Building Bench Strength in Collaboration Cultures

Digital transformation is having a profound impact on organizational design. It has virtually eliminated the hierarchical organization as a platform for scaling. As in our computing centers so in our enterprises: we no longer scale up—we scale out across teams, business units, value chains, and ecosystems. Implicit in all these organizational models is an ethic of collaboration, one that is gradually taking ground from an earlier model of competition. We still compete, but now more often as teams as opposed to independent agents. MBOs have been replaced by OKRs. We are living in an era of collaboration culture. 

Yet all is not light and happiness in this Magic Kingdom. Collaboration cultures struggle on a number of fronts. They are not good at holding team members accountable. They over-protect their weak. They tend toward conflict avoidance, substituting niceness for constructive criticism. Unchecked, this can lead to passive-aggressive behavior of the most annoying and debilitating kind. They tend to have too many meetings, in which people feel entitled not only to express their opinions but to opt in or opt out of any decisions made. Finally, although less noticed, perhaps most concerning of all, they are not good at succession planning and developing bench strength. 

Now, none of this is acceptable, and the good news is, there are best practices addressing them all. We just need to bring these practices to the fore and pay more attention to employing them.

Let’s start with accountability. Here we can take a lesson from team sports. Every collaborative initiative can be thought of as running a play, or over a longer haul, running a playbook. Plays are by definition team efforts, but each one hinges on the performance of a specific individual. This is the person who bears the most accountability for the play’s success. In a business context, they need to be called out as the single point of accountability and empowered as such. This does not mean that everyone on the team reports to them. It does not mean everyone else can just put the load all on them. Rather it means, they are the ball carrier, the one who is going to get us over the goal line, and we have empowered them to orchestrate the rest of us to best achieve that end. For this play, they are the leader.

Single points of accountability dramatically improve the performance of collaborative teams. First of all, they clarify decision rights and thus speed decision-making. Second, they provide visibility into the current state as it is the leader’s role to know that state and be able to communicate it at all times. Third, they make it clear who the go-to person is when a call has to be made. The leader, in turn, has to step up to make the tough calls, knowing the goal is either to win or to learn. Hedging decisions is not an option—that rarely wins and results in no learning because you can never know what would have happened had you not hedged. 

All this makes day-to-day management a concomitant exercise in leadership development. You are building your bench strength as you go. And you are developing a culture of accountability in a context of win-or-learn, fully respectful of the fact that we will make mistakes, and that we can be accountable for them in a constructive way if we are able to extract the learning and modify the play for future use. At the same time, when we find people who cannot play the game this way, who do not extract learnings, who do hedge, then we need to help them find another place to work. Not everyone is cut out to succeed in a collaboration culture. They might thrive in another type of culture, be that hierarchical, competitive, or entrepreneurial. That’s great for them. You just can’t keep them on your team.

Now, when it comes to meetings management, both in terms of their quantity and quality, single points of accountability can make a big difference. They empower the leaders to call the meetings, set the agenda, capture the conclusions, and confirm the action items. The meeting itself is still collaborative—it is the end of the meeting that is different. There is no “opt-in/opt-out” choice here. Instead, there is a “disagree-and-commit” option which says, even though I think we may be running the wrong play, I will do my part to the best of my ability so that, if we don’t win, we can at least learn (and if we do win, then I can learn). The worst thing that can happen in any team sport is to have one player opt out of their role.

Finally, when it comes to building bench strength, single points of accountability provide a living laboratory for developing leadership through real-world experiences. Everyone on the team should be a single point of accountability for one or another initiative at some point during the year. This not only engages and enlists them in the team’s success, it gives the organizational head a chance to see who performs best under what circumstances, and to move to the front those most likely to succeed in leading the organization going forward. You don’t have to send these folks to some outside school. Work is school if you organize it properly.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube