Executive Thought Leadership

Solving the Collaboration Conundrum

A comprehensive study finds that collaboration is easier said than done. Those firms that collaborate successfully share a number of traits worth sharing.

By Eric J. Adams

Senior executives today pay homage to collaboration, there’s a wealth of collaboration technologies available, and tens of thousands of words have been written on the subject.

Yet, despite the buzz, many firms simply aren’t doing a good job of collaborating.

Three in four of 394 executives surveyed in a 2007 Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) study sponsored by Cisco Executive Thought Leadership say they collaborate regularly across a broad range of issues, but seven out of 10 say efforts fail when collaborative initiatives aren’t carefully planned and given adequate follow-up. Executives give a wide range of reasons why companies have trouble collaborating, including muddy definition of responsibilities; a gap in expectations among partners; missing preparation, targets, benefits, and communication; and nonexistent rewards for collaboration results.

Most importantly, half of executives say collaboration failures are due to a lack of a clear commitment of top management, “who need to set an example,” and a lack of effective leadership “in managing change and identifying in advance the typical dynamics of organizational evolution.”

Collaboration Is a Business Imperative

Executives understand that effective collaboration is truly a competitive advantage. It helps companies move fast, move efficiently, and grow profits. And in this day of shrinking product cycles, an early-mover advantage is often the key to rapid growth.

Collaboration is particularly important when moving into the unknown. Even traditionally international industries—pharmaceuticals, banking, consumer-packaged goods—have become even more global as the barriers to investing in emerging markets have fallen.

To share in this growth, corporations need to build collaborative networks and think of the world as a supply base for talent and not just materials. That’s because companies, customers, processes, and supply chains will continue to fragment as companies expand globally. Collaborative networks (facilitated by information digitization and broadband growth) will knit together these disparate groups, and move work to where it can be done best.

This much is clear: companies that excel in collaborative problem solving will be better able to grow by entering markets early, taking advantage of local knowledge, and ramping up quickly.

Rethink Your Collaborative Practices

Now is the time to establish formal collaboration processes because the future of collaboration figures to be even more complex. While firms have traditionally collaborated vertically—with suppliers and distributors, for instance—future collaboration will extend to broader communities of specialized players, from customers, partners, and freelance contractors to competitors, regional distributors, and university researchers.

The EIU study provides a few insights into what it takes to collaborate successfully:

1. Senior executives need to get on board. There was near-universal agreement among the study participants that collaborative relationships are growing increasingly crucial to business success. Executives spend at least two-thirds of their time currently working alone, with people in their own functional silos, or with people at the same location. But in the next three years, more than one-half of executives say they will spend more time working across functions, locations, and organizations.

2. Successful collaboration requires a culture of sharing. Companies that collaborate successfully have a common cultural profile: employees trust each other, sharing is more prevalent than secrecy, communication is frequent and open, employees actively seek specialized knowledge from other organizations, and employees are eager to partner with other organizations.

3. Collaboration process and metrics are critical. Despite the scale of investment in many collaborative arrangements, providing guidelines for collaborating and measuring and monitoring the benefits still prove elusive for many companies. In the EIU survey, only a minority has adopted a formal process for collaboration. Almost 80 percent said their companies have not attempted to measure how collaboration can help to achieve any business objectives. Among the 20 percent that have attempted to measure the benefits, several alluded to difficulties in coming up with appropriate methodologies, but a few have developed useful metrics that provide insight into the collaboration process and its results.

4. Collaboration tools are underused. Despite the rise of powerful networks with universal connectivity, there is little consensus on the most effective ways to use technology to facilitate collaboration. Virtually all executives use e-mail, two-thirds use instant messaging, one-half share calendars and intranets, and just more than 40 percent use web conferencing. But few feel the current bevy of tools added much to the collaborative process. Leaders need to effect a cultural change among their employees to drive adoption of these tools—through education and process change. And tool developers need to consider adoption of their tools as they develop and sell

Take Control of Collaboration

Collaboration will become ever more important as organizations and markets further globalize and take advantage of the cost and expertise advantages gained by sharing their functions with partners. Executives recognize this.

For the most part, they have not recognized that collaborating successfully is difficult. Yet they can be successful when they apply ample doses of leadership, process, metrics, and cultural change.