Famine not only arises from bad geography, bad weather and bad luck, but from the conflicting interests of big business, governments, charities and NGOs, world banks, international trade and economic bodies, investor groups, patent owners, unions of producers, unions of farmers, etc. Organisations all.
However, it’s my hope that we can collectively reduce the debilitating effects of conflict in the world by positively improving the culture in each of our individual spheres of influence – a micro approach to a macro problem.
Whether you manage a small team or a global organisation, whether you are part of a group or running one, whatever endeavour you are involved in, personally or professionally, by outing, understanding and living by a personal values framework, we can reach a place of greater harmony and collaboration.
A bit like those little birds Darwin discovered in the Galapagos: be more finch.
3 Volkswagen went out of its way to invent tech that told the world its cars were clean, while they were really emitting pollutants at 40 times the legal limit.
Step three: Drop the C-bomb
Collaboration: why are we obsessed and are we any good at it?
One of the irritating things about collaboration is that it’s difficult to achieve. Uniting everyone around a single vision is no mean feat – the average collaboration risks collapsing in on itself under the collective weight of the egos in any given team. Especially if you’ve overindulged on the ego-stacking front (a term I use to describe a personal temptation to overload a team with too many big personalities in the belief that they’re the most likely to get things done).
A lot of conflict can get stirred up that way.
The other irritant is the sheer frequency with which this C-word gets used. It’s sprayed around so liberally inside organisational life that, if you’re like me, the mention of it sets your teeth on edge. I worked for one CEO who would have sprinkled collaboration on his chips if such a thing were possible. He dropped the word so often, he must have thought that by this simple act of repetition it would just happen.
The Maitland report, discussed in the previous chapter, listed 28 FTSE 100 companies claiming collaboration – or its first cousin, teamwork – as one of their corporate values. Back in 2012, IBM’s global C-suite study of 1,709 CEOs found that 75% saw collaboration as the key to future success and recruited with this in mind. When you learn that a large chunk of the Forbes 1000 also claim collaboration in their values framework, it becomes apparent: we’re obsessed. Whenever the person at the top of an organisation is speaking or writing, the chances are that, in a game of buzzword bingo, collaboration will keep the fingers on the buzzers very busy.
BUT. Are we any good at it?
I believe this ongoing preoccupation is actually because successful collaboration in business is elusive. We’re not very good at it at all. While we can all see collaboration’s huge potential to change our fortunes, it streaks by overhead, comet-like, to remind us that we don’t really understand how to do it.
The same is true in politics. With the loudest voices gathered at the extremes, the rest are drowned out. Even views that are just a few degrees to the left or right of the noisemakers are shouted down, encouraging people to retreat to a safe place where everyone holds an identical view: the infamous bubbles of social media. Yet, many people wish that those in politics could reach across the divide to achieve consensus, to work together cross-party to solve the big problems. If only they were not hemmed in by their ideologies! Here again collaboration becomes comet-like – streaking across the heavens to taunt those below.
As for me, I’m looking heavenwards and being taunted like everyone else. A report I recently read (more on that in the next section) claimed group collaboration projects fail most of the time. Admittedly, this must mean they also work out at least some of the time. It’s worth asking, though – does the benefit of success outweigh the cost of failure?
The dream for any team leader would be to possess the managerial superpower of a sixth sense that could identify in advance which collaborations would fail – they could then invest everyone’s time into the guaranteed wins. Imagine the positive effect that would have on your culture. Morale would be stratospheric, the energy-sapping drain of interpersonal politics might be reduced to zero and, once everyone’s palms got too sore to continue high-fiving, this would leave everyone with more time to generate still more growth in the enterprise.
Is this the type of dream that only occurs in pipe form – or can we really and finally remove what stands in the way of success?
The barriers to effective collaboration
The report I alluded to above makes a compelling case that successful collaboration may well be beyond our grasp. At least if you don’t get the basics right. It’s a 2015 study involving 106 European and US companies participating over a period of six years called, ‘Why Supply Chain Collaboration Fails: The Socio-Structural View of Resistance to Relational Strategies’. Despite the less than snappy title, it’s a critical read with far wider implications than supply chain economics.
There were a couple of specific barriers that stood out:
Barrier one: tarnished reputation
Managers struggled to assess in advance the true value of any collaboration. The resulting poor return on investment was said to tarnish the reputation of future collaboration strategies.
Organisations ‘invested scarce resource in collaborations that offered no unique value co-creation potential’.
It’s easy to see how these frustrations may lead to…
Barrier two: territoriality
Seventy-three percent of companies cited territoriality and turf wars as the most problematic barrier. The report highlighted evidence that showed partners could not break out of their siloed mindset to make collaboration happen. It contained a telling remark made by a senior manager;
“People are more concerned about who will get the glory or the blame rather than evaluat[ing] whether or not a decision will benefit the entire company.”
This resonated with me. I recently asked a close colleague to help me with a collaboration project. There was a momentary faraway look in his eyes which seemed to suggest he was mentally grasping for the unobtainable. He then snapped out of his reverie to answer thus:
I totally get that. He’d been burned before. In our sector of industry, several specialist businesses often come together at the request of a joint client to work on an integrated marketing campaign. I see these as a cocktail of roughly three parts optimism to one part trepidation.
They can be an exciting business opportunity, but the path is strewn with trip hazards related to human nature. Even the slightest problem, one partner in the endeavour failing to meet a deadline for instance, can cause crab-like behaviour in which everyone scuttles back to their silos and may only emerge again to point an accusatory claw at the others. Once this happens, the issue becomes amplified and the management energy required to get things back on track may undo any benefits of the collaboration.
Setting aside the findings of the report, there are other hurdles to seamless collaboration. For me, the main flashpoint occurs at the intersection of two planes.
When worlds collide: the horizontal versus the vertical
I think of collaboration as a horizontal occupation – organisations are tasked to work side by side in partnership to achieve a single aim.
Each partner also has their day-to-day obligations outside