My Success, My Collaboration
“Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi
In my recent blog on the study, Collaboration: Know Your Enthusiasts and Laggards (.pdf), I reviewed our second key finding: organizational culture influences collaboration success. Company culture is clearly set by the CEO and promulgated by senior management. Thus, our third finding should come as no surprise: in companies that consider themselves advantaged by collaboration, the employees recognized it as critical to their work and individual success.
In our top two collaboration segments, 83 percent of Collaboration Enthusiasts and 82 percent of Comfortable Collaborators recognize that collaboration contributed to their individual success at work. The research shows when collaborative practices are openly rewarded and included in performance reviews, it drives the behavior across the enterprise.
Not all worker groups agree. In the two weakest collaboration segments, Reluctant Collaborators and Collaboration Laggards, the survey participants do not view collaboration as a make or break factor. Interestingly, these segments include more individual contributors who have been at the companies or in their job roles for the longest tenures.
According to 75 percent of respondents, work practices are more collaborative today than they were two years ago. Email and phone conferencing remain the most frequently used tools for collaboration, but other tools are being adopted rapidly. More than 75 percent use web conferencing, 68 percent use video collaboration, and about 40 percent use wikis and blogs.
Yet for a lot of companies, the legend of the superhero senior manager or executive who comes up with all the answers—working alone, late into the night—remains deeply ingrained in the corporate psyche. Indeed, in a recent Harvard Business Review blog, Tammy Erickson captured the transition senior management must undergo if they will influence the culture of collaboration. She calls it “pull management.” Erickson notes: “Today, encouraging a greater number of people to go just a little bit further is the essential job of leaders. Long gone is the time when our primary management challenge was to ensure that workers performed tasks consistently and reliably, using standardized best practices. Now we need “pull” approaches, geared to encourage individuals to share their ideas more widely and constructively, to push the boundaries of what’s possible further — or to be more collaborative and innovative.”
Or, as John Donne, the English Poet and Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral noted over 400 years ago “no man is an island.”
Posted by Alan Cohen at 09:32AM PST
Charles Amico Aug 17, 2009
Interesting article, Alan. What have they found in the research is the key motivator for Collaboration to work, and how does the reward system best recognize contribution of teams versus individuals through Performance Management using “best practices”? I have my own theory, but I am interested in research data, if there is any.