurately, what is the value their collaboration will create over and above the sum of their individual efforts? The most important thing teams working on Inspire Purpose do is develop a purpose statement that expresses their Big Why.
Once teams have a clear and compelling purpose statement, they move on to the third Clarity-related Practice, Crystalize Intent which answers another fundamental question: what? Just because we understand the Why of our collaboration it doesn’t mean we know what it’s going to take to deliver on it, the specific tasks and initiatives. We call the Practice Crystallize Intent because it is meant to crystallize the specific work that will deliver the team’s purpose and be aligned with its broader organizational context. With these three Practices, Clarify Context, Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent, teams create the clarity needed to make their collaboration most productive.
Intentionality Imperative Practice: Cultivate Collaboration
Next, teams move on to the Intentionality Imperative and its one related Practice, Cultivate Collaboration. Cultivate Collaboration leverages the Clarity that the first three Practices create to help build strong, productive relationships. In Crystallize Intent we identified the specific work that requires collaboration. In Cultivate Collaboration, we focus on the important relationships needed to get that work done, who will do what with whom in service of the team’s purpose. We also have collaborative partners commit to how they will need to behave together.
Discipline Imperative Practices: Activate Ways of Working and Sustain & Renew
Activate Ways of Working is the next Practice and the first of two Practices related to the Discipline Imperative. Activate Ways of Working, as I discussed when I covered the Imperatives previously, involves crafting a few, simple team processes and lining those up with your Purpose and your Crystallized Intent so that your ways of working support what you agreed to focus on.
The second Discipline-related Practice is called Sustain & Renew. This Practice is about continuous improvement and learning. Like Activate Ways of Working, you are likely to find things like Sustain & Renew in other team effectiveness frameworks. The difference with HPC is focus and alignment. Sustain & Renew is grounded in a clear team purpose and focused only on what’s needed to support the specific collaborative work the team has identified. If a team is not growing, not doing things to sustain its effectiveness and taking time to renew itself, it won’t last. That’s why we call it what we call it Sustain & Renew. It’s about regularly pausing to reflect, to inquire and figure out what needs to be learned to get better and move forward. Teams must develop a rhythm, a habit and cadence of learning for this Practice to deliver value; that’s why it’s a part of the Discipline Imperative.
So, there you have it; Three Imperatives, Clarity, Intentionality, and Discipline that lead to six related Practices. The next several blog posts will go into detail about how to implement each of the six Practices. I recognize I’ve given you a lot of information here. And of course you can always buy the book.
Now that I’ve laid the groundwork, I’m excited to show you how to put the Practices work. I’ll be doing that in the next six blog posts.
