How To Cultivate Collaboration
Collaboration is like garden that needs cultivating, so how does doing a ropes course help grow results?
We are in the middle of a series of blogs about the six Practices of High Performance Collaboration. This blog discusses the Practice Cultivate Collaboration.
Cultivate Collaboration is absolutely essential
To illustrate why this Practice is important, and how it’s different, I want to tell a story. It was around 2012 and my team and I were still developing the Framework. I was boarding a plane for an engagement with a team in China, as I recall. I was settling into my seat when my phone buzzed. It was a text from one of my brothers. I am one of 11 children by the way; I am number six with five older siblings and five younger. This whole group dynamics thing is something I grew up doing and have grown up well suited for based on my central position in my family of origin.
At any rate, this text was from child #7, one of my younger brothers. I noticed there was a video embedded in the text so I clicked on it. I saw two rows of six guys – and they were all guys – in polo shirts and khaki pants. They were standing facing each other on a platform in a windowless hotel meeting room, shaking their arms forcefully, pounding their forearms against each other, grimacing and chanting something in a strange language. I had no idea what I was seeing.
We hadn’t taken off yet and the door of the plane was still open so I called my brother. It turns out he was in London. I asked him, “What’s going on?” “You’re never going to believe what they’re making us do!”, he told me.
Some genius in higher management thought this would be good team building
He was there on a business trip. He was part of a sales and marketing organization within a business-to-business industrial software company. The entire sales and marketing function – around 30 folks - including people from North America, Australia and Europe was gathered in London to do some team building.
His company had been acquired about a year earlier by another, larger company. Their smaller company, now a division of the larger one, wasn’t doing well. As my brother put it, some “genius in higher management” decided what they needed to turn things around was a little old fashioned team building. What I was seeing in that video was this group being taught how to do the haka, a ceremonial war dance of the Maori people of New Zealand. The haka is quite stirring to watch when it’s done well. If you’ve ever seen the New Zealand All Blacks, the country’s national rugby team, they open every match with a performance of the haka. It’s impressive, exciting.
Along with those 30 people from around, the company had flown in a couple of Maori tribespeople to act as instructors. They were gathered at a very expensive hotel in the center of London where, in groups of six, the team spent 4 hours learning how to do the haka. They would then perform their hakas for each other and be judged by their peers. The team judged to have out-haka-ed the others received a prize, some small token for their efforts.
9 months later the division was sold off
Remember: this team building was meant to help turn the business around. Think about the odds of its being effective. It didn’t surprise me when 9 months later when my brother called and told me his division had been sold off by the parent company. They never could turn the corner.
This is the sort of thing that passes for team building, trying to build more effective relationships at work and within teams. It doesn’t work. We’ve come to rely on tools and techniques like these that don’t deliver a difference in performance. Cultivate Collaboration is about building relationships in teams but it’s different.
To make collaboration accountable it must be cultivated and contracted
Cultivate Collaboration is about accountability, about building accountable collaborative relationships. It is done in 3 ways, through 3 different sets of conversations.
We begin by creating accountability between the leader and the team. A manager says, “Look, team, here is what I am expecting you to be accountable for in terms of collaboration, the behaviors I will be looking for if we are going to do what we committed to do through our Inspiring Purpose and Crystallized Intent – the previous two Practices.
It goes the other way, too. The team also says to their manager, “Fair enough. Here’s what we’ll need from you in terms of leadership, guidance and coaching to deliver on our collaborative commitments. It’s two-way contracting building mutual accountability.
The 3 Directions of Accountability
The next step is team members talking to each other. Think back to the Radar Screen in Crystallize Intent where subgroups were named to run certain projects. In Cultivate Collaboration those groups get together. They discuss who is going to do what and with whom, who will be accountable for the specific parts of each project or initiative and how they will hold each other accountable. They also discuss how their boss could hold them accountable for the commitments they are making to each other.
Notice that there are three directions of accountability: leader to team, team to leader and team member to team member. We are weaving a fabric of collaborative accountability. You don’t get that by doing the haka, going out on a ropes course or in a paintball battle.
Know who we are and how it will affect our teamwork
There is one other element to this. We want our working relationships to be trusting and rewarding. Once you’ve determined who is doing what with whom, and what the accountabilities are, it’s time to sit down and ask a deeper question: “Who are you, who am I and how will our personalities and preferences affect how we work together?” It’s not necessary, but this is where you can use something like Myers Briggs, DiSC, or Strengths Finder. You could use any instrument that reveals a bit about your personality or preferences or that speaks to your natural inclinations or strengths.
You use these instruments to understand how your preferences and strengths can support your work together. You might talk about how, given your profile, areas of project you are well suited to, or aspects of the project it might be best for you to avoid. You can also talk about how your attributes would enable you to support others and how they might support you.
make a contract of commitment and accountability for the team’s collaboration
This is different from doing the haka or a ropes course. It’s also different from how personality tests are usually used, as a generic “get-to-know-each-other” exercise. Contracting as I’ve described it builds commitment and accountability. Then you use the information about yourself in constructive and focused ways to help you do the shared work that must be done.
After decades of working with teams, I have never seen relationships get stronger than when people sit down for a Cultivate Collaboration workshop, when they connect to each other around meaningful work, make accountable commitments and figure out how they can add the most value to the collaboration.
To sum it up, Cultivate Collaboration is about contracting, connecting individuals to the work of the team; it’s about how each individual can make their shared work stronger and better. It’s about creating more intentional collaboration. You might recall that this Practice is a part of the Intentionality Imperative. In fact, it’s the only Practice that is directly aligned to Intentionality.
You don’t arrive at Cultivate Collaboration without having created Clarity using the Practices Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent. You come to this third Practice knowing why your collaboration matters, which work requires collaboration, and who should be doing it. Cultivate Collaboration is the payoff for all that work.
The next blog is about developing good team habits, the disciplines of running a team on a regular basis. I look forward to building on what we have covered so far so you can see how the Framework comes together.
