Collaboration is essential for any team, but it can be challenging to achieve when you have a large group of people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and goals. How can you facilitate effective collaboration with large teams and ensure everyone feels heard, engaged, and aligned? Here are some tips and strategies to help you.
Before you start any collaborative activity with a large team, make sure you have a clear and shared purpose for why you are doing it. What is the problem you are trying to solve, the goal you are trying to reach, or the outcome you are trying to create? How does it relate to the team's vision, mission, and values? How will you measure success and track progress? Having a common purpose will help you focus your collaboration and avoid confusion, ambiguity, and conflict.
Its important to articulate vision and common value that the initiative will deliver and the role other teams/functions need to play to enable success
Collaboration begins with mutual trust if I don't trust someone I simply do not collaborate if so that will not contribute to the desired results. There are a few aspects to keep in mind when you collaborate with large teams 1. Audience 2. Purpose 3. Cultural differences 4. Choose the right platform 5. Understanding the team dynamics is very important
Encouraging collaboration within large teams requires clear communication channels, fostering a culture of trust, and providing opportunities for shared goals and successes. Implementing collaborative tools like project management software or communication platforms can facilitate teamwork. Regular team meetings and brainstorming sessions allow members to exchange ideas and contribute collectively. Recognizing and rewarding collaborative efforts reinforces desired behaviors. Additionally, promoting a supportive environment where diverse perspectives are valued enhances collaboration. Studies show that teams with high levels of collaboration demonstrate greater productivity and innovation.
Once you have a clear purpose, you need to design a process that will enable collaboration with a large team. This means choosing the appropriate methods, tools, and techniques that will suit your purpose, your team, and your context. For example, you might use brainstorming, affinity mapping, voting, or prototyping to generate ideas, prioritize options, or test solutions. You might use online platforms, breakout rooms, or polls to facilitate communication, interaction, and feedback. You might use agendas, timelines, or roles to structure your collaboration and keep it on track.
Humans naturally behave in different ways in different settings. As facilitators, we can use this in our design. For example, I know that if I have 100 people on a call or even in a room and ask a question, it is highly unlikely any one person will just jump up and answer. However, if I break them into groups and have them discuss the questions among their smaller groups, it is much more likely that they will engage. Then, bring them back and ask for reflections or thoughts. I always think of my facilitations using self-reflection, small-group conversation, and summary reflections in larger settings.
Bear in mind that you don’t always need to work with the whole team but with representatives of all relevant disciplines, which are usually all of them regarding the end-to-end customer journey. Nevertheless, you can for example start collecting pain points by inviting the whole team time online, time and location independently, then generating a first prototype with a small team of a maximum of 6 people and integrating the rest for voting and giving feedback and direction. Don’t forget to frequently communicate the progress, provide transparent access to the outcomes, and encourage people to participate.
One of the challenges of collaborating with a large team is managing the complexity and diversity of information, opinions, and perspectives. To overcome this, you can divide your team into smaller groups or subteams that can work on specific aspects of the problem, goal, or outcome. This will allow you to leverage the different skills, experiences, and interests of your team members, as well as create more opportunities for participation, engagement, and ownership. However, you also need to ensure that the smaller groups or subteams are aligned with the larger purpose and process, and that they communicate and coordinate effectively with each other.
Another challenge of collaborating with a large team is creating a culture that supports and values collaboration. This means fostering trust, respect, and openness among your team members, as well as encouraging feedback, learning, and improvement. You can do this by setting clear expectations and norms for how you will collaborate, such as how you will communicate, share information, make decisions, resolve conflicts, or celebrate successes. You can also model and reinforce positive behaviors and attitudes, such as listening actively, asking questions, acknowledging contributions, or giving constructive criticism.
Culture is developed through consistent displays that showcase the words and actions are in alignment with overall values and stated beliefs. I share this because if you are developing a unique culture for how you want collaboration, it is critical that organization defines this, highlights examples and displays it via their leaders consistently. If you are truly committed to a particular "culture" around collaboration, you can't say one thing and do another. You must be clear and insist that this is how its being doing from the top down.
Finally, collaborating with a large team can be a great opportunity to tap into the diverse perspectives and insights that your team members can offer. However, you also need to be aware of the potential biases, assumptions, or blind spots that might limit your collaboration or affect your results. You can diversify your perspectives by inviting external stakeholders, experts, or users to join your collaboration, or by using different lenses, frameworks, or scenarios to challenge your thinking and explore different possibilities. You can also seek feedback from different sources, such as peers, mentors, or customers, to validate your assumptions and improve your outcomes.
Large teams are effectively a collection of small teams. There is a reason Amazon adopts the 2 pizza rule (most specific tasks shouldn't require more than the number of people that could be fed by 2 pizzas), usually people lazily put a big team together because they think everyone should be involved but actually the smaller team is actually needed for the specific task and then you need to work on the integration of those tasks. That way as a leader it is easier to foster collaboration. You should still fundamentally challenge siloes but you can do this at a different level of detail than thinking everybody needs to collaborate with everyone else in a large team