From the experts: Why collaboration and teamwork isn’t a natural process

Collaboration with colleagues and employees is at the heart of a functional and successful organisation — but good intentions and warm feelings aren’t enough. These nine experts say there are techniques and styles to make it work.

“If you are leading a team … think about what message your choices send,” says Charles Duhigg in Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive.

“Are you encouraging equality in speaking, or rewarding the loudest people? Are you modeling listening? Are you demonstrating a sensitivity to what people think and feel, or are you letting decisive leadership be an excuse for not paying as close attention as you should? There are always good reasons for choosing behaviors that undermine psychological safety. It is often more efficient to cut off debate, to make a quick decision, to listen to whoever knows the most and ask others to hold their tongues.

“But a team will become an amplification of its internal culture, for better or worse. Study after study shows that while psychological safety might be less efficient in the short run, it’s more productive over time. If motivation comes from giving individuals a greater sense of control, then psychological safety is the caveat we must remember when individuals come together in a group. Establishing control requires more than just seizing self-determination. Being a subversive works, unless you’re leading a team.”

“Some leaders drain all the intelligence and capability out of their teams,” write Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown in Harvard Business Review. “Because they need to be the smartest, most capable person in the room, these managers often shut down the smarts of others, ultimately stifling the flow of ideas. You know these people, because you’ve worked for and with them.

“Consider the senior vice president of marketing who, week after week, suggests new targets and campaigns for your team—forcing you to scurry to keep up with her thinking rather than think for yourself and contribute your own ideas. Or, the vice president of product development who, despite having more than 4000 top-notch software engineers on staff, admits that he listens to only a couple of people at development meetings, claiming ‘no one else really has anything much to offer’. These leaders — we call them ‘diminishers’ — underutilise people and leave creativity and talent on the table.

“At the other extreme are leaders who, as capable as they are, care less about flaunting their own IQs and more about fostering a culture of intelligence in their organisations. Under the leadership of these ‘multipliers’, employees don’t just feel smarter, they become smarter.”

“How do you create a company structure that focuses on goals instead of titles? One that encourages teams to collaborate instead of hoarding information?” asked Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins in this article in SmartCompany in 2019. This is a question that we’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years. It’s essential to get it right, or we literally couldn’t take on the crazy big goals that we’ve set out to achieve.

“The issue with titles is that they are very rigid. If you were Canva’s director of marketing a couple of years ago, for example, you would have just been directing yourself and your projects. But now we have 100 people playing a role in marketing. We started 2018 with 300 people, and we’re now at 500 and expect to have doubled the team again by the end of 2019. In other high-growth companies that I have spoken to, they talk about the ‘tour of duty’, where people ‘at the top’ will generally only last a few years before not being able to perform at the level required as their company has grown. This feel like a pretty big pitfall of a rigid title system.

“So instead of focusing on titles that are most likely going to be outdated as our company grows, we focus on goals. For example, doubling the number of users acquired through a certain channel. As people grow in experience they may be able to take on harder and harder goals, support other people to reach their goals and explore more complex or ambiguous goals.

“Rigid titles work well in environments that aren’t changing very much, but when goals, teams and team sizes are constantly evolving and changing, it’s essential to focus on goals instead.”

“Thomas Edison’s greatest achievement was not, in fact, the invention of the lightbulb,” writes Jamey Austin on FastCompany.

“The genius of Edison was that he brought together some of the brightest minds to collaborate, exchange ideas, and work in creative ways to change the world as we knew it. Edison encouraged, even required, the sharing of notes. He placed notebooks everywhere — the workshop, the foundry. The notes the team added helped them build on each other’s radically different ideas, capturing all this divergent thinking like lightning in a bottle, so their work could literally be more than the sum of their individual efforts. The shared workspace at Menlo Park allowed divergent thinking to become convergent thinking. Edison expected workers to figure stuff out for themselves, and didn’t restrict them to working on one specific job. If someone on the team showed interest and aptitude in another area, they were encouraged to dive in. Edison believed that when teams needed input from different perspectives, roles had to be fluid. His goal was to always access new ways of thinking.”

“A collaborative team isn’t a group of people working together. It’s a group of people working together who trust each other,” writes Carol Kinsey Goman in Forbes.

“Trust is the belief or confidence that one party has in the reliability, integrity and honesty of another party. It is the expectation that the faith one places in someone else will be honored. It is also the glue that holds together any group, and it is the foundation of true collaboration. Without trust, a team loses its emotional ballast. In an environment of suspicion, people withhold information, hide behind psychological walls, and withdraw from participation.”

“A pile of studies show that when people fight over ideas, and do so with mutual respect, they are more productive and creative,” writes Robert Sutton in Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst. “By pushing your ideas, pounding on others’ ideas, and inviting others to pound on yours, too, the best ideas are formed and selected. If people can’t fight without acting like assholes, it is better not to fight at all. But the best bosses ignite constructive battles over ideas. The list that follows gives tips for ‘How to lead a good fight’:

• “Don’t begin the fight until everyone understands the challenge or problem at hand;

• “Don’t argue while generating ideas or solutions — make it safe for people to suggest crazy or controversial ideas;

• “After you have some ideas, then invite people to tear them apart; 
• “If people turn nasty, take a time-out and ask them to turn off the venom;
• “Pay special attention to comedians who deliver devastating insults via jokes and teasing;

• “Encourage everyone to argue;

• “Gently silence people who talk too much and invite those who are silent to jump into the fray;

• “Don’t just listen to people’s words; watch their nonverbal behavior. Are they smiling? Really listening? Glaring, smirking, or rolling their eyes? Model constructive nonverbal behavior and coach people who (perhaps unwittingly) interject negative expressions;

• “Take special care to invite people who are shy, new, or at the bottom of the pecking order to express opinions — and defend them vigorously against personal attacks;

• “Learn people’s quirks. Some have remarkably thick skins; nastiness doesn’t faze them. Others are so thin-skinned that even gentle critiques send them into a rage or a funk;

• “Once the argument is resolved, make sure that the conflict and criticism ceases. It is time to develop and implement the agreed-upon ideas;

• “Forbid people from rehashing complaints that ‘my great idea’ was killed and/or well-worn criticisms of ‘winning’ ideas;

• “After the fight is over, do some backstage work. Soothe those who feel personally attacked and whose ideas were shot down; and

• “Give warnings and coaching to those who made personal attacks. Despite mentoring and skilled facilitation, some people may prove to be too nasty or hypersensitive to criticism. You may need to exclude them from future battles, as their foibles may make it impossible for others to engage in constructive conflict.”

“Casual persuasion is the act of dropping an idea in someone’s lap and then helping them to notice it,” writes Mark McCormack in Managing. “If you have a good idea, you can usually improve its chances of coming to life if you can convince someone else that it’s their idea as well. Quite often, if I have an idea that I want one of our executives to implement, I will casually mention it in a conversation. I don’t flag it by saying, ‘Here’s a great idea!’ I simply muse out loud in the hope that an alert listener might pick up on it. Then I wait for something good to happen.”

“The conventional model of collaboration in business is to go to a lot of meetings to try to get agreement on five things,” explains Adam Kahane, author of Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust, writing in strategy+business magazine:

What is our common purpose?

What is the problem?

What is the solution to the problem?

What is the plan to execute the solution?

Who needs to do what to execute the plan?

“Answering these questions typically involves a delicate dance of managerial authority and employee adaptation. A boss may have a solution in mind, but could face potential downsides by enforcing it unilaterally. Those who disagree may drag their feet in implementing the plan or otherwise sabotage the team’s efforts. So instead, teams collaborate: A boss leads everyone to see the problem the same way (probably the way the boss does), and then to agree on a way forward.

“But what if the people in the room are working at cross-purposes? … it becomes time to attempt what I call stretch collaboration. There are three ‘stretch’ tools you can use to make progress, as an alternative to trying to work through the five questions in the conventional form of collaboration:

• “Accept the Plurality of the Situation. You do not have to agree what the solution is — or even what the problem is — to make progress. Different actors may support the same outcome for different reasons;
• “Experiment to find a way forward. Keep trying things with the understanding that you can’t control the future, but you can influence it. Success isn’t coming up with a solution — it’s working towards one; and
• “See yourself as part of the problem, not outside of it. You can’t make progress until you realise that you have a role in the situation. If you’re part of the propblem, you can’t be part of the solution.

“Stretch collaboration requires us to keep moving and trying things with the understanding that we can’t control the future, but we can influence it. The definition of success in this kind of collaboration isn’t to come up with a solution, but to be working toward it.”