Masterclass: The cultures of collaboration

In part one of this series we set our definition for collaboration and introduced the idea of team, community and network collaboration. As we move between each of these different types of working together, how do our traditional notions of collaboration and collaborative culture vary?

In Part 2 we’ll begin to explore this question in our journey to build better collaborative workplaces. While we do, it is important to keep in mind that collaboration happens both within and among organisations. Tapping the wider networks outside, collaborating across organisations is an essential part of the collaboration landscape. But for the purpose of this article, we are taking the perspective of at least starting within.

Understanding your collaboration culture
What is your organisation’s collaboration culture? Is it focused on rewarding only divisions or teams, or does it embrace the wider organisational community and connect to the looser networks, inside and outside your walls? Is collaboration forced, or even stifled by vertical rewards structures? Or is it a natural practice, like breathing? Are you aware of the collaboration culture at the individual, team, organisation and even network level?
There are some basic indicators of a strong collaboration culture that work across all levels of collaboration. They include:

Reflective practices are valued. Reflection enables individuals, teams, communities and networks to learn and improve their collaborative practices. This includes all types of ongoing communication and feedback;
A receptive environment for learning from mistakes. Mistakes are discussable learning moments rather than shaming moments. Being ‘right’ is not the only thing valued so being wrong is not hidden, hiding learning and collaborative moments. This includes constructive criticism and critical thinking in general;
Transparency is the sets of tools and practices that supports reflective practices and the culture of learning from mistakes. Most importantly this includes speaking up when something is wrong and doing it with respect and good intent;
Awareness of, and balance between, competition and cooperation. Awareness of the impacts of competition – how much focus to put on individual, team and organisational achievement;
Willingness to surface and share expertise. This means people are encouraged to and are allowed the time to share what they know in addition to focusing on their own work.

Attention to relationships. Both the formation of and attention to relationships are critical. Are the words ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’ part of your working vocabulary?
Each of these indicators reflects team culture, community culture and network culture. And all of them are influenced by leadership practices, particularly when collaboration is within an organisation.
Let’s look at each of these a bit closer.

Impact of leadership on collaboration culture
The six broad cultural indicators of strong collaboration all have a link back to leadership. Leadership is a keystone for establishing supportive collaboration cultures, especially in teams and communities within organisations. This is based on how leaders embody and embed their beliefs, values and assumptions in the fabric of their organisation. As they walk their collaboration walk, so do others and this is an essential part of embedding collaboration culture in an organisation.
A shorthand for this list in earlier eras might have been, “How does one get ahead around here?” In the collaborative age, it is about creating the conditions so we can answer the question, “How do we get ahead around here?” To create a culture that supports collaboration, leaders must understand, create conditions for and model collaboration for teams, communities and networks.
There are six main behaviours leaders display that mould the organisation’s culture.1

Attention – what leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis – are they paying attention to collaborative strategies and behaviours from team, community and network perspectives?
Crisis behaviour – in crisis, how are leaders reacting to critical incidents and organisational crises – are they sacrificing long-term goals for short-term fixes which sabotage collaboration? Does fear of connecting to the larger network keep them from tapping into it?
Resource allocation – are leaders allocating for, and investing in, the collaboration capability? Is the investment attentive to all three types of collaboration?
Walking the talk – as leaders express their identity through deliberate role modelling, teaching, and coaching – so we follow!
Recognition – how leaders allocate rewards and status – are your leaders rewarding individual or collaborative behaviours? Or both?
Recruitment – leaders are key influences for how collaborative talent is brought into and nurtured in the organisation. Is there a plan and practice for recruiting, selecting and promoting good collaborators while edging out bad collaborative apples.

The best way to foster a value is by example. Here’s an instance of how leaders can demonstrate that they truly value collaboration. Leaders need to change their behaviour so that these types of stories circulate within their own organisations.
People are convinced by actions more than words. In organisations everyone watches the leaders for clues as to what is really valued and worthwhile. A collaboration culture emerges partly, but significantly, when leaders display behaviours that indicate they value collaboration.

Team culture
Effective team collaboration requires a culture that values and supports specific interdependencies between people who must achieve a shared goal. In other words, we look out for each other and we can’t succeed without each other. The collaboration is explicit and in organisations, embedded in a person’s work duties. Do your organisation’s teams have clarity around the following?

Priorities: team success prioritised and is in alignment with individual performance. Teams must recognise that individual identity and success is a long-term issue, while task completion is the priority of the short term. This stresses clarity of roles and the status inherent to those roles (as in, who is the boss?);
Meaning: the team is working towards delivering an outcome that is both meaningful to the team members and to the organisation;
Targets: the desired outcomes are clear in terms of time, budget and specification;
Explicit team processes. The collaborative interdependencies of a team benefit from clear, articulated team processes. This includes decision-making, leadership, communications and attention to both workflow and the work itself;
Learning: time and process is dedicated to learning from within and across teams. Processes like after-action reviews should be embedded in what is regarded as real work;
Speaking up: Whenever anyone has a concern, he or she speaks up and explains the concern in a complete, frank and respectful way;
Accountability: Everyone holds everyone else accountable for meeting expectations, for commitments and for bad behaviour – regardless of role or position. Every member has an influence on the team.2

Community culture
Community collaboration is often voluntary, so the issues of status and reputation carry a different weight from within teams and formal organisational structures. Communities can be challenging because they don’t have the ‘stick’ of ‘do this work or you won’t get paid’, and the status of organisational role might be irrelevant.
Community leaders often lead from their own passion. They either gain the support of members, or they are rejected. Members engage and build their own reputation through contribution, which might later indirectly reflect back in their rise within the organisation. Some things to examine in your organisation’s community collaboration culture include:

Community Coordinator or leadership practices. It matters how these leaders view and enact their roles. Facilitory practices aimed at increasing connections amongst community member, participation in the community and learning go farther than mandates. (We’ll say more about the Community Coordinator in Part 3 of this series).
Management support for community self-direction. Have senior and middle management successfully avoided tasking the community and recognise it’s important for it to be largely self-directing? Is the community there to support people who wish to enhance their craft, or is it merely an organisational initiative for sharing knowledge that people are instructed to attend? This is a key cultural difference between communities and teamsl;
Longer-term view. Does management understand and actively support (by allowing members to attend community events) the role of collaborative communities as a way of developing long-term capability?
Flexible views of participation benefits. Are there incentives or rewards for participation in communities or in addition to one’s team roles? Are there disincentives?
Time to participate. People need time to participate in communities and at some point, competition for time and attention that only focuses on one’s teams will kill community participation. Sometimes it is useful to protect some time for community participation. Other times they can thrive when people participate on their own time – but the value to the individual has to be very high;
Attention to using what is learnt in communities. How do you convert that knowledge and participation back into your organisation’s goals?

The evolution of a community culture is set in motion at its inception and continues, moment by moment, during the life of the community. How people respond to a situation and then how everyone else reacts becomes the driving force for culture development.
For example, if your community communicates using an online forum and a member posts a message stating her heartfelt and well-intentioned opinion and then this post is flatly rejected by another member in a way that reeks of arrogance, this situation becomes a moment where culture is incrementally created. If the community says nothing, this behaviour receives tacit approval.
In time it becomes the way the community communicates and, in the long-term, this community is most likely doomed.
However, if other members step in and describe the arrogant behaviour as unacceptable, or role model another approach, then another evolutionary path is taken.

Network culture
Networks are reliant on stimulation of various points or nodes rather than centralised leadership. A need is expressed and, somewhere, someone in the network who can respond to that need replies.
Some factors to consider in supporting network collaboration in your organisation include:

A way of sending and receiving signals. Network collaboration is reliant on the sending and noticing of signals around issues of shared interest. How do employees attend to this sending and receiving in ways that are useful to the organisation? Is it encouraged or blocked, both from a cultural and a tool perspective?
Rewarding scanning and filtering practices. With information overload, the ability to filter and scan the messages that fly across a network is critical, from both a tool and a skill perspective. Have those who are good at this in your organisation been identified? Are they given time and support to play this role?
Distributed trust and individual identity. Identity and trust manifest differently in networks, where identity is more about what you know than who you are, and trust is about consistent delivery and quality rather than a personal sense of trust and one-to-one reciprocity. In other words, you can trust someone without getting to know him. Are employees in your organisation aware of and using this distinction to best participate in relevant networks? Are they rewarded for participation that builds their network reputation?
Open borders but strong incentives to stay. Networks can raise the profile of employees and so create a perceived or real threat of their being poached by other organisations. Are key employees being rewarded so they don’t want to leave? Bright stars will shine, so leaders had better be aware of the danger and be proactive!
Formal leadership humility. Networks can make leaders feel as though they have nothing to lead. Individuals can easily bypass nodes in the network that they don’t care to interact with, making one person a leader to some and irrelevant to others. So leadership becomes distributed and embodied in the actions of each individual. How does your leadership culture (noted above) work with this distributed leadership style in network culture?

To sum things up
Our aim in this article has been to highlight the important role culture plays in determining the effectiveness of your collaboration environment and give the reader a feel for what an effective collaboration culture might feel like. We have outlined some indicators of a healthy collaboration culture and highlighted the vital role leadership behaviours play. Then, for the three types of collaboration, we briefly describe some of the defining features.
We closed this part with a quiz as a way to generate some conversations back in your organisation about collaboration and start the process of raising awareness and taking actions to make incremental improvements.
In our third and final instalment we describe some of the ways you can put these ideas into practice to help build an even better collaborative workplace.

Real story
In 2007 senior managers at an international engineering firm became increasingly concerned that the firm was gradually losing its engineering competency. They could see it happening before their very eyes – new engineers would join the firm, they would quickly take up a position within a large project and be immediately head down, tail up, getting the job done.
The problem was that these rookie engineers didn’t know their colleagues who were on other projects doing similar work such as designing circuit boards, drawing technical diagrams or conducting stress simulations. The rookies were creating their own standards, making the same mistakes as their predecessors, and therefore taking longer to deliver lower quality work.
Engineering firms, like all services firms, are governed by timesheets and delivering client projects. Without senior leadership support it’s difficult to connect people across an organisation for the purposes of learning, especially if there is not a time code allocated to the task. For this firm, a group of dedicated middle-managers took it upon themselves to make things happen under the radar, with limited funds but a desire to make a real change.
They started a series of communities of practice to help the novice and expert engineers collaborate and learn from one another.
Time will tell if the culture of timesheets and project rule will give way to longer-term commitment to collaboration, learning and capacity building.

Real story
An Australian pharmaceutical organisation faced a major dilemma. The Swedish arm of the organisation had advised that a key drug would be in limited supply for a considerable period. This drug was a life-saving antibiotic used in intensive care to treat severe infections.
“If you are an intensive care physician and you need it, you don’t want to be told that there is none on the shelf.” The GM insisted that company employees be proactive and engage with their customers to tackle the issue. Sales, marketing and national accounts all worked together to develop a strategy based on identifying the hospitals most at risk.
First action was to engage with Sweden to examine global issues and to get an adequate allocation of the available stock. Next, “we phoned over a hundred directors of pharmacy and intensivists and had a discussion with them to identify needs and how they might change their internal protocols to use the available production as effectively as possible. They were really appreciative of the engagement”.
The organisation had lots of positive feedback... “We hated the fact that you were out, but we really appreciated the fact that you bothered to talk to us beforehand”. Staff involved in the issue described how “our GM led the way, engaging with everyone and making sure everything was kept out in the open, despite others insisting that we ‘keep it quiet’ ”.
At the same time there was another example with a competitor: the pharmacists and clinicians told us, “We didn’t find out about this until six weeks after the fact”. So it was a good example of a global action, local action at the hospital and also internally coordinating those activities.

How is your collaboration culture?
This little quiz is merely designed to get you thinking. Even better, get a group together, each take the quiz on behalf of your work-group, department, organisation and then discuss the results.
Answer these 15 true/false questions to give you an idea of just how collaborative your organisation is today, or whether your collaboration culture needs work.

Team

You enter into collaborations as peers, with each person playing a valued role. True/False?
Teams are recognised and celebrated as a unit. True/False?
People enter into collaborations with a feeling of promise. True/False?
There is someone in your organisation you can talk to, to learn more about effective collaboration approaches. True/False?
You have access to relevant and useful collaboration technologies and are encouraged to use them. True/False?

Community

There are other people in the organisation who have similar interests and passions with whom you connect regularly to learn from each other. True/False?
Your organisation actively supports communities of practice or learning. True/False?
The conversations that your community is having are engaging and help you do a much better job. True/False?
Your community is coordinated by a passionate individual, supported by a small group that really cares about the existence of the community. True/False?
Managers see the value of participating in your community and actively support your participation. True/False?

Network

The organisation actively supports the use of network collaboration technologies such as social bookmarking, blogs, wikis, tagging and RSS. True/False?
More than one third of the members of the organisation are bookmarking and tagging web pages. True/False?
People can recount stories of how they found information from someone else’s bookmarks that made a significant contribution to their work. True/False?
New communities have formed based on the realisation that people were interested in similar topics discovered via the network. True/False?
Senior leaders are using network collaboration technologies. True/False?

Give yourself one point for each time you answered True. Add up your points.

15 points: Collaboration nirvana. If you like working with high-performance teams, communities and networks, never leave this organisation.
14–11 points: Darn good. You have many opportunities to tackle complex problems and achieve tremendous results.
5–10 points: So-so. Things are getting better and the signs of life for collaboration are there.
1–4 points: Dismal. Most of the time the hero sweeps in on her white steed and saves the day and receives all the glory, despite all the hard work everyone else actually did.
0 points: Collaboration hell. If collaboration is your thing, why are you still in your organisation?

Shawn Callahan is founding director, Anecdote. Website http://www.anecdote.com, e-mail shawn@anecdote.com.au;
Mark Schenk is director, Anecdote, e-mail mark@anecdote.com.au;
Nancy White is founder, Full Circle Associates. Website http://www.fullcirc.com; e-mail nancyw@fullcirc.com.

References

E. H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2004), p. 246.
Patterson, K., J. Grenny, et al. (2008). Influencer: The Power To Change Anything. New York, McGraw Hill