It’s pretty much undeniable that collaboration and performance go hand-in hand.
We already know individuals perform better overall when they collaborate with others with differing expertise. And we know teams perform better overall when they collaborate with other teams from unique functional perspectives.
And of course, we know organisations perform better overall when they collaborate (internally and externally) and establish a culture of collaboration.
How do we know these things? Well, it’s a reasonably well-researched phenomenon. In supply chain and logistics, technology, education, health care and capital infrastructure planning – all have bodies of research pointing to collaborative practices to improve outcomes. Companies like Google build their innovation practices around collaboration. In fact, big tech in general stake part of their business models on creating tools that facilitate collaboration. There’s got to be something in that, right?
Here’s the rub though…collaboration is often messy. And even though in most organisations, people believe in it… it’s hard to get right. Count the number of times someone credits functional “silos” as the reason a project didn’t deliver expected outcomes. There’s a clear difference between the term “collaboration” and the practice of effective collaboration.
An organisational culture of collaboration is defined by patterns of behaviour around information sharing, effective feedback processes, and strong lateral or cross-functional relationships. These are the very things that are discarded when we struggle with silos, usually underpinned by an “us and them” mindset.
So best intentions aren’t enough… and this is where collaboration maturity comes in. It reflects the likelihood that collaboration is effective and leads to better outcomes.
Effective collaboration is enabled by two sources -the person participating and the enabling environment. Best captured by Kurt Lewin’s equation B=fn(PE). Where B=Behaviour, P=Person and E=Environment, ee argued that individual behaviour can only ever be seen in context of the forces within the environment that shape it.
The role of individuals (P) in collaboration is skills and mindset based. This element is largely outside of the control of organisations and so if the sole emphasis is on individuals being “better” collaborators, I would argue that the organisation has lower collaboration maturity.
The role of the enabling environment (E) in collaboration is about the practices that hardwire collaborative behaviour. These elements consistently and constantly reinforce and reward collaboration. This is at its most powerful when collaboration is reinforced both explicitly and implicitly. By that we mean a combination of visible commitment and communication about the role of collaboration as well as pulling the levers of processes, systems, reporting, and feedback mechanisms.
As an example, in high collaboration maturity organisations we tend to see reporting that encourages collective problem solving, feedback normalised as a way to improve outputs and outcomes, shared systems with data available as open source across an organisation and leaders with strong lateral relationship ties with other leaders across the organisation.
High collaboration maturity organisations focus on both the P and the E… just as Kurt Lewin would have wanted.
Want to build your organisation, team or joint venture’s collaboration maturity? Head to the Collaboration Maturity Model (CM2) page on our website https://carouselconsulting.com.au/expertise/collaboration/ and learn how it helps establish cultures of collaborative behaviour.