Collaborate for Real

Tom Froese As business buzzwords go, “collaborate” and its derivatives are surely modern favorites. Applying for a job? Emphasize your collaboration skills. Courting customers? Promise a collaborative relationship. Wooing new hires or investors? Talk up your collaborative culture. Academics, practitioners, and especially consultants seem to be obsessed by these terms—and rightly so. Any business works better when its employees, teams, divisions, and leaders share ideas and resources to pursue a common goal. But how do we turn the ever-present lingo into everyday reality? Four new books offer advice. You’ll find the most interesting case studies—of organizations getting collaboration right and of those felled by the lack of it—in The Silo Effect, by Gillian Tett, an editor at the Financial Times (where—full disclosure—I once worked). Drawing on her background in anthropology and decades as a reporter, Tett shows us how Sony missed the digital music revolution because its competing divisions couldn’t agree on products, platforms, or strategy; how UBS, the venerable Swiss bank, lost billions through lack of coordination between its New York and London credit derivative desks and its three risk departments (credit, market, and operational), which left everyone clueless about the enterprisewide threat; and how tribalism among the world’s leading economists blinded them to the causes of the most recent global financial crisis. On the flip side, Tett explains how Facebook uses a hierarchy-free orientation program, frequent job rotations, and regular “hackathons” to encourage cooperation among project groups; how the Cleveland Clinic reorganized its medical staff into teams that focus on ailments rather than their own skills to improve patient outcomes; and how data crunchers infiltrated bureaucratic police departments to reduce crime rates in New York and Chicago. Many readers will have heard those stories before, but the detail is impressive. And the lessons Tett offers at the end of the book are spot on: Keep organizational boundaries flexible and fluid; use technology to disrupt them; share data and let different interpretations of it be heard; tie compensation to collaboration; reimagine corporate taxonomies and experiment with new ones. These are high-level, top-down recommendations. But she also has a few tips for any manager eager to fight silos from the bottom up: Think like an anthropologist—with curiosity, healthy cynicism, and an appreciation for how things relate to one another so that you’re able to recognize when systems no longer make sense. Also, consider jumping across a corporate or social divide yourself once in a while. More advice for individuals comes from three other recent books about collaboration. In Friend & Foe, Wharton professors Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer (see “The Organizational Apology,” in the September 2015 issue) present reams of cool research showing why, although humans are inherently social animals, we’re also wired to vie with one another when resources are scarce and conditions are dynamic or uncertain. The most pertinent lesson for would-be collaborators: Build trust by showing warmth and competence, appreciating others’ perspectives, and revealing vulnerability. (Quick tip derived from one experiment: If you do well in a job interview, make sure to also spill coffee; people will rate you even higher than candidates who did just as well but weren’t as clumsy.) In Collaborative Intelligence, consultants Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur drill down into personal skill building. They encourage leaders to understand their own and others’ “mind patterns” (six in all, based on one’s preference for visual, auditory, or kinesthetic information processing) and “thinking talents” (35, ranging from “adapting” to “wanting to win”). The authors then describe how to use inquiry and mindset shifts to ensure that everyone is contributing to a successful shared future. The book is cluttered with assessments, charts, and “breakthrough practices” (exercises) to convey what is, in the end, a fairly simple message: Appreciate the value in intellectual diversity, and approach every work partnership wondering, “What can we make possible together?” Do intelligent people need 345 pages to learn this? Probably not. Further Reading The Silo Effect Gillian Tett Simon & Schuster, 2015 Friend & Foe Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer Crown Business, 2015 Collaborative Intelligence Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur Spiegel & Grau, 2015 Collaboration Begins with You Ken Blanchard, Jane Ripley, and Eunice Parisi-Carew Berrett-Koehler, 2015 Longtime management writer and consultant Ken Blanchard also believes that Collaboration Begins with You. That’s the title of his latest business fable, a story about Dave Oakton, the leader of a cross-departmental project—Primo—that fails because the units involved are too competitive with one another. The solution, he learns from his visiting sister-in-law, is to shift his and others’ hearts (intent), heads (thought), and hands (action) toward collaboration. He comes to see that leaders must build on differences; nurture safety and trust; craft a clear purpose, values, and goals; talk openly about collaboration; and empower themselves and others to spread it. And, of course, there’s a happy ending: After sharing these epiphanies with his boss, he not only leads a successful Primo II but also gets promoted to chief operating officer! Blanchard’s principles—helpfully summarized in an appendix for readers who prefer their self-help straight, not fictionialized—are sound. But, like Markova and McArthur’s mind patterns and thinking talents, his “heart, head, hands” construct feels a tad contrived. More important, I think Tett has a better handle on the real problem. Companies don’t fail at collaboration because not enough people will cooperate with one another. They fail when people work too closely in certain teams, functions, or departments without any regard for the rest of the organization. Coaching for collaborative thinking and behavior might help them break through those boundaries. But policy changes—such as the incentives and restructuring put in place at the Cleveland Clinic or the nudging mechanisms seen in Facebook’s orientations, rotations, and use of its own social network to forge surprising connections—are much more effective. Surely Sony and UBS employed collaborative people—even leaders. But that didn’t stop them from succumbing to silos, and those silos from destroying value. As Galinsky and Schweitzer note, the more cohesive and successful teams become, the less likely they are to cooperate with other teams, even within their own companies. So, yes, let’s encourage people to get better at collaboration, even train them in it. But let’s also design organizations that make it energizing and fun, not forced. As Tett points out, even the companies that excel at collaboration today can’t afford to rest on their laurels. Organizational silo busting requires constant vigilance.

Collaborate for Real

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