It was not so long ago that business leaders viewed competition as the most appropriate way to achieve their goals. The basic premise was that in any industrial environment there was a finite amount of potential value and the savvy executive tried to beat other companies by gaining as much of the cake as possible.
This focus on competition has played out in many ways. Executive boardrooms have been filled with the language of competition, with words such as winners and losers, and battlefields the norm. People management practices extolled the virtues of competition through the high value placed on individualised bonuses and rewards.
Over the past five years, it has been striking how this fundamental premise has begun to falter. Instead of competition, the discussion in the executive offices is increasingly of collaboration. While the former focused on bosses and hierarchies, and was about withholding knowledge and the exercise of personal power, this new way of management thinking is about working with peers and colleagues.
Why collaboration is increasingly crucial
The emergence of collaboration as a managerial competency is the result of a number of intersecting trends.
The rise of partnership strategies
The first trend is a fundamental change in what constitutes good business strategy and strategic positioning. Over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that executives and their businesses are not, in fact, competing for a piece of finite cake. Instead they are more interested in making the cake bigger. In the jargon of business strategy, the emphasis is less on “value appropriation” and more on “value creation”, often in the context of co-creation.
According to this logic, new markets can be created but to do so often requires erstwhile competitors, customers and clients to work together. This first became apparent in the pharmaceutical industry, which had for decades created and marketed its products through alliances and joint ventures that allow individual companies to pull together the breadth of talent and experience required to bring major drugs to the market. Working with partners has required this sector to hone their partnership skills and build their collaborative capabilities. These patterns of collaborative working are now apparent in the telecom sectors and IT where it is becoming increasingly untenable to ‘go it alone’ Alliances and partnerships require the capacity to work collaboratively with others who you consider to be more like peers than suppliers.
The emergence of the knowledge economy
The second trend is the rapid move into the knowledge economy and the focus on innovation of products or services. Research into the history of innovation shows clearly that in the majority of cases, innovations arise as the result of the collective experience and conversations of groups of people. It is in this combination of ideas and insights that innovation is borne. Yet, and here is the real issue, people do not willing work with each other and share knowledge unless they respect and trust each other. Simply put, innovation is unlikely to occur without some degree of a collaborative culture.
The working styles of GenY
These first two trends are about the business environment. The third trend that influences the extent to which collaboration is crucial and possible is the subtle but profound generational changes that are becoming apparent. To understand these subtle changes let’s step back for a moment and think about the basic attitudes and values of many of today’s CEO’s and senior executives, many of whom are baby boomers. These post war baby boomers entered a world of competition and individual endeavour. Typically they had to battle to get a university education, to get a job and to make it in a career. Competition was the name of the game and they honed their competitive skills and practices as they rose through the corporate hierarchy.
These generational cohorts are now in their late 40s and 50s. They may still have their hands on the corporate steering wheel – but coming up after them are two generations with very different attitudes. Coming up behind them are Gen X’s and Gen Y’s. Both of these generation cohort are more collaborative – and Gen Y (now up to age 27) are particularly adept at collaborating with others. This is a community-based generation who place enormous value on working with their peers and shy away from the individual competitive nature that marked many baby boomers. So, as the power of the baby boomers and their competitive style begins to wane – so we might expect a more finally tuned collaborative style to occur – championed by GenY’s – for whom collaboration is a basic attitude and competency, and for whom collaborative technology is second nature.
Advances in collaborative technology
The final trend is technological. As I will show – much of the collaborative experiences in companies take place in highly complex forms. These rely on advanced technology to support them. For example, it is very difficult to collaborate with someone in another country without asynchronous communication technology such as voice mail and e-mail. It is also very difficult to share information without some shared repository of knowledge. Technology has made possible what demography has made plausible – a wired up generation for whom communities is central. You may not be on face book or second life – but check with your teenager children – they are.
The complex nature of collaboration
So how is collaboration actually taking place? At its most simple, collaboration involves two or more people actively engaging with each other. They could be working on a joint project and sharing an office – or even meeting each other over a coffee to discuss an issue they both face. This is collaboration at its most simple.
However, in most cases, collaboration takes an altogether more complex form. The magnitude of this complexity was brought home to me in a recent study at London Business School supported by the Advanced Institute of Management. Over the period of three years we studied 52 teams in 15 companies located in both the USA and Europe. Our interest was in the nature of collaboration. What became rapidly apparent was that collaboration is inevitably occurring in highly complex situations.
Complexity of collaboration typically takes a number of forms. It can be created by the sheer number of people involved. At Nokia, PwC and Reuters for example, we found collaborative teams of over 100 people to be the norm. This is an incredible scale of collaboration. These collaborative situations are also complex because often the people who are collaborating are not co-located – and in many cases the actual team members are arrayed around the world. And finally, give the virtual and international scale of collaboration – the membership are diverse and often strangers.
Collaboration is simple when people are interacting with a relatively small number of others – when they are a similar age, gender, nationality or education level, and when they are located in the same place and already know each other. It is a whole lot more difficult when teams are large, diverse virtual and a high proportion of them are strangers.
Supporting complex collaboration
If collaboration is so crucial, what can be done to create a culture of collaboration? Our research shows that collaboration emerges when the culture and expectation are in place, and when the task itself encourages collaboration.
A culture of collaboration
In our research we examined almost 100 factors that could potentially support the emergence of a culture of collaboration. These are the four factors that are most important:
·Leadership role modelling – employees are unlikely to behave collaboratively and to value collaboration if they see senior executives competing with each other.
·There are a number of people practices that appear to support a culture of collaboration – in particular selecting for collaborative attitudes and induction are particularly important.
·Individual reward structures act as a barrier to collaboration and should be removed if collaboration is to be encouraged.
·Collaboration is more likely to take place when people also collaborate in more informal ways – for example through shared social activities, communities of practice or social enterprise activities.
Productive collaboration
These four enablers together create a culture where the probability of collaboration is increased. However, for collaboration to be productive – then there needs to be a focus on the competencies of people and the task itself:
·The general skills of appreciating others diversity, managing conflict and commitments are crucial to productive collaboration.
·The task itself is important. Tasks that encourage collaboration are complex, ambiguous and meaningful and require people to collaborate if the goal is to be achieved.
Over the last couple of years I have worked with a number of people to create a simulation of collaboration – where people work in a virtual environment to create an innovative product. As they go through the challenges of attracting people to work with them, assigning tasks, giving feedback and sharing knowledge – so they experiment with the styles that work best for them. I believe that these simulated environments will become ever more central to the development of collaborative competencies.
The on- going challenges of collaboration
As collaboration becomes one of the defining competencies and strategies for this decade – I see two major issues and challenges that will require greater insight:
The evolution of virtual technology. Technology plays a central role in complex collaboration – particularly when many of the players are virtual. Our research shows that whilst most teams currently use asynchronous technology in the form of e-mails and voice-mails – surprisingly few make use of video conferencing. Yet in a virtual world visual identification can be enormously useful as visitors to second life can see. The challenge here is to understand how technology can support complex collaboration. At IBM, for example, there are a number of on-going experiments into using Second Life and personal avatars as a platform for the interactions of virtual teams. These early experiments have been very successful – and so we can expect to see more collaboration mediated by the virtual world of technology. Expect some exciting development over the next couple of years and more and more collaboration is played out in the virtual world with avatars (with possibly multiple identities) standing in for you.
The second challenge for collaboration over the next decade will be to build a more sophisticated and finessed understanding of the leadership techniques of collaboration. Whilst some of the competencies we have already will be useful – others need to be realigned and readjusted. For example – in our own work we explored at what stage in complex collaboration team leaders should bring the team together. Whilst many leaders had presumed that to bring people together at an early stage – in fact we found this was more likely to create the fault lines that breaks collaboration and teams.
Working in complex collaborative forms and supporting a cooperative culture are some of the most pressing leadership challenge executives face. They are also some of the most challenging and exciting.
Lynda Gratton is professor of management practice at London Business School. Her latest book “Hot Spots; why some teams buzz with energy and others don’t” explores how complex collaboration takes place. The title of the article about faultiness is “Bridging Faultlines:Overcoming Fractures in Diverse Teams” by Lynda Gratton, Andreas Voigt and Tamara Erickson and is published in the Summer 2007 edition of the Sloan MIT Management Review.
Hot Spots at www.hotspotsmovement.com
