This article is part 2 in a four part series on collaboration. Part 1 focused on how to build a powerful professional network with entry-level talent. Here we present strategies and tactics for building the capacity and capabilities for authentic collaboration.
Building Collaborative Advantage
Achieving authentic and useful collaboration that yields results is messy work. Effective collaboration requires openness, trust, conflict, and dissent.
Why build collaborative capabilities?
Collaboration is a capability that can be developed at an organizational level and can enhance innovation as well as provide a competitive advantage. Research has converged around the idea of collaboration as a meta-capability, which Blomqvist and Levy framed in their 2006 paper as “enabling leverage of both internal and external knowledge bases for changing needs in uncertain and complex environments.”
Your competency in this area is the key to achieving more than you ever could alone.
Sounds great, I know, but it takes more than just piling people into teams and saying you’ll be collaborative – some people just flat-out dislike collaboration, as previously discussed by Jilly Charlwood. Getting there can be a bit of a catch-22.
You know how some people say they learn best by doing? Nothing illustrates this idea better than collaboration.
3 Ways to Build Collaborative Capabilities
Leader-up
Bring an authentic commitment to your team, organization, community, and be prepared to listen and give. Every moment of every day you’re leading by example. Lead others towards committing to a shared goal by listening, understanding and aligning their needs with those of the team. Articulate your goals, and commit to caring for a successful outcome that includes a stronger relationship across the group.
Integrate
Bridge cultural, organizational, and operational differences by learning each other’s processes, challenges, and social and cultural norms or conventions. Get to know your collaborators personally and get to know the way they work – some people like to start projects, others are inspired when they’re wrapped-up, and some folks thrive doing the diligence. Peoples’ jargon or technical language, social norms in the office, and personal cultures or backgrounds are all important to building awareness of what influences how each member of a collaborative team works and behaves.
Respectfully Disagree
The reluctance to rock the boat with dissent, disagreement, or conflict is a huge danger when building the collaborative capabilities that will drive your competitive advantage. You’ll want to make sure everyone is happy so they build relationships and keep working together, but focus too much on happiness and/or politeness and you’ll make terrible decisions all because nobody had the guts to say out loud that something is a bad idea. Here again you need to lean on how well you’ve integrated everyone’s norms and backgrounds, but ritualized dissent is one of the most important parts of collaborative work – otherwise you’re just a bunch of people cooperating to bad decisions together, egging each other on.
For collaboration to happen, everyone involved needs to be committed to a shared goal. Without that you can only hope for cooperation, where individuals work together on something but collaborative advantage isn’t present. Once you build readiness for adopting authentic collaboration both within yourself and across your community at work, at school or in your neighbourhood, you’ll be able to actively engage a breadth and depth of knowledge, skills, and ideas that you couldn’t possibly manage alone.
Read more about collaborative capabilities and the collaborative advantage at HBR and the Sloan Review.