Not All Collaboration Is Created Equal
Collaboration has to be more than unsustainable fire-fighting. It has to be proactive.
In earlier blogs I alluded to what I call the Levels of Collaboration. It’s time I explained what I mean.
My research at Mars led me to the conclusion that 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
The levels idea had its genesis when I was working with a group of senior Mars HR folks in Europe. I had struggled to help them understand that teamwork and collaboration don’t always look the same or accomplish the same ends. It was late at night and I was alone in a hotel room in Brussels trying to find the right words or graphics, anything to help make this concept clearer for my clients.
So, I went back to the data I had gathered. I reviewed the analysis of the hundreds of team member interviews I’d done. I wanted to see how people spoke about the ways they were working together. Lo and behold, a pattern emerged. People described their collaboration in different ways depending on the circumstances, what they were doing and how much collaboration was required. I organized my insights into what I now label the Levels of Collaboration.
In previous podcasts I’ve talked about the most effective collaboration as that which creates value over and above the sum of individual efforts. Based on this idea, I illustrated the levels according to how much value each level created for the team and organization, going from least potential for value creation to greatest. That’s the order in which I’ll describe them now.
Co-operation and benign neglect
The first two levels, which are closely related, I dubbed 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 I mean by Co-operation.
Benign neglect is 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
I see a lot of these first two levels. 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.
A few additional points
Not all teams require intentional collaboration. In an earlier podcast I talked about a Sales team that consisted of three distinct groups that didn’t need to work together to achieve their goals. They acted accordingly and spent most of their time working in their individual silos and it all worked out.
Also remember that there are dysfunctional levels of collaboration that erode value. For example, destructive politics. All organizations have politics; that’s just reality. Getting things done by under-handed political means, working behind peoples back and exerting power in deceitful ways requires collaboration. If you work in a culture where destructive politics are the norm, it will be difficult to foster and ignite higher levels of collaboration.
Collaboration cycle
Finally, we found at Mars that about 85% of collaboration played out in a cycle. That cycle started with Co-operation, which at some point shifted to Coordination and then moved up to Reactive Collaboration. Once the collaborative need was addressed, the players returned to Co-operation and the cycle started again.
When people at Mars talked to me about teamwork or collaboration, this cycle is what they usually meant. There are two key features of the cycle. The first is helpfulness, jumping in when needed, as Mars Associates tend to do. The second and the main problem with this cycle is it involves repeated fire-fighting. Stuff gets done but at a high cost to people’s energy and engagement.
It’s that tendency towards fire-fighting that makes Intentional Collaboration so important. Yet, we noticed that very few teams were using Intentional Collaboration. That missed opportunity is what we designed the High Performance Collaboration Framework to address. I’ll address the particulars of the Framework in the next several blogs.
