Is Your Culture a Confederacy or a Collaboration?

Culture is a big picture concern, but it’s not an abstract concept: it’s tangible and downright personal.?

Whether you are working in a large, multinational organization or as a solo practitioner engaging with different partners and clients, culture makes a difference every day, from moment to moment.

The Oxford dictionary defines culture like this:

The second definition is truly the best fit for the social aspects of culture in the workplace, but the biological definition is an important consideration. When the workplace is a learning, living organization, it is much like an organism—and each person has a purpose in it, just like the cells in a living being.

Here’s my question about your organization’s culture:

On most days, do you feel like your culture is more like a collaboration of colleagues or a confederacy of consultants?

Collaboration of Colleagues

Let’s begin with an explanation of the best case scenario. This is the most rewarding and people-focused type of culture. Highlighting some examples from my world, below are the signs that point to a collaborative environment. What it feels like when it's working well is synchronized swimming.

Working together feels like sharing.?

I bounce around ideas openly with co-workers, and they do the same with me. We feel free to push back when ideas aren’t a good fit, and the end result of the work is a combined effort in terms of process and final product.

What can help here is clarity from leadership about everyone's role on the team, and when their roles are activated. Who is leading each workstream? Who is giving in-process feedback? Who is reviewing and approving final work before it goes to the client? MOCHA or RACI charts can be very beneficial.

Remember: If roles aren't spelled out, people will do their best to figure it out or just guess. This means that some people will have overlapping roles, leading to inefficiencies and frustration. Or, worse yet, people will not understand when there's a gap in responsibility, and some work won't get completed when or how it should have been. Being very specific, and repeating the communication during meetings, and in writing before and after meetings, are all essential.

Information flows across the organization, between colleagues and up and down any hierarchy.?

Colleagues are committed to sharing information about the work, in terms of their own process and updates or perspectives from or about the client, with one another. This happens during the day-to-day work and at key project milestones, so everyone has equitable access to background and updates. While the sharing may not always be possible in real time, my coworkers do their best to provide email, text, or work messaging platform updates as frequently as possible.

When conflict arises, it is often based on information shared. This is not bad conflict. In fact, it should lead to solutions that are owned by different members of the team. If leaders welcome all types of "news," good or not-so-good, the information flow stays open. When leaders don't want to hear about it and push back on employees to solve all problems, that flow won't happen any more.

Relationships are owned by and for all.?

Client relationships are like gold, as are relationships with the C-suite. Those in the organization who have close client or leader relationships prioritize sharing those relationships with their colleagues and make time to help nurture those bonds.?

This can look like inviting multiple staff to client or leader lunches, rather than going alone, or signing off on emails as oneself on behalf of the team (for example, “Thanks—Kim and Your EXMI Team). Simple steps like this help with strengthening multiple internal and external touchpoints over time. And for the long haul, it benefits succession planning.

Confederacy of Consultants

And here's what it feels like to work in a group of consultants who are loosely organized but not always truly collaborating. Think of the swimming metaphor again, but this time it's like being in the pool on the same team, in separate lanes.

Working together feels like parallel play.?

This is the stage of human development where children play alongside each other but don’t engage together. In the workplace, it looks like coworkers breaking up different activities and wholly owning them from start to finish, then dropping them into the final product at the end of the day. There is no opportunity to “show your work” along the way and receive input for improvement, a process which can help all to learn. While each person may have contributed to the final deliverable, the process was not experienced collaboratively.?

To get past this phenomenon, it can help to plan time to work together in person, if possible. And if not, schedule some whiteboarding sessions where each coworker has time to pitch their ideas and get feedback, with limits set on air time for each so no one person dominates the conversation. Setting interim checkpoints ahead of final deadlines—and holding true to having drafts ready for team review—is a critical step here.

Not everyone is at their most creative without solo work hours—so please note this guidance is not meant to replace that valuable “get sh*t done” time. But the give and take of true collaboration should make time to include support for work product iteration as well as healthy criticism for the sake of improvement.

Information is not shared with all team members, and/or it is not shared in a timely fashion.?

I have seen this happen in many different ways, and most of the time it’s not intentional. Typically, a coworker isn’t trying to hide information, but they run out of time to share it when or where it could be most helpful.?

The most important thing to remember here: Even when this isn't intentional, not sharing information feels that way to everyone with whom that information wasn't shared.

Being 100% honest, I have made this mistake. I remember once working with a project manager who was amazing. Getting ready to leave on vacation, I was up against a deadline that was going to hit during the week I was away. While I tried my best to get all the work done before vacation, it just didn’t happen and I finished it on the first day of my vacation. I failed to update the project manager, because I didn’t want her to worry. Since we were still meeting the deadline, I didn’t want to bother her with something I was going to take care of anyway.?

She and I both ended up emailing the client at the same time on the first day of my vacation. Her email was letting them know that even though I was out we would still meet the deadline, and mine was to deliver the report a couple days before its official due date. We ended up double-teaming the client with confusing information. It wasn’t a crisis situation, but it did demonstrate that we were not keeping one another updated—often a warning sign to a client that the team is not truly collaborating on the work for them.?

The word “transparency” is over-used, but in this situation it is important. To eliminate the double-team effect, I could have dropped my PM a note even during the rush of my busy last day before vacation, telling her that I had run out of time that day but would finish the report the next day. This would have solved the problem. It’s okay to admit that despite my best intentions, I was running behind, but I would get the work done and bring it all home. And even better, if I had known that someone else on the team had bandwidth to help finish the work, I could have eliminated that work during day one of my vacation.

Relationships are territorial. ?

When relationships aren’t owned by and for all, they become commoditized. And people know it.

Oftentimes, I’ve seen individuals who own the client relationship unintentionally let this happen. They try to save the rest of the team from hours of interaction time with a client who has unpredictable availability and miss the opportunity for the team to benefit from learning about the valuable moments of client relationship-building.

If employees don’t have important “face time” with key clients, or with leaders inside the organization, they can feel cut out or cut off. This is a particular problem when work is presented to clients without the chance to see or hear client direct reaction to work products created by the entire team.

When work is made by the team, the team should be presenting it to the internal leaders or the client. This gives everyone the responsibility for addressing the feedback, whether it be good, bad, or ugly. This is how colleagues learn how to collaborate successfully in dynamic situations, and it makes stronger ties between team members and their clients so that future work can be more client-aware and on point.

What Else?

Realistically, every day feels different in the realm of workplace culture. I’ve been in organizations that feel at either extreme, or at many points in between, over time. And that’s the magic of culture: We have a chance to change it in the small moments. That’s how transformation happens.

What am I missing? Anything you’d add to these markers for collaboration or confederacy—and how to address the opportunities for cultural refinements?