EXCERPTS - The Culture of Collaboration

CHAPTER 1
CLIMATE SHIFT: EMBRACING RICH, REAL-TIME COLLABORATION

The script has changed.

   No matter where we live or how we earn a living, we face a sig­nificant shift in our personal and professional lives—the transition to the Culture of Collaboration.

   Let’s face it. The shift is happening all around us. And it’s impacting our work styles, our paychecks, our relationships and our habits. In short, the transition is changing our world. So understand­ing the implications is key to staying in the game and succeeding.

   At work, information used to arrive in our in-baskets, later in our email in-boxes. We received instructions and passed them to others. Somebody else had to do their part before we could do ours. Then we tossed our work product to the next person so that they could fulfill their function. We were running relay races rather than creat­ing and producing in concert with colleagues.

   The in-box culture is dead. It’s no longer acceptable to let work and requests for decisions languish in email. The quest for value creation has forced the deserialization of work. Simply put, we are curbing the pass-along approach. Receiving a document or spreadsheet, making notes, and sending it to some­body else for their comments slows decisions and complicates reso­lution. To solve problems and make decisions efficiently, we must often come together in real time rather than wait for the email, the file, or for somebody else’s input.

CHAPTER 2 
THE CULTURE OF COLLABORATION

SHORTCOMINGS OF STAR CULTURES
Toyota’s culture provides a stark contrast to many organizational cultures that value internal competition. In such cultures, colleagues may view being collaborative as a weakness. In The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin writes about natural selection in which the fittest survive. Many competitive organizational cultures apply a similar concept to workforce development. So that the best rise to the top, a company may eliminate the bottom performing 15 percent of its workforce. Out the door along with the underperformers is trust. Such cultures often pit one colleague against another in that a man­ager may ask two or more people to prepare proposals. The manager then picks the best one.

   In such cultures, fear dominates as people worry whether their names appear on the elimination lists or whether they can beat out colleagues for recognition and promotion. Such star cultures reward individualism rather than collaboration. Why would you trust Joe and share your ideas with him? He will steal your concepts so that he can get promoted over you. Such cut-throat cultures often extend beyond the enterprise to relations with business partners. Without understanding the need for partners to succeed, companies with competitive cultures may negotiate too aggressively and therefore sacrifice partner trust.

CHAPTER 3
THE DYNAMIC DIMENSION OF CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATION

Bridging cultural gaps creates a dynamic dimension perhaps unattainable with homogenous groups of collaborators. Diversity of cultures produces broader perspectives that give collaborators an edge, particularly in solving complex engineering problems. Team members trained in one country’s aerospace engineering tradition may view a creative challenge completely differently than their colleagues who were trained in a different country’s system. Drawing from their collective global knowledge, cross-cultural collaborators can spark synergies and create greater value. The trick is to build trust and bridge the cultures so that collaborators can benefit from their differences rather than fail because of them.

CHAPTER 4 
LIFESTYLES AND WORK STYLES

Some mobile workers spend most of their day in motion and part of their day at a desk. Others could be classified as deskless workers. These people often work on the front lines providing care, tabulating damages at disaster scenes, photographing news, responding to crimes, or assembling the products on which a company stakes its reputation. Deskless and mobile workers can effectively collaborate only if the approach and tools fit into their work styles. Expecting people to abandon their work to collaborate makes little sense. But it’s in the best interests of organizations to include the input of mobile workers in collaborative endeavors. After all, they’re often the people who have insight from the front lines. Rather than make process decisions in a vacuum, smart organizations encourage deskless and mobile workers to collaborate with people across functions, departments, levels, and regions. This means making it easy to participate in synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.

CHAPTER 5 
BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS

INFORMATION DEMOCRACY AND THE CULTURE OF COLLABORATION
The concept of information democracy and access to data occurs repeatedly in organizations with collaborative cultures. Access is about sharing, one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration. While companies clearly must safeguard their data from competitors and interlopers, they nevertheless must share data with all of the people who participate in data-driven processes. By sharing information and data, companies promote innovation and collaboration. Policies that overly restrict access to data can foster a culture that rewards secrecy and internal competition. In such cultures, information hoarders thrive.

CHAPTER 6 
INTEGRATING COLLABORATIVE TOOLS INTO CULTURE

PUTTING PRINCIPLES BEFORE TOOLS
Too often organizations introduce collaboration approaches, processes and tools without linking them to organizational principles. This confuses users and stalls integration into work styles. In hierarchical, internally-competitive cultures, organizational principles may run contrary to the free flow of information that collaborative tools often encourage. This presents a significant cultural divide. People can accept changes in work styles more readily if they understand that those changes are based on tenets that they have already accepted. We are more likely to create value through collaborative approaches and tools if we perceive that the tools reflect the collective personality of the organization.

CHAPTER 9
COLLABORATIVE LEADERSHIP

LEADERSHIP IN HYBRID CULTURES
On the spectrum between collaborative and command-and-control cultures is the hybrid culture. This is one in which a collaborative culture pervades particular functional areas, regions, or business units, while other areas tend towards a “me” rather than a “we” cul­ture. This scenario often occurs in companies that have extensive scientific or research and development operations. A prime example is the pharmaceutical industry. In the case of the unnamed Fortune 50 pharmaceutical company discussed in chapter 8, the organization experiences cultural schizophrenia in that its scientific community embraces collaboration far more than other areas of the company. However, economic exigencies are forcing the broader organization to adopt a culture that mirrors that of the scientific units.

   Hybrid and transitional cultures present leadership challenges and  provide insight into the disconnection between people accus­tomed to traditional verses collaborative approaches. Leaders in the scientific  arena sometimes focus more on debate, discussion and achieving consensus. When conditions change, those leaders are quick to revisit decisions. However, this approach seems like indeci­siveness to leaders in finance, IT, manufacturing and other areas of the company. According to the Fortune 50 pharmaceutical CTO, “For most of the rest of the business, we need to make decisions and get on with life. Otherwise you’re paralyzed by the continuous revisiting, so the leadership in the purely scientific area is much more iterative.”