Collaboration is an essential ingredient for teams to operate in the high performance space, yet few people really experience it.
Most people experience compromise and mistake it for collaboration – people hang on to their own agendas when they engage in conversations or participate in meetings and the result is political game playing and manipulation.
People too frequently engage in the pendulum swing between loyalty and betrayal rather than finding their courageous space of telling the truth. So what does this pendulum swing look and feel like? People sit in meetings and decide it is best to display “loyalty” – don’t rock the boat, be seen as a good and loyal team member. After the meeting is finished, they walk out and betray – they talk behind others backs about what happened in the meeting. They “betray” what was agreed and yet were not honest during the meeting because they wanted to be perceived as loyal. Alternatively, someone has the courage to speak up in the meeting and “rattle the cage of existing habits” and then feel to have betrayed the team and its way of operating. They leave fearing retribution and judgment.
What is collaboration?
I describe it as the “win-win” intent we enter into any business activity with – the belief that we can achieve an outcome none of us as individuals could possibly have created. It is not your way or my way… it is the way we uniquely create together without ego and personal agendas driving us.
What does it take to make this happen?
To walk in without holding on strongly to a mutually exclusive personal agenda takes great courage. Business leaders have personal KPIs they need to achieve – their personal success relies on the achievement of these results. So to enter a conversation with a preparedness and intent to subordinate these for the greater good of the group is very courageous. They need to really believe they can achieve far more if they align with their colleagues and embrace the outcomes of everyone in the final solution. To truly collaborate, people balance the exposure of their thinking and feelings with listening to others as they disclose their thinking and feelings – it is all done without judgment while listening with the intent to really understand. Some of you may connect this concept to that espoused in the Johari Window framework, where they introduce this place as the “open” space. Research over the years has certainly aligned the open space with high performance because the open space is where we have full exposure and full disclosure. People are empowered to perform because there is transparency, trust and vulnerability. Do this and you experience conflict – different opinions, different needs, different perspectives and different values governing behaviours.
Why is conflict essential to collaboration?
Collaboration is about encouraging diversity of thought before you create convergence with a decision. Diversity of thought automatically generates conflict.
Think of the people you trust the most and love the most – your family – and tell me you have never experienced conflict with them. This is because they feel safe enough to be real. When people are “real” with each other and trust each other, there IS conflict. So if you are serious about collaboration, then get serious about conflict. Ignite it and resolve it constructively and you enable collaboration.
What’s the significance of challenging behaviour to high performance?
To enable and encourage diversity of thought, you enable and encourage challenging behaviour. Valuing this behaviour is counter to our natural inclinations.
We are wired to defend, protect, blame and justify. Release this and see challenging as positive then we drop our egos and embrace diversity of thought. We stop judging, generalising and blaming others and things for the lack of high performance.
Reframing our understanding of this essential business behaviour is critical if we are serious about high performing teams and organisations. Recall the disaster of Enron and the group think caused by the fear to challenge – we don’t need more of this we need more challenging behaviour.
Why is collaboration essential to high performance?
High performance happens when clarity is created on where we are going; leaders are clear on their personal brand and what they bring to their role to lead us into the future; people know they are cared about and are important to the achievement of this vision; and lastly the leaders are prepared to invest the time and the energy into encouraging these people to succeed. None of this happens without collaboration – a belief in the good of people, a belief in the potential of people, courage to be clear on the vision and what it is going to take to create success.
