Collaboration by Morten Hansen|Book Brief

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>> The book Collaboration questions the assumption that collaboration is always a best practice. Author Morten Hansen explains how to avoid the costly traps of unnecessary collaboration and start getting the results you need.

Music Morten Hansen: To collaborate or not to collaborate: That is the question. Collaboration has been a hot buzzword for many years. But not much thought has been given to whether all collaboration is, in fact, necessary or effective. When I speak of collaboration here, I'm referring to collaboration within the company, not outside it. Now, collaboration has tremendous upside. As companies as diverse as Apple, Cisco, Wells Fargo, and Proctor and Gamble have discovered, collaboration can lead to better innovation, better sales, and lower costs. But the key is to know when to collaborate and when not to.

Music Even the smartest managers can get collaboration wrong. One trap you can fall into is to overcollaborate. For example, that happens when people attend too many meetings of questionable value. Another trap is to start collaboration projects in hostile company environments. For example, in 2003, Howard Stringer, the U.S. head of Sony, launched a project called Sony Connect to compete against Apple's iPod. But they failed to produce a great product. Because its employees worked in silence and competed against each other, Sony was just not set up to support collaboration across its divisions. How do leaders avoid such traps and instill the kind of collaboration that produces great performance? The answer I found is a set of principle I call disciplined collaboration.

Music The idea of disciplined collaboration can be summed up in one phrase: the leadership practice of properly assessing when to collaborate and when not to, and instilling in people both the willingness and the ability to collaborate when required. The first step is to evaluate opportunities for collaboration. Will we gain a great upside by collaborating? Remember that the goal of collaboration is not collaboration. It is to gain far better results. This means that you need permission to say no to collaboration when there's no compelling reason to do so. The second step is to spot barriers to collaboration. What's keeping your staff or your company from collaborating effectively? They must simply have no incentive to reach out to others or converging to provide help. People may also not be able to work well with others who they don't know. Or they may not be able to find information they need when they need it. Once you discover the barriers in your setting, you can now tailor a solution, which is the third step to disciplined collaboration. When managers want to motivate people to collaborate, they can craft compelling goals, articulate a strong value of cross-company teamwork, and reward people based on collaboration. Managers can also cultivate a certain type of management that gets the right people to collaborate on the right project. This means cultivating what I called T-shaped management. People who simultaneously focused on the performance of their unit, the vertical part of the T; and across boundaries, the horizontal part of the T. They are willing as well as able to collaborate when needed but disciplined enough to say no when it's wrong. And, finally, you can build nimble, interpersonal networks across the company. Collaboration tends to run better on interpersonal networks rather than formal hierarchies. Remember, more collaboration is not necessarily a good thing. Rather, there's a right way and a wrong way to collaborate. If you can implement the right way of collaborating, you can take your level of performance to a whole new level.

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