Smart Collaboration
Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos by Heidi Gardner (Harvard Business Press, 2017), reviewed by Steve Gladis, Ph.D.
1.????Overview. Collaboration isn’t easy; however, companies that collaborate well and bring various business-unit partners into a client engagement right from the start produce satisfied customers, generate larger profits and produce a better workforce. In a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world, companies require, and will pay for, collaborative, higher-end services. On the other hand, they will commoditize lower-level routine services, driving down revenue and general satisfaction with that service. We especially see this happening in client-services companies like law, accounting, and consulting. And while the evidence mounts for smart collaboration, people and cultures resist due to barriers—it’s a new idea, demanding, and sometimes difficult to execute. How do you build smart collaboration??Build competence-trust (trust in the competence of others) among departments, foster interpersonal trust, develop confidence and capability to dig into the client’s broader issues, learn about your own firm’s offerings, develop internal political skills, and create a more efficient collaboration process.
2.????Specialization vs. VUCA.?Your profession will require more and more specialization, especially in a more complex world—VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). This calls for collaboration among specialists to deliver high-quality outcomes on VUCA issues.
3.????What is Collaboration? Collaboration is not delegation. Delegation is an important skill but different from collaboration. Delegation involves breaking down a problem and handing it out for discrete solutions (a hub-and-spoke approach). Collaboration integrates specialized knowledge to solve complicated problems that no solo expert can solve on his/her own. Examples of complicated problems requiring collaboration of sophisticated skills: ?Privacy (data and cyber security), regulatory, compliance, and other such issues.
4.????Why It’s Important.
a.????Revenue: The more business units that serve a customer, the higher the revenue. The addition of just one business unit to the team serving the customer creates a quick upswing in business. All the business units do better. More services on complex problems has high impact on companies.?Margins rise with complexity!
b.????Customer Loyalty: The more partners who work with a client, the longer the customer stays. When entire teams serve a customer, 90% stay with existing provider. How many of your customers are having a collaborative customer experience with your company?
5.????Collaboration Barriers. Company solo “superheroes” can block collaboration. A study across financial services and many other types of services discovered similar barriers to collaboration. Here are the BIG barriers: ?Don’t know colleague’s expertise, competence-trust (will my partner screw up?), inefficiency of collaboration and time pressure, lack of knowledge of your own firm’s offerings, and politics. So how to collaborate??Specifically, how do you build smart collaboration? Try these: Build competence-trust, foster interpersonal trust, develop confidence and capability to dig into the client’s broader issues, learn about your own firm’s offerings, develop internal political skills, and create a more efficient collaboration process.
6.????Find the Opportunity. Ask your client, “What keeps you up at night?” The answer is invariably a VUCA problem—complex problem calling for smart collaboration. This is NOT cross selling—clients hate that. How to choose where to start? Consider the immediate potential of the engagement and ease of implementation. Take on the small problems that are easy to implement to rack up small wins. Then, move up the chain of problems.
7.????Types of Collaborators: Solo Specialists—experts who see little value in collaboration confuse cross selling with collaboration—leave lots of money on the table and can underserve their clients. Seasoned Collaborators—they understand collaboration’s big benefits—but are often frustrated by a lack of support. Contributors—they churn out work—hard workers, heads-down delivering without collaborating. Contributors are valuable to the organization and worth cultivating into collaborative ventures. Ringmasters—they can get all these folks (the solo specialists, seasoned collaborators and contributors) to work together in smart collaboration. For ringmasters to be successful, they must be able to measure collaboration, get compensation right, and use technology to leverage collaboration.
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8.????Build the Team: For a committed, accountable team, try the following: Avoid replicating yourself when collaborating—you need a diverse team. Avoid gurus, who are flooded and have limited time. Find “hidden gems,” people in your company who are hungry for opportunities. Become an honest broker—recommend collaborators to others in the group—be honest about their pluses and minuses.?Consider laddering—cross-generational collaboration. Learn the motivations of people in your organization that you need to understand: Revenue, learning and challenging opportunities, as well as legacy motivation. Then think about what barriers hold them back and persuade them that you can mitigate those risks for them. Pay people fairly. Compensation matters but is not the silver bullet. Relative pay matters—my pay as compared to my peers. The more you show people they are valued, the less you have to pay them. Metrics drive behavior—the progress principle. Give feedback: High quality, timely and constructive, but not necessarily positive. Motivate people: When people do what they do best every day, they love their work, turnover drops, customer service rises. Engineer a proper team kick-off. A good team launch or relaunch drives up team performance by 30% with an enhanced sense of shared purpose, objectives, and valued peer expertise. With “Smart Collaboration” all boats rise—your team, your company and your clients. See my article on Team Coaching That Accelerates Performance .
9.????Video Links of Value: Check out these videos of Heidi Gardner explaining her research.
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