Driving a Business Culture that Encourages and Rewards Collaboration, Communication and Innovation

Have you ever come across the study called “The Five Monkeys”. I’ve recently remember it from my college days and started to consider how encouraging open dialogue and collaboration and rewarding innovative thinkers (or failing to do so), really impacts an organisation, especially in this Covid lockdown market. 

Psychological safety, transparent communication structures, and processes which allow for collaboration and idea sharing are fundamental in modern businesses, and I wanted to share & look at the benefits of creating this team culture, whilst expressing the risks & challenges businesses will face if they do not.

The Five Monkeys: A Recap

If you haven’t heard of the 5 Monkeys experiment before, it’s a great analogy for stagnation and learned behaviour. Here’s a quick overview.

A researcher puts five monkeys in a cage with a bunch of bananas hanging from a string and a ladder leading to the bananas. When Monkey 1 goes for the bananas, the researcher sprays all five monkeys with freezing water for five minutes. Later on, when Monkey 2 tries to retrieve the bananas, the researcher sprays all five monkeys with freezing water for five minutes again. Now, the researcher puts the hose away completely. Despite this, when Monkey 3 tries to get the bananas, the other four monkeys attack him to prevent him from climbing that ladder because they are afraid of the punishment of the cold water.

Next, the researcher replaces one of the monkeys with a new monkey who wasn’t part of the original experiment and was never sprayed with water. As soon as he tries to go for the bananas, the other four monkeys immediately attack him to keep him from doing so.  When he tries again, they attack him again. The new monkey therefore learns not to go after the bananas because he’ll get attacked if he does. The researcher replaces a second monkey with another new monkey. When this monkey goes for the bananas, the other four attack him, including the new monkey who was never sprayed with water. The researcher continues replacing the monkeys until none of the five original monkeys are remaining. Despite these monkeys never having been sprayed with water, they continue to attack monkeys that try and get the bananas. 

They resisted the temptation to go for the bananas, because that’s the way it had always been done.

Business Application

So, what do monkeys have to do with business? Well, imagine if you stuck to the same processes and traditions just because that’s the way they have always been done. You’d never grow, you’d never adapt, you’d be unable to retain any form of competitive advantage, and you’d find it near impossible to attract and retain top talent in your market.

The five monkeys experiment illustrates that we need to constantly challenge ourselves to look at things from a new perspective, to question the effectiveness of our processes, and to avoid using the excuse of “we’ve always done it this way” to avoid trying new things replacing this with “how can we get this better? Is there an expert we can speak too? Is there a process of someone even more successful than us that we can plagiarise and put our own spin on it”. If we want success, we have to be open-minded to change, creative, adapt and take risks.

A huge part of this is creating a culture of trust and transparency to empower your employees to come up with new ideas, to contribute to business decisions, to take risks (and yes, make mistakes), and try new things. To do so you need to ensure access to tooling and training, and the creation of a supportive, inclusive, and collaborative culture, rooted in open dialogue and psychological safety. 

Encouraging & Enabling Dialogue and Collaboration

Managing teams successfully involves ensuring that team members can communicate with their leaders and with one another effectively so that they can collaborate effectively as a team. Whether working remotely or in an office, team members should have access to meetings (both team and 1:1s), tools to allow virtual communication (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business), and should know the processes for escalating communications (such as feedback, ideas, and challenges) up the leadership hierarchy when in the office.  I love the idea of servant leadership and try to encompass this in our business. 

Allowing collaboration between team members is how new ideas come to be. It’s an easy way to engage staff and keep them excited about being a part of your business whilst actively improving your business and allowing for growth and scaling. There’s a thought-provoking dialogue analogy I always think on when investing in my teams: 

Invest and value your team members and you’re more likely to retain the top talent. But you’re only going to do this by investing in them, and then giving them autonomy to use their training, ideas, and solutions to truly impact the business. This encourages creativity, innovation, and collaboration which then goes against that stagnated dynamic that resulted from the 5 Monkeys experiment. Let your team help influence change.

Rewarding Innovation

Rewarding innovation is a great way to encourage people to take risks, think creatively, and break stagnant and outdated processes through intrinsic and extrinsic feedback. Acknowledging somebody for trying out a new idea (even if unsuccessful) is really important to build confidence in your teams, and rewarding people who consistently deliver creative solutions, improve processes, share their knowledge to support the wider team is great for team morale. By doing this, you are giving everybody the opportunity to make a difference in the business, which will help keep them invested in your business success. 

Trusting your teams enough to give them the autonomy to try new things, fail, make mistakes, and succeed instils confidence, innovation and fearless creativity in your teams so that they feel comfortable and motivated to experiment. Innovation is the key to competitive advantage and business resilience, and this should be driven by leaders and their teams. 

Great Things Happen when you Empower your Teams!

When you have empowered teams who are confident and comfortable with innovation, creativity, change, and adaptability, you already have a winning formula. Your teams feel valued and like they have a voice, and are therefore more motivated and more invested in your business success. Hiring wise, you provide:

• Accountability that’s fair, open and ensures all parties improve and get better together 
• Efficient, transparent communication to ensure improved processes, with no-one taking blame and everyone working together to improve hiring processes
• More innovation and creativity which helps reduce time to solve problems
• Better candidate attraction with people genuinely being happy and shouting about it, which also helps with staff retention

You should also extend this collaborative culture to your clients and partners. You will always do more for someone you know than for someone just on an email chain. Do everything you can to build relationships and have candid chats about improving the process regularly with your clients and partners, to make them feel valued and more likely to stay with your company for long periods of time. People do business with people!

What Happens when you Don’t Empower your Teams?

If you fall into stagnant habits and traditions, problems will arise early on. You will end up with an unmotivated workforce, high staff turnover, and outdated processes leading to the loss of competitive advantage. If left to manifest these problems take lots of time to resolve as it requires a full brand and culture refresh. Further issues include: 

• Learned helplessness – people stop trying and think “what’s the point?”, and assume the right people are actually problems. This takes a lot of time to resolve and recover.

• Assumed negativity & retention issues because of toxic people. Your good people will leave as they’re not rewarded for adding value or have to operate in a toxic or political environment. It's hard to swim against the tide consistently when you don't have too with some many opportunities available.

The combination of staff loss, inability to attract and retain top talent, and the failure to retain competitive advantage through innovation is a recipe for disaster for any business.

Summary

In order to survive in the modern age of continuous digital change and transformation, and the fact that top tech talent now have an abundance of choice as to where to work, it’s more important than ever that businesses create and maintain a culture that supports collaboration, communication and innovation. Leaders need to challenge the negative narratives around failure and mistakes, and reposition them as learning opportunities, encouraging their teams that mistakes are natural. Psychological safety is key in enabling all team members to contribute ideas, debate other people’s ideas, and provide key feedback to other staff members regardless of their seniority. Rewarding innovative thinking will also reinforce creativity and trying new ideas as positive, meaning that teams will be more willing to step outside their comfort zone. 

If you’re currently growing your tech teams and would like more information and advice on how to build and maintain a business culture that encourages, enables, and rewards collaboration, communication, and innovation, and that empowers teams to excel and solve problems creatively, then please get in touch. Alternatively, drop me a message to register your interest in upcoming exclusive tech leaders’ roundtables.