It’s in this intersection, where the horizontal and vertical meet, that opportunities for conflict arise. If business in the vertical needs attention – a poor-performing quarter, client crisis, or even a high-performing quarter when you need all your people back in the room – then these things will take priority. If you need to cut back on resource commitment in the collaboration, the other partners may grow to resent that – especially if they have to fill the gap left by you.
I’ve also found that because each partner is tasked with hitting hard targets in their vertical, some are tempted to compete to maximise their share in the partnership to justify the time spent in collaboration. It may even become tempting (in the worst cases) to actively undermine other partners, or to make a big deal over any mistake they make. I’ve been on the receiving end of that. It hurts. I’ve also driven that sort of behaviour in my teams. Karma.
Going back to the research, I raised an eyebrow as I read that 73% of companies cited a refusal to share important information between partners as a source of frustration. Similarly, 63% reported a lack of faith that individuals in one business would do anything to benefit another. If true, this is clearly defending of turf; siloed thinking writ large. I’ve certainly been guilty of that.
It’s not just group collaboration either. The difficulties at the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal occur between people embroiled in interpersonal conflict. A happy resolution in a disagreement is the common goal on the horizontal plane, reached only through a collaborative process. Competing against that in the vertical plane of each combatant are individual preconceptions, assumptions, desires and needs. Not to mention all the stuff that informed their formative years, as discussed in earlier chapters: the drive to differentiate, the urge to compete, our well-rehearsed conflict abilities.
I mean, really, when faced with a potential collaboration project, who can blame my dear colleague for posing the question: what’s in it for me?
Hopefully, we can restore his faith.
Better collaboration – make a list, get a ritual
I’m going to get temporarily biblical on you. Luke 4:23 to be precise.
‘Physician, heal thyself’ is an ancient Greek proverb. Luke, who was a Greek scholar, quotes the phrase in his telling of Jesus’s return to Nazareth to do a hometown gig at his local synagogue.
Jesus gets a little giddy with the occasion and tells everyone he’s the son of God. Presumably after a short period of pin-drop silence, the locals, who knew Jesus from a boy and couldn’t reconcile this claim with someone they knew to be the lowly son of a poor carpenter, become incensed.
According to Luke, Jesus then says: “Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.” For those not familiar with biblical geography, Capernaum was (and still is) a nearby town on the shore of Lake Galilee. Jesus had been there curing blind lepers, and word that the Messiah was in town had spread to Nazareth. The Nazarenes thought that surely this Jesus, familiar to them from his days in short pants, couldn’t possibly presume to be the son of God. They demanded he perform miracles as proof.
Jesus, more superstar than wedding DJ, never did requests. Unimpressed, the locals tried to kill him for blasphemy. A salutary tale – Jesus created a lot of conflict. What Luke was trying to draw attention to was that even messiahs need to check themselves.
Way before it was quoted by Jesus, the phrase had been an invocation to ward off hypocrisy. It asks us to attend to our own faults before pointing out the same in others. Which is good advice for aspirational leadership gurus, as well as would-be messiahs. It’s also a pertinent consideration for those struggling with a collaboration exercise.
In attending to our own faults, it’s vital that we’re able to recognise those aspects of our nature we may not readily confess to. It’s even more helpful, just to keep ourselves grounded, to sometimes remind ourselves that we have flaws – otherwise we will all end up claiming to be the offspring of a divine entity.
There’s a very simple way to avoid this…
Make a list
I have no qualifications in psychology, but I’m pretty sure most people have enough self-awareness to know their weaknesses. Even if it’s rare to admit those faults to anyone you like or love, it’s the admission to yourself that counts. From there it’s easy to set them down in list order. There are some good reasons why you might want to do that.
Why lists work
Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, health campaigner and writer. In his 2008 bestseller The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande showed how the introduction of tick-box checklists achieved impressive results in aviation, large-scale construction, and his own profession – medicine.
At the time of Gawande’s writing, there were 230m major surgical operations happening annually. On average, 7m people were left disabled and 1m died from complications arising from their care. Gawande attributed this to human fallibility and inattention. Seemingly mundane details were easily overlooked or skipped, which sometimes happens when medical people are confident in their abilities but under pressure because they are elbows deep in their patients.
According to The Checklist Manifesto, there are over 2,500 different types of surgical procedures. The care teams administering these procedures perform, on average, 178 actions every day to every person in intensive care. These are undertaken by a range of specialists often acting in isolation to the others under difficult working conditions. During observation, doctors and nurses only made an error in 1% of these actions – this still amounted to almost two errors daily per person.
For example: a central line is a catheter passed through a vein into the chest portion of the vena cava, the large vein that returns blood to the heart. They are used to administer chemotherapy and other drugs. A five-point list – which included a prompt to wash hands with soap for 30 seconds, clean the patient’s skin with antiseptic, and wear a sterile gown – reduced central line infections from 11% to zero in the hospitals tested. Or, in other words, spared the hospital 43 infections, eight deaths and $2m.
Initially these lists struggled to gain acceptance. That’s because they weren’t technical; they dealt with basic tasks. You can see how that might seem like an insult to the intelligence of experts who have spent years both training and practically applying their knowledge in highly skilled roles.
However, the results spoke for themselves. And one in particular stood out like the proverbial sore thumb (suitably swabbed with antiseptic). This returns us to the problematic theme of collaboration.
A 19-point list, developed by Gawande for the World Health Organisation (WHO), was designed to enshrine collaborative behaviour in the small army of medical experts gathered around their patient stretched out on the operating table. You’d think that, there of all places, the collective weight of medical knowledge would be able to pin down collaboration, to stop it streaking about the firmament to help save a life.
Yet, in a survey of 1,000 operating-room staff in the US, Israel, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, only 10% of anaesthesia residents, 28% of nurses and 39% of anaesthesiologists felt their operations had high levels of teamwork. By contrast, 64% of surgeons – the operating theatre equivalent of the boss – reported high levels of teamwork.
The mismatch is striking to me and reminiscent of my former CEO, who thought going on about collaboration would summon it into existence. Gawande reported the sense of teamwork he’d experienced in theatre was more due to luck than design. He described the lack of it as a consequence of the complexity of his job, which creates a division of tasks by expertise. This resulted in highly skilled people sticking narrowly to their domain.
Here I see the vertical plane of the personal clashing with the horizontal goals of collaboration. Even more so when I learned that surgeons often walked into the room fully gowned, expecting everyone to be in place, including the patient, unconscious and ready to go. If you are a member of the supporting team, the surgeon may not even know your name – a common occurrence. That’s