Collaboration as a Corporate Competence

I had an interesting conversation with Charlotte V Rose, CPCC today. Charlotte specializes in leadership development & communications with a particular interest in personal and organizational culture.

The topic we were discussing was collaboration as a corporate competence. I was explaining to Charlotte that in my work I look at 5 key aspects of effective collaboration these are: Commercial, Technical, Strategic, Cultural and Operational. In each of 4 of these there has been some significant progress made. The one that stands out as the 'hidden killer' of effective collaboration is the cultural aspect.

Perhaps an example would help to make this clearer. A few years ago, I was asked to help a cyber security software company establish an effective alliance program. The company had concluded that it needed to 'pivot' from direct sales to third party introduced sales through partners.

We established a great commercial offering which would have provided great value to a range of global system integrators and advisory companies. We checked that the program had significant senior executive support within the firm and that partnering was a strategic imperative (check). We then looked at a range of partners who were classic candidates bearing in mind the technical alignment of both companies (check). Finally, we established alliance best practice training, structure and processes to support the new initiative (check).

We then stood back to watch the tsunami of new business flood in from new partners and .........

Nothing happened. No new business. No commitment from the rank and file employees in the firm and no active effort at collaboration with partners.

So I went round the company and investigated the problem. I got the following comments time after time:

'We don’t need to partner with anyone else, we have been successful on our own for many years.'

'Why are we giving away margin? It will make us uncompetitive against our major competitors?'

'Why do I have to talk to GSIs? I don’t understand them and in truth I am a little intimidated by them!'

'We have established a global agreement with global systems integrator company X so why aren't they actively selling our software? Its good software!'

Reluctantly I had to report back to the head of alliances and the President of Europe for the company involved that the exercise was doomed to failure because the company culture was as a direct sales company, and it would take many years and many hours of work to change the organizational behavioural beliefs that were strongly embedded in the personal culture of the vast majority of the employees.

So back to my conversation with Charlotte, I was asking her (as a best practice practitioner) whether there were any best practices in changing organizational culture. She shared that she has worked with organisations building this specific area of their organisational capability and the 4 key domains she drives development: the importance of change leadership, the significance of #psychologicalsafety, impactful communications and quality coaching to transition individuals, teams and organisations through change effectively. These 4 key capabilities can be built and support the effectiveness of organisational change on initiatives big and small. She also mentioned PROSCI change management had valuable research, a framework and principals for large scale change.

All of this was new to me since my only exposure to questions of change came from my past history of working for #ey when the firm had an offering called Organizational Change Management. However, that methodology took many years to implement and cost a small fortune to commission.

We then got onto discussing whether the ability of an organization to change created a competitive advantage and I was able to share with her another past client (O2) who had outperformed almost all of its bigger mobile telecom competitors precisely because it focused on collaboration as a fundamental business strategy and corporate strength.

That in turn led me to an interesting dialogue I had had recently with Kevin Smith who is the founder and CEO of #coleid Ltd. If you look up Coleid in LinkedIn, you get the following company snapshot:

The era of the Collaborative Company. We believe connectivity is an art and collaboration is the key to healthy, sustainable and accelerated growth. With a wealth of world-class partners at our fingertips sharing the ethos and drive for collaboration, the only question is... Are you ready to 'Coleid'?

Kevin was until recently the partner in #KPMG who was in charge of the Private Enterprise Practice. In which role he regularly advised smaller scale up companies on how to grow effectively and cost efficiently. He told me:

Mike, many smaller business owners want to grow but they aren't prepared to let go of day to day operational control. They find collaborating with internal and external colleagues very hard indeed!

Kevin's conclusion was that companies that could instigate encourage and develop collaboration as a corporate competence rather than just a personal skill in some key executives could achieve significant competitive advantage. Hence the reference to 'The Collaborative Company' in his description of his company.

Talking about the collaborative company reminds me of a very enjoyable lunch I had a number of years ago with Heidi K. Gardner who is a distinguished fellow at Harvard Law School. Heidi has authored two best-selling books on collaboration "Smart Collaboration" and "Smarter Collaboration" published by Harvard Business Press and she previously worked for McKinsey and Co. During the lunch Heidi and I talked about the nature of collaboration in legal firms (Heidi's speciality) she had clear evidence in her first book 'Smart Collaboration' that breaking down internal silos and encouraging collaboration between different departments in Law firm not only increased profitability but also resulted in higher levels of innovation and increased market share.

There are some tools around to help you assess whether you and your colleagues are inclined to collaborate well. Perhaps one of the most well established and effective of these is the Game Changer Index https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/gc-index/people/ developed by Dr John Mervyn-Smith Nathan Ott and Simon Etherington the system is used to help organizations develop more effective teams and was originally developed to identify individuals within organizations that exhibited the characteristics of 'Game Changers'. Exactly what you want if you are looking to change a corporate culture.

Finally in my own latest book 'The Strategic Alliance Fieldbook - The Art of Agile Alliances' which was co-written with Gavin Booth and Jim Whitehurst all three of us recognized the accelerated nature of partnering in the early part of the 21st Century. As a result, we advocated an approach called Agile Alliances as a way of developing active collaboration with suitable partners quickly and effectively to take advantage of transitory market opportunities. In fact, we even set up a LinkedIn group to explore the topic more fully. You can find the group here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/12379400/

So, what about your experiences? If you are an alliance or partnership manager reading this does it resonate? Do you find that your CEO has given you the job of running an alliance or partnership function, but you are hamstrung by the corporate culture which is at odds with what you are trying to achieve with external partner organizations? Do you fear for your job perhaps? Given that the role you have been asked to fulfil is to develop effective collaborations and partnerships with other companies and that you can see key executives in other parts of your own organization self-sabotaging your efforts at every turn?

If so, I'd like to hear from you. I'd like to explore this aspect of alliances and alliancing further and provide practical tools that practicing alliance managers can use to assess objectively the collaborative corporate competence of their organizations even if only as part of their own due diligence before taking on their next high profile alliance role with a new company.

If you'd like to explore further the concept of the Collaborative Company and the practical implications (both good and bad) of adopting collaboration as a corporate culture, please contact me at [email protected]