The strength of the team is the individual... the strength of the individual is the team!

Developing a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing, Part 2: Barriers and Enablers (Co-Author: Maxine Shaverin)

Last weekend my 11 year old son was playing a game on his Nintendo Switch. In the middle of it, one of the fictional characters made a remarkable statement and yelled out: "The strength of the team is the individual... the strength of the individual is the team!" I stopped reading my book and started paying closer attention. And immediately my son asked me: "Dad, what did he just say and mean with this?"... and there we were, talking about teamwork and collaboration and how helping each other is so important in todays world. The conversation was cool but also made me uncomfortable at the same time. I first had to realize that my biased view of kids not learning much through video games was proven pretty much wrong. And of course my son did not hesitate to point that out to me :-) . And in addition it made me even more uncomfortable because it reminded me to put some time again into this article series:

So here we are now and I'll try my best to move forward in sharing more about the study I conducted last year. It was all focused on how leaders in todays world can enable and create a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing. A few weeks ago, as an entry into the topic, we found that culture is determined and develops through collective learning and collaboration of an organization and everyone in it. The strength of the team is the individual, the strength of the individual is the team. Sounds all somewhat related, doesn't it?

In global technology services organizations, ongoing learning is surely often seen as an important differentiator for improved performance and gaining a competitive advantage. As culture shapes through the groups collective learning, a structured approach to collaboration and knowledge sharing is vital to cope with the rapid increase of new information and technological advancements. Successful organizations use these learnings to continuously develop a winning culture. Everyone learns and willingly shares, and the organization gets smarter every day. In an ideal world. Bust most of us don't live in an ideal world. Many of you will have experienced that not everyone is a natural collaborator. Not everyone is comfortable sharing their knowledge, despite it being so critical for the success of the overall team or organization. It may have to do with self interest or just fear to speak up. It may have to do with unrecognized conflicts amongst individuals or teams. There are plenty of barriers that can be found. But it too often does not yet happen successfully.

What are these barriers and how do you overcome them? How do you encourage your employees to be different? In my study last year I tried to find that out. Over 300 individuals from tech companies all over the globe participated and shared their views in a survey, which was later on complemented with several interviews. A very diverse amount of people contributed and I am very grateful to all of you who did. Participants came from 36 countries and shared their experiences from working in small companies, mid size businesses and large global corporations. There were individual contributors with no formal management responsibility, first and second line managers as well as Directors and Vice President's all the way up the chain to C-Level Executives/Board members. Going through the results later, it was fascinating to see that some interesting patterns emerged from all the data which was so willingly shared by all of you.

To start with, over 90 % of all participants judged the level of importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing in their organizations as absolutely essential (the highest score possible), followed by 7 % who saw it is at least as very important.

But then only 28 % of participants stated that they had very good success in establishing strong collaboration practices across their teams. And even worse, only 18 % of participants thought that they were doing very well with regards to knowledge sharing. Let's get into it and have a look at the barriers of collaboration and knowledge sharing more closely now. Can you guess the number one barrier ? The strength of the team is the individual, the strength of the individual is the team... where do we hit the brick wall in all of this?

61.6 % reported that individuals or groups who are trying to gain, maintain or defend their expert status are the biggest barrier to success, followed very closely by the lack of leadership recognizing and rewarding collaboration and knowledge sharing (61.2 %) and the lack of leadership / management emphasizing the strategic importance of collaboration and knowledge sharing for their organization (60.4%). Along these lines the issue of managers and leaders not being role models (58.6%) was emphasized as well.

This may be surprising to you but all of these aspects came before processes or even the physical workplace, tools etc. that enable collaboration. These are surely not unimportant however you can have great collaboration tools and the nicest office environment or infrastructure, but if you, as a leader of your organization, are not personally engaged in making collaboration happen, your organization will have a tough time developing the culture you are longing for. As leaders, it is a good idea to remind ourselves regularly that we are part of the team. We're an individual in our team and without our team, there's not much there for us to lead. The strength of the team is the individual, the strength of the individual is the team. Think through this a bit for yourself and what that means for the team or organization you are leading, whether it is a small team or a large corporation. And if you have kids playing video games, pay some attention every now and then... there is always something to learn :-)

Makes sense?

There is more to come.