Teamwork and Collaboration

How does one move an organization from a culture of ‘individual heroism’ to one of ‘teamwork and collaboration?

Let’s assume that there’s enough leadership momentum to ensure the change kicks off.  Hence there is sufficient dis-satisfaction with current state, there is a concrete enough vision of future, and first concrete steps have been identified.

Using a change management lens, you will further need to:

·         WHAT - Identify performance Metrics and Execution Plan– think of the change as a project.

o   What are some of key metrics/milestones you want to measure and track?  Given we are talking of culture change, these metrics can both be ‘observable behavior changes – in individuals/teams’ and ‘business outcomes’.

o   What’s execution plan including RACI? Do you want a week/month/quarter wise execution plan?

·         WHY - Identify changes in attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets required – Our views on teamwork and collaboration are strongly shaped by our upbringing and education. Further our workforces are diverse in nature.  It is important to converse with employees on what are prevailing attitudes, beliefs, and mindsets, identify ones that are limiting, and agree on new ones that need to be pursued.  

o   E.g. – An Individual Heroism culture might be based on belief ‘I can win it on my own’. On other hand, a more collaborative culture might be based on belief ‘2 minds and/or 2 hands always work better than 1’.

A powerful way of ‘anchoring’ this conversation is through examples of how old/new beliefs have played out in failures/successes in similar other companies/situations/sports, etc.

·         HOW - Identify Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities – employees/teams will need to make shift.

·         WHAT - Identify role of Leaders and Managers and hold them accountable for it –

o   What role should these 2 critical role holders play? Do you want them to set the tone, role model, encourage, and/or reward appropriately?

o   Frequent communication is a critical aspect of entire change process. What kind of communication plan do you want to have for leaders and managers?  ‘Examples’ and ‘success stories’ can provide further clarity and positive momentum to change process.

·         WHAT - Roles and Responsibilities – how will these change for individuals and teams?

·         WHAT – Assimilation –for any group/team which needs to be restructured as part of change efforts – there additionally needs to be a focus on their assimilation into new group/teams.

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Sourav

Effectiveness of Work Relationships

What is the unit of performance in organizations today –Individuals or Teams? ‘Teams’ would be the answer at most places.

What do we mean by teams? What is the nature of teams? Is a team a self contained unit with a boss and a set of subordinates or a complex network of independent individuals/team collaborating on a project?

The visual I have in mind when I think of a business organization is this vast criss-crosses and interconnections of various teams, with different kinds of working relationships between them.

So there are individual and multiple teams and nature of interaction/relationships between them varies.

How would you measure effectiveness of working relationships in teams? e.g. - How would you measure levels of partnership between a line and staff (HR) function, or levels of service orientation shown by a service team towards customers?

The building blocks of relationships are ‘interactions’. If there are no interactions, there can be no relationship. If there are interactions, it is not necessary that an effective relationship exists. Presence of interactions is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.

So the first thing to do would obviously to list out what are the interactions (as mandated by process) that two people/teams would need to have.

But does just the presence of minimum number of interactions ensure effectiveness of relationships?

We would also have to look at quality of interactions too. How does one figure out quality of interactions?

This is an area I am still exploring but I think the answer would be both generic and context specific. Let me illustrate through an example.

How do we measure the effectiveness of interactions in a partnership relationship? A few things that can be observed are:

• Is there collaboration in:

o goal setting

o work planning

o implementation

o review

• Are successes and failures owned/attributed equally?

• Are all stakeholders involved in celebration of successes?

• Are interactions between two/multiple teams limited to only the process or is there discretion shown in interacting more number of times than as mandated by the process?

I do feel that i am still scratching the surface when it comes to measuring ‘effectiveness of relationships’. How would you go about measuring the same? Do you know of research in this area?

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Sourav

Inter-Dependent Groups and Conflict

So here I was in a group of about 45 people. It was the 1^st day of a workshop that was to span across 2 days. The seating arrangement was different. We were to sit on mattresses placed on the floor in U shaped arrangement. There strangely seemed to be no PPT.

Most of us knew each other but still there was this anxiety and excitement on what lay ahead. I was aware that there was this group of some 10 participants who had participated in a planning workshop before. I had heard, through informal networks, good reviews of the planning workshop. I, and the other first time participants, were curious to know what had transpired there.

The facilitators found a unique way of transferring context from one group to the other. They 1^st called in the “experienced” group to sit in a circle, within the U, and share their experiences of their experience of the first workshop and Appreciate Inquiry discussion they would have had with their subordinates (a planned post workshop event). The first time participants sat in the outside U and could comment/ pitch in anytime we felt like.

After those in the inner circle were done sharing their experiences, we were called in to the inner circle to share what we had felt while we had heard the 1^st group sharing their stories.

At the end of these 2 sharing sessions, all of us were on almost common ground.

At the start of the 1^st day, there were 2 specific groups in the room. There was a need to bring them to common ground. The facilitators acknowledged this need and found a creative, experiential way to bring the groups together.

What might have happened had this initial exercise not being done? The presence of the 2 groups within the same room might have been a White Elephant- something no one speaks about but is present and influences all interactions within the room.

What are the other situations where different groups need to be brought to common ground? I can think of inter-dependent departments (e.g.- production and maintenance, sales and commercial, research and marketing). Even mergers and acquisitions would come under this realm. What seems to go wrong in these situations? Why do we frequently see friction and heartburn in these integrations/inter-dependent relationships? What can be done about them?

I think the answer lies in ‘speed’ and ‘norms’ of the different teams.

Different teams have different ‘speeds/flows’ in which they work. A simple manifestation of this would be the turnaround time for any query which flows into the team-some teams may respond in 24 hours; others may take 48 hours. Another manifestation would be what is meant by a project timeline- an IT team might be used to working on year long projects while a sales team would talk in terms of quarters.

Different teams also have different ‘norms’ – these would be in terms of decision making, communication, rituals, etc. Sales might prefer things to be done over phone, while accounts might need everything written down and documented.

Many a times these differences in ‘speed’ and ‘norms’ are not acknowledged leading to continuous and, at times, caustic friction between inter-dependent teams. Acknowledging these differences and making the teams take conscious steps towards reaching common ground on ‘speed’ and ‘norms’ would be the first step in ensuring effective collaboration.

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Sourav

Group Size and Split the Bill Problem!

Are larger or smaller groups better to get work done? Research on groups and teams tells us that there is an optimum group size (150- Dunbar Number) beyond which groups/teams become dysfunctional. Hence the need to split groups into smaller operational units once the number of people in the group exceeds 150.

What seems to be the problem? What do we mean by dysfunctionality? What happens in a larger society as compared to a smaller neighborhood? Why is it difficult to get work done through groups?

The other day I was reading about Venkat Krishnan (an IIMA graduate) and his entrepreneurial venture – Give India. He made a few interesting observations:

• He had traveled across the USA and he had found that the middle class there had a high sense of ownership.
• He compared this to the lack of ownership of the Indian middle class. He mentioned what Gandhi had said in the early 20^th century – that the Indian middle class would be the instrument to freedom.

This set me thinking. Tim Harford talks of Split the Bill problem. When there are multiple people involved, but no one has a significantly high majority stake and no one has individual accountability - then everyone tries to maximize individual pleasure/benefit and not look at the total picture. The summation of individual benefits doesn’t lead to an optimum solution at the group level.

I remember a study of different organizational types that concluded privately held organizations, or those with majority stakeholders, seem to do better than listed organizations (without any majority stakeholders).

One thing seems to be clear. Driving ownership and individual accountability seems to become harder as an organization grows in size. Probably that’s the reason why high growth organizations sometimes realize that stories of ‘discretion’ from across seem to thin down as they become larger.

Similarly, given India’s large population, driving ownership amongst citizens is a greater challenge than the challenge might be in countries with lesser population.

So what is the solution for organizations of large size? What can they do to make each employee take ownership for his/her decisions, which invariably would also impact his/her eco-system?

I can think of a few solutions:

• There are advantages of clearly delineating job responsibilities/duties but it also seems to drive unintended consequences. One of these unintended consequences is the mindset ‘My work is my work. Please don’t intrude into it. Your work is your work. I won’t intrude into it.’ In this case the team/group is just a collation of individuals. There are no synergies that emerge from having a team work on a problem. So the challenge is to ensure that job responsibilities specify/highlight what are the minimum expected requirements from the job while at the same time ensuring that employees are encourage to go beyond their job descriptions. How can this be done?
• ‘We can help others if we know what they are working on.’ This means that everyone needs to have clarity on what everyone else is working on. This would enable everyone to understand how their own actions might be impacting others and consequently take corrective action. This, along with understanding and accepting the larger organizational goal, would also form basis for collaboration amongst individuals/teams.

My proposed solution rests on the assumption that individuals are willing to extend themselves for purposes beyond their own immediate benefit.

What other solutions can you think of to drive ownership in large teams?

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Sourav