Eight Factors for Collaborative Work Success
Harvard Business Review
by Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School, and Tamara J. Erickson, one of the top 50 global business thinkers in 2015.
Notes
- Investing in signature relationship practices.
- Modeling collaborative behavior.
- Creating a “gift culture.”
- Ensuring the requisite skills.
- Supporting a strong sense of community.
- Assigning team leaders that are both task- and relationship- oriented.
- Building on heritage relationships.
- Understanding role clarity and task ambiguity.
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In assembling and managing a team, consider the project you need to assign and whether the following statements apply:
__ The task is unlikely to be accomplished successfully using only the skills within the team.
he task must be addressed by a new group formed specifically for this purpose.
__ The task requires collective input from highly specialized individuals.
__ The task requires collective input and agreement from more than 20 people.
__ The members of the team working on the task are in more than two locations.
__ The success of the task is highly dependent on understanding preferences or needs of individuals outside the group.
__ The outcome of the task will be influenced by events that are highly uncertain and difficult to predict.
__ The task must be completed under extreme time pressure.
If more than two of these statements are true, the task needs revision.
***
new teams, particularly those with a high proportion of members who were strangers at the time of formation, find it more difficult to collaborate than those with established relationships.
…when 20% to 40% of the team members were already well connected to one another, the team had strong collaboration right from the start.
One important caveat about heritage relationships: If not skillfully managed, too many of them can actually disrupt collaboration. When a significant number of people within the team know one another, they tend to form strong subgroups— whether by function, geography, or anything else they have in common. When that happens, the probability of conflict among the subgroups, which we call fault lines, increases.
Collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood—when individuals feel that they can do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste too much energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focus on the task.
Strengthening your organization’s capacity for collaboration requires a combination of long-term investments—in building relationships and trust, in developing a culture in which senior leaders are role models of cooperation—and smart near-term decisions about the ways teams are formed, roles are defined, and challenges and tasks are articulated. Practices and structures that may have worked well with simple teams of people who were all in one location and knew one another are likely to lead to failure when teams grow more complex.