Collaboration: harnessing the power to engage people, solve problems, and manage change in business

The facilitative leader makes conscious choices about how much collaboration is appropriate for each decision and delegates accordingly.

You are a leader at a great company with the goal of developing a more engaged workforce — one where your people are genuinely connected to their work and passionate about the company. You may have tried various approaches, but few led to lasting change.

Perhaps you're a CEO who knows employees are a vital asset and critical to the company's overall strategy and goals.

You might be a division head challenged with holding on to people, especially given the cost of recruiting and training great talent.

Maybe you lead HR and all those challenges reside with you — requiring smart approaches and effective solutions.

Regardless of company size, industry — or whether your company is global or not — the idea of developing an engaged workforce can seem like a daunting and ambiguous challenge.

Here's the good news: It need not be so challenging — especially if you embrace one of the most effective practices for truly achieving greater engagement. That practice is called collaboration.

A bum rap?

Collaboration, it turns out, has its share of detractors in some business circles. The mere mention of the word causes some people to furrow their brow. They hear "collaboration" and instantly think of "groupthink", impossibly difficult consensus building, ineffective group process, or a total surrender of leadership. And while it's a powerful concept for business, it's also true that collaboration has been saddled with many wrong meanings from the sometimes weak, non-strategic, soft, and ineffective approaches found in many companies.

But a growing number of people have come to know collaboration for the powerful way that it transforms work cultures and impacts bottom line priorities. Often, those people are found working at truly collaborative organizations — where people are empowered and engaged, where they co-labor successfully, reach agreement, resolve differences, produce great products, and meet customer needs in ways that are the envy of their industry and competitors.

Employee engagement and collaboration

It's widely accepted in business that companies excel when their employees are engaged and committed to their work. Highly engaged employees are more passionate and committed on the job — which typically means they are more productive; they create better products and services; they serve customers better; and they stay put.

That last point perhaps is the most significant: Companies with engaged employees have retention rates that that far exceed those of their competitors. People desire and crave connection and empowerment; they do a better job when they get it; and companies hold on to them longer in the process.

Much is made about the benefits of employee engagement, but most analysis stops short of focused, actionable, and practical methods for achieving it. There are plenty of measures and surveys for knowing whether your employees are happy and satisfied. And if they're not, a common option is to undertake an employee communications campaign with the aim of reaching the ranks directly — helping them to align around corporate goals and appealing to them emotionally. But those efforts are all about you engaging them, when the real challenge is getting them engaged with you, their work, and with each other.

So how exactly do you go about growing a culture of engagement? And how does collaboration play a role?

In the simplest terms, there's a powerful 1-2-3 formula for achieving strong results through collaboration:

1. Increased collaboration equals greater employee involvement — a key measure of engagement — which yields greater investment in their work.

2. Greater investment, in turn, fosters a stronger commitment to the outcome.

3. That stronger commitment leads to additional discretionary effort — more effort across more areas — and better results.

Said another way:

Collaboration = Involvement = Commitment = Increased Effort = Better Results.

Why collaboration matters

Developing a collaborative work culture means creating an environment where you get more out of people and they're more satisfied in the process — they invest more in the work and in the outcomes. As many companies know from first-hand experience, a truly engaged workforce is more productive and effective, one capable of achieving stronger results.

What's more, there's a well-established set of drivers behind collaboration — internal and external forces that are stimulating demand for a more collaborative environment at many companies.

They include:

• Mergers and acquisitions: They often fail because of the people piece. The relevant statistics are startling and point to a chronic issue: What makes sense strategically is often hung up through misalignment and failure of employees to embrace and institutionalize the change.
• The matrixed organization: This structure is a reality for many people today — which means the old ways of getting things done by relying on rank and position don't work. It's not so much about power today, as it is about influence and achieving results collaboratively.
• Teams: The team-based work environment has proven its value. Getting sales and marketing, or product development and manufacturing, working together on strategic tasks boosts the effectiveness of both.
• Younger workforce: Younger people are coming up in an increasingly decentralized and networked world. In that context, they are more demanding and expect greater engagement and collaboration with their employers.
• Competition: Your competitors no doubt are embracing collaboration, getting better at it, and seeing the results — in strong retention rates, better customer service, and a host of other areas.
• Globalization: As companies expand globally, collaboration becomes even more critical. There are more ambiguous factors, many of them unfamiliar, that can imperil the enterprise's interests. Multinational launch teams must share information and consider input from multiple stakeholders — or risk failing in uncertain, rapidly changing markets.

Collaboration from an employee's perspective: Think about collaboration for a minute from the viewpoint of a single employee — any of the people who work within your organization. On a typical day, is that person energized and empowered by her work? Does she feel in-the-loop, supported, consulted, and engaged by colleagues? Does she carry herself a way that implies a passion for her role and a commitment to the work and/or company? Or is she listless and embittered at some level — perhaps lacking in commitment and going through the motions on her job — waiting for the day to end so that she can get to other parts of her life?

Next, go beyond the individual employee level with a quick assessment of whether employees are engaged and supported in their work. How often does any combination of the following questions — posed here in the voice of employees — surface where you work?

• Why wasn't I consulted?
• I'm supposed to implement this change after nobody involved me?
• Who thought of this anyway? Whose idea was it?
• Why are we spending money on this?
• Why do you always consult only your clique and not the rest of us?
• What's with all the proclamations reached behind closed doors?
• What difference does it make when you ask me and don't value my opinion?

Questions like these — and others — are common at companies lacking in discrete collaborative practices. They're helpful in assessing whether your company is one of them, as is an old adage that applies here as well: "If you spot it, you got it."

Clarity and a definition

Too often, collaboration as a powerful tool is misunderstood, misconstrued, or simply missed altogether. When "collaboration" prompts a visceral negative reaction, it's largely due to bad practices, a lack of focus, or confusion about what it is — and what it isn't.

Four questions are important in dispelling the myths and bringing clarity:

What is collaboration?
The word itself is derived from the Latin collaborar, which means to work with. So, at its root, collaboration is simply "to work together." But we know there is more to it. Collaboration in practice achieves these goals and more: a sense of commitment among the members of the group, a dynamic process, a sense of belonging; open and honest communication; mutual trust and respect; complementary, diverse skills and knowledge; and strategic thinking. Collaboration is grounded in certain mental models and core values about people and what is possible when people work together. It assumes the dignity and value of every human being, and each person's right to be involved in decisions that affect his or her life. Collaboration, at its heart, is a way of working together that focuses the full, authentic powers of each person in a group on a shared objective. And that is, in the end, where it gets its power.

Is collaboration about consensus?
Building a collaborative environment can mean to some "building consensus" — which may have negative connotations for anyone with a history of getting impossibly bogged down in a bad process that took too long. Of course, consensus may be called for in some situations: for example, when the stakes are sky-high and the buy-in of the stakeholders is essential to implementation of the decision. More important than knee-jerk consensus (or automatic decide-and-announce, for that matter) is that leaders think through decisions, choose appropriate levels of involvement, and make the decision-making process transparent and honest. And when consensus is called for, applying a variety of tested methods and practices to build agreements and reach decisions along the way will keep the group from floundering or getting bogged down.

Does collaboration involve technology?
Collaboration for many today means a technology solution or tool — either a Web-based meeting, a wiki tool, or a handheld device of some kind. But at the most basic level, people collaborate, not computers or the Web. We live in an age of rapidly evolving and powerful technologies, many of which are designed as communications solutions and group work tools. But the simple common sense conclusion remains: A team attempting to make decisions and move a project forward via an expensive web-based collaboration tool, lacking basic human process skills, will simply fail in a more modern and costly fashion.

Can collaboration be taught?
The short and emphatic answer is: Yes. If people embrace the underlying assumption that collaboration is valuable and desirable, then the behaviors and methods for collaborating can be taught — and are being taught in companies and with huge success.

The core of collaboration

Consider these three core principles of collaboration that hundreds of companies, organizations, and communities use successfully in collaborative problem solving:

1. Involve relevant stakeholders: The power of collaborative action comes through inclusion. One of the biggest mistakes people make in trying to work collaboratively is to exclude a key person or group, either intentionally or unintentionally. That's where the "we weren't consulted" roadblock originates, and it's deadly to the process. Determine the key stakeholders and involve them. Trying to "outrun" them or do "work-arounds" don't work and in fact, will only have you living with a less than satisfactory implementation — or worse, failing because those uninvolved key folks will be heard. And remember, those voices may have the one missing ingredient you need for success!

2. Design an involvement map: Uncertainty makes people anxious. Before embracing change, most people will need a clear sense of what they're getting into and how and when their input will be heard. The involvement map is about making the process transparent — by providing a clear visual representation of the entire picture and the order of the individual agreements and deliverables. This is the plan for the plan, so to speak, and its power comes from dispelling confusion and how it shows people what agreements will be needed in each phase of the effort. In the way that open-book management makes a company's finances transparent, the involvement map makes the human side of things transparent, by unpacking the complete involvement and flow of a change initiative or engagement. Lots of questions are answered with an involvement map; lots of fears are put to rest. In fact, the process itself of creating an involvement map is where the real magic lies. Done right, that process brings teams together and helps them collectively explore the implications of doing the work they have in front of them.

3. Build agreement step by step: Collaboration is not about tackling the big agreement first; it's about creating small agreements and building towards the larger ones. Because of that, involvement maps are broken out into phases. Each phase requires agreement before the team moves forward. If a big agreement cannot be reached, the group can fall back to the last agreement and problem-solve from there. When striving for concensus, keep in mind that consensus has been reached when everyone agrees to support a decision.In building concensus one agreement at a time, it's helpful to decide up-front on a fallback decision-making process — some way of coming to a decision if consensus can't be reached.

Implications for leaders

Collaboration is at the center of an important shift in a business world increasingly caught up in the shift away from autocratic leadership to more decentralized models. For many leaders, the shift away from command and control raises a central dilemma: How do you get things done and drive an organization forward when you're forced to coax and convince your people?

The central point in all of this is collaboration is not about shifting from command and control to coax and cajole. Instead, collaboration is an essential tool for the new kind of business leader — the facilitative leader — one who engages relevant stakeholders in solving problems collaboratively and works to build a more collaborative culture in his or her organization or community. The facilitative leader makes conscious choices about how much collaboration is appropriate for each decision and delegates accordingly. The facilitative leader is able to get more out of the organization, while also staying on track and driving it forward.

And how can you know whether you're one of them and whether your company benefits from the power of collaboration? A mini self-diagnostic can help — consider briefly the following questions:

• Are employees engaged, effective, and productive?
• Are they bringing their fully authentic selves to the workplace?
• Do they share a sense of pride and ownership in the work?
• Are decisions being made with all the relevant input needed to ensure they're both smart and strategic?
• Is change being implemented smoothly and effectively?

If you can answer "yes" to most or all of those questions, then you know you are reaping the rewards of a truly collaborative organization. Your people are engaged, and together you're harnessing the power of collaborative action.