Executive Thought Leadership

Leaders Needed to Bridge the Gap to Effective Collaboration

Mix these vital ingredients to lead effective collaboration initiatives

By Michael Astle, Cisco Executive Thought Leadership

Collaboration is necessary to business success, right?

It is if you listen to the 394 executives around the world who participated in an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) survey and report called “Collaboration: transforming the way business works.” Although they currently work within the confines of their own spheres—functions, locations, or organizations—globalization, along with its increased opportunities for new markets and productivity, as well as competition, will require collaborating across all these boundaries within the next three years.

Employees Want to Collaborate

Many executives think collaboration is easy, judging by the way they presumptively mandate collaboration in their organizations. But you’ll get a different view if you speak to the people who are trying to collaborate. They often tell of failed collaborations that waste resources and even create resentment and a determination to “go it alone.” They cite lack of common goals, miscommunication, perceived inequities, distrust, insufficient resources, and a lack of incentives as the reasons for the failures.

According to the EIU survey, employees want to collaborate. They say they have the right culture of trust and desire to partner. Executives and employees report that leadership, incentives, processes, and metrics are the missing ingredients. In many ways, these ingredients flow from strong leadership and the organizational behavior it develops. Without the right leadership, collaboration is an action with no one acting.

Use All the Ingredients of Successful Collaborations

The following are not secret ingredients, but they are missing from most collaborative efforts today. Mix them in to maximize the success of your collaboration initiatives.

Leadership. As a leader, inspire your team members to collaborate. Though you’ll find employees want to collaborate, doing so successfully is not intuitive. They need to understand where to start, how to set goals in line with your objectives, what to do when conflicts arise, and how to divide responsibilities, among other things. Work through these processes with them.

Formal process to find the right outside collaboration partners. You have a process for selecting suppliers and other vendors. Set up a similar process for selecting partners with whom you will collaborate. Identify your goals and the necessary capabilities of the partner. Create a formal process for testing and establishing trust. And, employ a consultant that specializes in finding the right partners for your objectives.

Planning, goals, and follow-up. Seven of 10 collaborations fail when they don’t begin with careful planning and provide proper follow-up, according to Gene Slowinski, professor in the Graduate School of Management at the Rutgers University School of Business. Firms that identify joint goals, allocate sufficient resources, and identify roles and responsibilities enjoy the exact opposite results: 70 percent succeed.

Open, clear, and frequent communications. Right in the planning stage, create the means you will use to communicate throughout the collaboration. The staffing firm Aramark discovered that managers were extending employment offers to candidates who had already received offers from other parts of the organization. To rectify the overlap, Aramark developed a shared, real-time recruitment database that gave all hiring managers a view to where candidates were in the hiring process, as well as the ability to see candidate details and set up interviews.

Twenty percent of employees in the EIU survey claimed their organizations failed to provide a compelling reason for collaborating. Communicate the goals, processes, and expectations clearly. And keep the channels of communication open. Successful leaders spend as much as one-third of their time on the phone with team members, according to a study called “Can absence Make a Team Grow Stronger” reported in the Harvard Business Review, May 1, 2004.

Metrics and rewards. The EIU survey revealed that many organizations do not measure their success. Maybe they believe collaborations will succeed naturally. We know they won’t. Then reward your employees for their collaboration successes. Without incentives your vision may become just a dream.

Lead the Way

Firms will continue to globalize, according to another report by the EIU called “Foresight 2020.” Business functions are atomizing into parts of the world where they are completed most efficiently and effectively, opportunities are opening in markets where firms have little experience, and competitors are rising from places you’ve never expected competition. The role of collaboration will only grow in importance, becoming a basic tenet of any successful organization.

Collaborating is not an activity that can be dictated by managers. It requires leaders who identify the right partners, paint their vision, form the right processes, communicate often, and, most importantly, lead the way with goals, metrics, and incentives.