Credo #5: Irresistible collaboration includes shared goals, but relies on shared work
Bees collaborate by working together
Shared goals matter, but not as much as you might think
Experts will tell you shared goals are essential to teamwork and collaboration. Our research showed something else. Instead of fostering teamwork, shared goals drive more individual effort. Think about an office supplies sales team that’s told the business wants them to grow by 10%. What will they do? The paper salesperson is going to do all they can to sell more printer paper. The tech sales person will push those high-margin laptops. The person selling pens and markers will do all they can to make those writing implements fly off the shelves. Each of them will rely on what they know best and are good at to reach that shared goal. Good for them. But where’s the collaboration? There isn’t any.
Maybe there doesn’t need to be, and that’s okay. But calling that teamwork only confuses things. Shared work, by contrast, focuses collaborative effort. Think about a car design team. It’s a group of highly interdependent designers, engineers, marketing people, sales people and even finance folks. They labor together to create a beautiful car that’s mechanically sound, will sell well at a price that makes sense and generate a profit. It’s the clarity about the work they share that drives their collaboration, that makes working together essential, even irresistible. Should they also have shared goals? Sure, that’s how they will know they achieved what they set out to do. But it was the specific work they shared that ignited powerful collaborative behaviors.
