Collaboration is Hard but Worth It!

by | May 31, 2021 | Opentalk Blogs

From working with hundreds of teams, individuals and a wide range of organisations, I can attest to the multiple benefits of collaboration. Collaboration can be an effective and sustainable process for ground-breaking problem solving and change through building relationships and cohesion across boundaries.

As organisations face complex challenges, be they entrenched social issues such as health, justice, education or how we evolve our workspaces and practices to a post-pandemic world, collaboration needs to become more of a ‘norm’ of how we work together. Understanding the foundations of healthy collaborative practice will help us benefit more from this way of working.

According to research by the UK’s Institute for Government (Miles & Trott, 2011) and Bradley (2020), the reasons many collaborations run aground boils down to Time, Turf and Trust. While I will expand on what is meant by Time, Turf and Trust, I want to add one other risk to collaboration, which comes in the not so hidden form of Hierarchy.

In practice, ‘collaborative processes’ are often little more than a series of meetings with poorly aligned agendas and goals. Many groups think that they are collaborating by ‘coming together’. But collaboration is more than sitting around a table and ‘discussing’ or ‘managing a meeting’.

Collaborative processes lend themselves well to situations where there are:

  1. Many stakeholders involved, with multiple perspectives on what the problem is and a range of ‘right’ or possible solutions.
  2. Unresolved, deeply embedded issues, which perhaps, previous attempts failed to address.
  3. Time and energy to invest in a more thorough process to fundamentally address issues.

Collaboration, as a process therefore, requires an investment of TIME. Ultimately this investment will lead to better relationships, ways of working together and better outcomes.

However, the process and outcomes of collaboration often suffer from TURF wars – each person minding their patch – and the very barriers collaboration is supposed to break down can become more entrenched, reinforcing or developing ‘factions’.

From my work with senior teams, I see that a source of this dysfunction is often rooted in the divisional structure of organisations. Although the leadership team comprises divisional heads, responsible for strategic decisions about the whole organisation, they are judged on the performance of their individual areas. They must ‘fight’ for limited resources for their area and over time the divisional walls can go higher. The coordination of these various needs, tends to be channelled through an individual ‘leader’, who in effect becomes an ‘arbiter of factions’.

How can you overcome this ‘turf’ tendency?

  1. Build a systemic view of issues – this helps you to see the interrelationships and dependencies with others across the organisation and that all are part of a bigger ‘system’.
  2. Align individual agendas to the overall organisational strategy and the purpose of collaboration.

Few organisations across any sector are immune to these issues. It is still rare in my experience, to see a cohesive and united leadership culture, where individuals ‘give up’ their agendas for the good of the whole organisation. Though there are of course examples of good practice- this practice is not pervasive enough yet. If senior managers are coming to the top table to ‘fight’ for limited resources and to defend and promote their ‘patch’, it’s hard to see where there is room for TRUST. As the behaviours of the top team shape the mindset and culture across the wider organisation, it is important for leadership to be practiced in building trust. (See my previous blogs discussing the importance of Trust and how to build trust).

Some key points around Trust, in relation to collaboration, include:

  1. Focus on Relationships – the key to success in most disciplines is an ability to build relationships and specifically in collaboration, with people with very divergent thinking and needs to yours.
  2. Agree the behaviours and values you want to uphold in the collaborative process, role model them and agree how to hold each other to account.

And finally, HIERARCHY is endemic in any system but once it is introduced into the collaborative process, the dynamic of conversations changes. Often the ‘most senior’ person leads the collaborative process. Due to ‘hierarchy’ they typically become the focal point and people either yah or nay their thoughts or even worse, wait for them to take the lead, before following suit. Which begs the question, why they are in a ‘collaborative’ process?

If you are facing this hierarchy challenge:

  1. Agree values and practices you will follow to maintain the peer relationship model.
  2. Allow those, no matter their level, with the appropriate facilitative skills to manage the people dynamics and movement of the process forward.

Collaboration might seem easy but if it were, we’d all be doing it well and enjoying productive processes all the time. Working in a truly collaborative way requires embracing a new way of thinking and working. These essential foundational points can help you engage with the process more easily. In summary:

  • Pick the right issues
  • Dedicate Time to the process
  • Be aware of and avoid Turf wars, driving the organisational agenda forward
  • Build the foundations for and/or strengthen Trust
  • Avoid the trap of Hierarchy- identify the person with the requisite skills to facilitate

Collaboration requires commitment to a process – a commitment at the individual, collective and organisational levels, if collaboration is to become a more embedded approach and an effective one for problem solving and change. Echoing the conclusions of the UK’s Institute for Government report (Miles & Trott, 2011), ‘collaboration is hard, but it is worth it’.

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