Creative Collabs > Selfish Silos (+ football ??)

Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success

Henry Ford

What.

A.

Game.

I imagine most of England are still reeling off the success of last nights Euros game. With us through to Sundays final we’ll be competing for our first ever mens Euros win, and our first trophy for the mens team since the World Cup in 1966!! So a pretty exciting week all round for the English (and for English pubs ofc??)!

In a somewhat tenuous link, one of the notable differences with the way England played last night compared to some of their previous games, was they truly felt like a team. Every player on that pitch was needed and played to the best of their ability, everyone pitched in and collaborated to get to the all important win.

Collaboration and trust are the key to a healthy functioning team dynamic which we see play out in the footie, but this team dynamic is often underplayed in the business sphere.

Todays compass is all about building creative collaborations across your business. Touching on:

• Market context and why this is relevant now
• What creative collaborations look like
• How (dare I say it) Meta / Facebook smash it out the park

Why fostering this is so vital for workplace efficiency

As businesses scale, professionalise and reach beyond the ‘proving’ phase (pre-seed/seed), there is a bigger need than ever before to ensure your team is continuing to innovate and operate effectively.

In todays world, we read so much every day about work-life balance and how younger generations are work-shy - this is not true. Across the globe our quality of life has gotten worse, the improvement in technology and social media has led to a lot of competition and comparison between individuals, and people are likely to be working for far longer than ever before (some studies say we’ll be working easily into our 80s!). As a result it is simply not good enough to ‘waste time’ working for a company you’re not happy at or passionate about.

Ultimately, in order to build high performing teams you need to have a happy team that genuinely want to be there.

In classic sales nature, people buy from people - and it’s the same for every line of work. Human connection and camaraderie is everything. Therefore building an environment where the team are able to work closely, challenge one another, talk about a project and truly collaborate will be a happier team. This is why companies that typically operate in silos beyond their first few years, struggle to expand.

What creative collabs can look like

So now we appreciate the importance of working in collaboration with one another as opposed to in silos, we can look into what tactics you can bring in for this.

Cross-team goal setting

• OKRs are an obvious one - but worth keeping in mind that these are extremely difficult and time intensive to roll out, especially if you don’t have full buy in across the team
• SMART goals - this is great for when you’re smaller and looking to drive purely incremental improvements rather than a whole company shared objective:

• Outcomes vs Inputs - easy to track in a simple spreadsheet. So outcome could be ‘increase platform adoption by 10% and the input would be ‘build seamless payments function’ for example

Team sprints and agile teams

• In the spirit of agile tech teams you can work in fast team sprints where each team is made up of between 2 - 6 people and each sprint is between 2-6 weeks. This is a great way to get projects shipped quickly and fail quickly (one of our core Passionfruit values)
• I’d be weary of shifting teams around more frequently than once a quarter, but certainly short, sharp drives towards a goal is a great way to build traction quickly

Regular retrospectives are also vital to hold each other to account in a creative way

• The frequency of these will depend on what your goal setting structure is like, but I’d suggest having one every quarter for the right balance of constructive feedback. Usually this aligns to a shift in the people in the team also

Mission, Vision & Values

• Collaboration only works if you’re driving to a shared mission and clearly defined goals so I cannot stress the importance enough of having a mission, vision and values that the entire team can get behind. If you’re happy with yours as it stands, I’d get some feedback from the team and some of your main champions externally to ensure it’s what will carry you through

Don’t forget to have fun

• I personally believe that nothing can beat a team away trip for fostering greater collaboration, especially for remote teams
• Taking yourself out of the office, out of a known space, and into a fresh, creative unknown territory together - I promise you the creative collabs will flourish
• Don’t forget - people love people. You work with people that you like, the more that your team get on with one another, the more likely they are to stay and work hard at the company

???Company Spotlight ??

Feels like a slightly dodgy one to reference here as they have popularly been known as not the best place to work in terms of employee wellbeing. That being said I think we can take a few tactics from them and implement with more empathetic leadership principles.

One of their key philosophies is ‘move fast and break things’ - which is very similar to the fail quickly value we have at PF. This is a great philosophy for 2 reasons:

1. It takes away the fear factor when employees do fail at something - because it’s showed as a learning opportunity not a judgement. This means the team will be more willing to push the boat out creatively
2. The business moves quickly towards their shared goal as you find out ‘all the ways not to sell the lightbulb’ (credit to Mike Bayly for this one). The more your team test, fail and learn, the more it narrows down what works exclusively for your business

They also have regular ‘hackathons’ (if you’ve seen ‘The Social Network’ this really rings true) which are a great opportunity to encourage cross-team collaboration and often leads to the creation of new bright ideas.

Instead of using what feels like a tech heavy phrase ‘hackathon’, maybe you can call it a workshop with the specific title being the issue you’d like to uncover. Maybe it is a [insert new feature] workshop, a [insert customer issue] workshop or a [internal feedback] workshop. Whatever your most important needs are, get the team together to discuss in a similar way to Facebook where it is now deeply ingrained into their ways of working.

At Passionfruit we run a regular one of these sessions monthly, and then have a whole company in-person workshop bi-annually (usually in sunny Porto which helps too).

So to summarise - be more Zuckerberg I guess? ??

What we're reading

• Alternatives to OKR structures
• Netflix amend their famous culture manifesto
• Simon Sinek on why Millennials are the way they are in the workplace
• 5 hiring orgs on encouraging collaboration

Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life

Amy Poehler