Mark Patrick opens the 2014 edition of AIIM's 8 Things series with a post packed full of advice, tips, and additional reading on how to do collaboration right and how to avoid doing collaboration poorly. The lessons he's learned and applied in the military are as important to working well together in all walks of life.
Mark Patrick has been Chief of the Information Management Division on the Joint Staff (U.S. Dept of Defense) since 2007. A retired U.S. Navy helicopter pilot, he and his team oversee records, content and knowledge management, collaboration activities, declassification, legal discovery, FOIA and research assistance for Joint Staff Action Officers serving the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has served as a board member for his local AIIM chapter and is currently serving on the board of AIIM International. He received the 2013 AIIM Distinguished Service Award. He and his family reside in Virginia.
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[Opinions expressed here are personal and are not the official position of the Joint Staff, the Department of Defense, or AIIM.]
Collaboration is not inherently good. It can be done poorly or well. It is important to think of it strategically as well as tactically. High ideas without detail-oriented execution will not produce the best outcomes. Here are eight things you need to know that cover strategic and tactical fundamentals for leaders serious about improving organizational collaboration.
1. Good collaboration is disciplined.
Effective collaboration is not some random happening. One must plan for it. At its core, good collaboration is people working together to arrive at the best possible solution to a single problem or group of problems as quickly as possible. This means that ideally one has the smartest people on the issue, all of the affected stakeholders, and rapid access to all relevant recorded information together in the same room -- working in person, face-to-face, in real-time. If folks can’t be in the same room together, virtual collaboration tools must be chosen carefully and used well.
The author Morten Hansen writes in much more detail about disciplined collaboration in his book Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results.
Key to disciplined collaboration is an accurate assessment of the problem or project at hand and a thoughtful determination as to whether group work is the best way to tackle it. If so, then process optimization for how that work will be done to accommodate team members with the best possible tools will increase the chance of success. Neglect a thoughtful, disciplined approach to people, process, or tools, and speed and quality of outcome will suffer.
Plan and prepare to collaborate in a disciplined way. Know your people. Know your tools. Know how to design an optimum process.
2. Bad collaboration occurs when teleconferences are done poorly.
Body language is key to communication, most sources say it is greater than 50% of how we communicate. Other than what can be inferred by tone of voice, body language is gone when talking on the telephone. Despite this, teleconference is still a speedy, real-time tool, and many use it regularly for collaboration. This is not inherently bad, but so many things can go wrong with a teleconference that compiling a brief list of pitfalls is impossible. In fact, if you’re not invested in a positive outcome, these pitfalls can be quite funny.
Beyond surmountable technical issues, another common mistake is that organizational hierarchy -- the Napoleonic staff structure used in the military and business -- can impose itself on large teleconferences (see T. J. McKearney’s paper for a discussion of this in the military environment.) Each participant is not set free to share information. Many may have observed the “senior person” in the room use the mute button selectively so that a room’s group can “get its story straight.” Frequently, this is done as someone else is talking -- they’ll be ignored during this mute period, droning on to a partial audience. Transparency? Gone. Again, funny for a YouTube video maybe, but not if you’re serious about getting quality work done quickly.
The mistake here is made by the collaborative team leader. Erratic interaction will slow down the outcome, as well as repressing shy or junior participants, decreasing the quality of the final solution developed by the group.
Technical and hierarchical issues aside, communications can be improved by moving to video conferencing, but there are pitfalls with video as well and sometimes mobile workers are limited by Internet bandwidth or other circumstances which make video impracticable.
Leaders, think through your use of teleconference and insure it is effective. If not, you’ll frustrate everyone, waste time, and achieve lackluster results.
3. Good collaboration is fast.
A past Chairman of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that he “must have the information he needs at the speed his job requires.” You would expect the senior military advisor for the President of the United States to say this, but does it sound familiar even where you work? Isn’t it what any senior leader wants? Senior leaders of any organization (public or private sector) no doubt have this same expectation. Wrong or inadequate information results in poor decisions. The perfect information arriving too slowly to be factored into the decision-making process is useless and that lack of timeliness leads to poor business decisions.
To the extent that this makes sense in both public and private sectors, leaders and group members must cobble together the right collection of people, processes and tools (especially if everyone can’t be in the same room together) that optimize the speed and quality of personal interaction to give the boss what’s needed.
If you can’t get everyone together in the same room, what tools are available for virtual collaboration? Does everyone know how to use them? Have they had training or do you just expect them to know? If a combination of tools is required, does the team leader know how to pick the cluster of tools to match the way the group needs to interact? Voice only? Teleconference? Video? Mac or PC?
Learn what it takes to work together quickly and prepare your team to do it.
4. Bad collaboration is done in email. Period.
Email is not real-time, by definition not fast. Usually, key stakeholders and experts are not included in the “discussion” taking place in an email trail. These two weaknesses slow down potential collaboration and reduce the quality of any final outcome. Sure there’s a place for email when it comes to certain point-to-point communications, especially if that email is backed up properly in an approved recordkeeping application. However, if speed and quality of work are paramount to good collaboration, why would one even include email in one’s collaborative tool kit? Is this striking a nerve? How about this: Why is email everyone’s go-to “collaboration tool” when it clearly doesn’t meet the most basic speed/quality requirements?
Rebecca Newton, a business psychologist, leadership advisor, and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science, says in her Harvard Business School Blog Network post that real collaborative leadership is, “facilitating constructive interpersonal connections and activities between heterogenous groups to achieve shared goals. It is proactive and purpose-driven.” When experts and stakeholders are left out of the discussion, and communications are slow, this is hard to do.
Do you use email for everything? Just stop. Think. Learn how to use new tools. Train and expect your people to do the same. Now, work smarter. (Notice I didn’t say SharePoint is the answer -- this is the subject for a separate post.)
5. Good collaboration results in quality work -- but a special type of leader is required.
A quality outcome is factually correct and can be measured, but there’s much more to it than that. A quality outcome is sustainable over the longest possible period of time. A quality outcome yields the highest degree of professional and personal satisfaction for the highest number of people. A quality outcome paves the way for successfully navigating future challenges. It may be scalable, repeatable, or it may be a critical link in a chain of successful outcomes.
Problems complex enough to require collaboration, are often multi-layered with as many nuances and potentially unintended consequences as obvious quick fixes and low-hanging fruit. In some cases, style can be as important as substance. How can a single person be all-knowing enough to solve such complex problems? That’s just it, a single person can’t. That’s why crowdsourcing is needed to begin with. Everyone has a part to play; a piece of the puzzle to solve; a strength they bring to the table. The collaborative leader’s role is to direct the orchestra of talent, not to play every instrument -- not to be the smartest person in the room.
Picking the right people, ensuring all stakeholders are included, governing the interaction between imperfect human beings to bring out the very best in the group -- these are the traits of a collaborative leader. Humility, the ability to listen, the courage to be firm when necessary to keep the group focused, while also being secure enough to allow others to be right -- or even lead within their areas of expertise; all of these are required of the collaborative leader. Retired General Stanley McChrystal counsels “listen, learn...then lead.” Sound advice from the former commander of U.S. and International forces in Afghanistan who believes that dysfunctional staff relationships pose risks to good collaborative leadership.
Do you possess these traits, or do you need to work on them? What’s your plan to do so?
6. Bad collaboration occurs when IM chat is used poorly.
Much attention has been given to chat as a customer engagement tool. This 2013 paper from Bamboocricket exemplifies the trend. But how are you using chat inside your organization?
Instant Messaging Chat is fast. Grammar and spelling don’t count (or at least they shouldn’t.) But if you don’t have existing relationships with folks in an organizational chat room, there can be miscommunication, misunderstanding, and general confusion (no body language or tone of voice for context.) Is everyone in the room that should be? If not, a critical stakeholder or expert can be excluded from a quick decision process leading to a poor outcome. Do members participating in the chat room feel free to speak their minds? Are folks respectful of one another so that shy participants will be encouraged to engage? Do they even know how to access and use the chat room in question? Are they expected to do so?
If personal relationships are strong, and everyone is in the chat room who should be, chat tools can add speed to many group processes. Have you thought through the business rules and processes for your use of chat? Could it replace email in many cases? Could it reduce the number of meetings you have?
Put some discipline into the way you use chat rooms and the quality of your collaborative work can get a real boost. Oh, and this is the leaders’ responsibility, not the IT department’s.
7. Good collaboration removes the filters between those who have the information, and those who need it.
When General James Cartwright (USMC Ret.) was the commander of U.S. Strategic Command, he spoke out about how rank structures can negatively impact the movement of information in an organization. General Cartwright thought and spoke a great deal about information flow between senior leaders and their advisors. This didn’t change as he moved on to become the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and advised at the highest levels of United States national security.
Have you organized your collaborative work to remove filters to information flow, or are there unproductive or dysfunctional organizational relationships which are impeding rapid information sharing and group problem solving? It takes more than humility and a good attitude to remove information filters.
8. Bad collaboration occurs when video teleconference is used poorly.
Video should be the closest environment to working in person real-time. Many are discovering its value. Oftentimes however, we don’t attempt to recreate an in-person environment with video, to the detriment of the final outcome. If you cannot see facial expressions and body language, what’s the point of using video? If members of the team are seated in order of rank or seniority, depending on the quality of the video conferencing equipment, not all members will be able to communicate effectively.
The trap of Napoleonic staff structure can rear its ugly head here too if only certain people feel they are expected or allowed to speak and others are relegated to merely watching the proceedings.
How are you using video teleconferencing now? Does it feel like you’re in the same room together? If not, why not and how can your use of video teleconferencing be improved?
Travel to meetings can be expensive, but so too can poor use of teleconference as a suitable substitute. Leaders make sure that you and your people use video teleconferencing well.
Putting the 8 things all together. Good collaboration requires both solid strategy, as well as the tactical management of the right people, processes and tools. The detail-oriented collaborative leader will insure that all of these are in place and working well together.
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