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The starting point in creating a culture of collaboration is to have a vision. Vision is a popular word in the corporate world, but at its core it means a common purpose. Whenever more than one person is working on a project it is essential to establish a common purpose from the outset that ensures incentives are aligned, regardless of the size or scope of the project.
In other words, to build a culture of collaboration, the common purpose of all those participating needs to be to build this culture of collaboration. This might sound like a paradox, but it’s quite easily solved.
To create and support the culture of collaboration, the following are key:
The first solution is in recruiting the right people. It is unlikely that a lone wolf is going to engage with and lead collaborative efforts to the same degree as someone with an expressed love of being in a team. If you’re really set on building a culture of collaboration, if that is your uncompromising vision, then that lone wolf would be an inadvisable hire, no matter what skillset they bring to the company.
It’s one thing not hiring the lone wolves, a fairly easy determination to make, but it’s quite another distinguishing between those happy to go with the flow and those who are proactive in their collaborative efforts. While the adaptability of the former is a welcome presence in any organisation looking to build a team culture, it is the recruitment of the latter that really creates a platform for a collaborative culture. But recruitment doesn’t operate in isolation. It requires a complimentary architecture and leadership style to maximally facilitate collaboration.
An organisation’s architecture refers to the technologies, tools and processes in place that enable synergy. There are plenty of technologies that help create a collaborative architecture. If a technology makes communication, progress monitoring, information sharing and knowledge dissemination between individual agents easier, it will help with collaboration. As a side note, technologies that enable person-to-person interaction and that remove the need for a ‘gatekeeper’ in that relationship carry enormous efficiency gains as well.
The leadership style of those at the centre of the organisation is also pivotal. It is their duty to foster camaraderie, openness and inclusion, and this duty cannot be taken half-heartedly. When humans feel unvalued or insecure, we become disengaged, and disengagement can be the undoing of even the best collaborative efforts. The leaders must be the glue that holds it all together. They must build and facilitate relationships by creating opportunities for the members of an organisation to interact by way of contact points, catch-up calls and events, making introductions, supporting personal connections, celebrating personal successes and establishing trust. When a new member joins, it is up to the leaders to ensure they are integrated and have collaboration opportunities from the get-go. This duty of the leaders to be the ‘glue’ never diminishes. Culture of any kind cannot be built through grand gestures but through consistent and deliberate engagement with the team, reinforcing the common purpose and making sure each individual feels valued, trusted and included.
In an organisation that has implemented the right technologies and got their culture right, feedback should be shared naturally as part of the day-to-day, but this is by no means prescriptive. Feedback systems can be formal or informal, just as long as they help keep track of culture building initiatives and identify what’s working and what isn’t. This is important for so many reasons.
First and foremost, because it is the surest way of finding out if one of the team is not engaging with, or being excluded from, collaborative projects. This would be an early indicator that that individual might need support from the leadership.
Secondly, feedback is fundamental to delivering measured growth and scaling with intent. The collaborative values and processes being implemented should be self-perpetuating and scalable (i.e. collaboration leads to collaboration), but this isn’t always the case. It can be that a process that was ideally suited to a business model at one stage of growth becomes outgrown by the business or outmatched by a better alternative available. Feedback is fundamental to identifying when a process might be nearing diminishing returns and that process can then be adapted or evolved to better suit the organisation at any stage of growth.
Thirdly, feedback provides a valuable opportunity for leaders to ask for feedback on themselves. A leader that is humble, democratic and self-aware enough to benefit from feedback of their own performance will engage the team members and encourage them of the commitment to a collaborative culture.
In summary, creating collaboration is not a one off event. It requires continual input from everyone in the business to ensure it is nurtured, developed and respected to embed the culture within the organisation at all levels.
