Over 40 years, we have found that leaders who practice and model behaviors that support and reinforce these four specific areas are successful builders of collaborative workplaces.

Collaboration is getting all kinds of attention these days. But many of us innovating at the leading edge of collaboration — especially around the power of collaboration as a strategic business tool — are often puzzled by much of the dialog. The word "uneven" comes to mind, but the dialog’s also often misleading about what collaboration is, and isn’t.

Before I elaborate, I’ll hint at something that Interaction Associates will be talking about in the coming weeks. We’ve just undertaken an extensive best practices study with IDG Research Services, surveying 211 business leaders from more than a dozen industries — looking to evaluate how organizations are using leadership, trust, and collaboration to drive success.

The findings are quite powerful, and include fresh data about whether people view technology as crucial to collaboration. It turns out, by a large percentage, those surveyed rate process and people skills much higher than technology as essential elements for successfully growing a highly collaborative work force.

Let’s go back to the uneven dialog about collaboration, just briefly. A recent online piece in the Social Computing Journal is a good example. It argues that collaboration is an activity that offers no ROI itself. Without splitting hairs, that’s a technologist’s view of collaboration — and it misses a fundamental point that my colleagues and I at Interaction Associates tell clients all the time: Technologies don’t collaborate. People do.

In judging the ROI of collaboration, it’s important to see how collaboration contributes to creating a more involved and committed workforce, to fostering innovation and supporting creativity, to building stronger trusting relationships through greater transparency — and more.

In tough times like we have now, collaboration helps companies achieve a multiplier effect — in short, they achieve more with less. But it doesn’t happen automatically, just as baking a cake doesn’t happen by simply putting flour, sugar, and eggs in a bowl and expecting a cake to emerge spontaneously. Successful collaboration doesn’t happen by acquiring new technologies, or expecting people to work more effectively together just because they should. We need to apply strategic process skills to make those ingredients come together for the successful outcome we desire.

So what are those skills?
For 40-years and counting, Interaction Associates has based much of our work with leaders in four areas depicted in a strategic framework that we call The Interaction Method™.

The Interaction Method provides a facilitated approach to building understanding, generating agreement, and helping people take concerted action. Creating more collaborative leaders within an organization requires a focus on these four interconnected areas:

Shared Responsibility. The principle that everyone in an organization can play an active and positive role in producing meaningful results.

Collaborative Attitude. The mindset that guides individuals to act in a cooperative and impactful manner.

Strategic Thinking. The mental process of selecting an appropriate course of action to achieve desired results.

Facilitative Behaviors. The practical tools, techniques and actions that help people build understanding and agreement.

What do these areas mean, practically, for the business leader? Some of the capabilities found inside The Interaction Method (though not all) include:

• Having the finesse and tools to lead complex, multi-sector stakeholder projects;
• Being able to manage both face-to-face and virtual meetings and conversations in ways that both build inclusion, yet are efficient in producing results;
• Knowing how to strategically manage the decision-making process to involve the right people at the right time in the right decisions;
• Being able to develop and promote a vision for success that enrolls employees and other stakeholders;
• And finally, but not least, the simplest of collaboration tools that yields enormous payoff — being able to build agreement in ways that increase commitment and accountability.

Over 40 years, we have found that leaders who practice and model behaviors that support and reinforce these four areas are successful builders of collaborative workplaces. Incidentally, what technologies they employ isn’t a significant variable.