Building sustainable collaborations

Everyone likes the idea of collaboration. Leaders, directors, and funders often call for more of it. Why is it so hard to do and sustain -- and how can you be more successful at it?

First, let's talk about why collaboration is worth the trouble. It is one of the keys to the dominance of Japanese automakers in the American market and the increased safety of air travel.

The biggest challenge is that many organizations and funding programs implicitly promote not collaboration, but competition. Executives who distribute limited resources based on individual success and funders who use traditional means of selecting grant recipients foster environments where people and groups fight against one another. Some competition is good, in that it challenges employees and grantees to be more effective and efficient. But it also leads to behaviors that drain resources and energy: power plays, hoarding of information and resources, and pretenses of collaboration. Bring together a bunch of organizational directors from the same industry, and they'll say they should work together. Check with them a year later; see how many have.

Under these conditions, those who initiate collaborations take on risks and added costs. Everyone else can sit back and get the windfall benefits of these efforts. Or they can focus on what will get them more resources, while the initiators spin their wheels.

If you want to see more collaboration, you have to do more than ask. You have to reward it. Here's how:

If you are an organizational director:
*Institute 360-degree performance evaluations. Employees tend to cooperate more with one another when they know they will evaluate one another.
*Reward efforts at collaboration in individual and group performance evaluations. Do not just reward outcomes; an indifferent worker or group could scuttle a successful effort at teamwork.
*Model collaboration yourself. You want employees to work across divisions and levels? You do it too.
*Ensure that employees understand that teamwork is a core principle of the organization, and highlight it in organizational communications.
*Have confidential conversations with staff to find out if individuals or divisions are engaging in "silo" behavior. Then through carrots, sticks, or some combination of the two, encourage the isolators to change their behaviors.

If you are a funder:
*Give more money to collaborative efforts than individual ones.
*Ask applicants to describe who they will collaborate with and how. Putting someone on an advisory board that does nothing is not collaboration -- it's tokenism.
*If applicants are seeking funds for themselves, ask them why they chose not to collaborate with other, similar groups.

If you are a team leader:
*Design tasks so that different members of the team work together.
*When tensions first arise, encourage teammates to talk about how the team should make decisions.
*Be alert to information hoarding, power grabs and back biting. Deal with it quickly. If you don't, your teammates will assume you're tolerating the behavior.
*Remember that everyone has different reasons for collaborating. Some are inspired by the team mission and feel comfortable in teams. Others may want to protect their interests. Understand your teammates' interests, and further them with teamwork.

People do tend to work together more effectively when they feel there is a crisis that they can't handle themselves. Of course, you want to avoid a crisis. But if it has to be dealt with, it's better to do it together.

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Do you have a professional development tip you would like to share? Have a question that you would like to see answered here? Please send it to Leo at vazquezl@rutgers.edu