Editorial
What Leo Tolstoy wrote about families — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — is also true about teams and communities. When collaboration is great, work and relationships are fluid and natural. When collaboration is not working, the cause is never exactly the same. The context, environment and individual personalities on the team all cause friction in different ways.
Despite how long ago Tolstoy wrote those words, we still too often see collaboration issues — like many other cultural issues — as individual failures rather than systemic governance and structural issues.
The good news? Many collaboration challenges can be addressed through better collaboration governance and management.
This article explores how to identify collaboration issues, understand their root causes and introduces a new role — the Collaboration Referee — whose responsibilities support good collaboration habits so teams work together more effectively.
The Impact of Poor Collaboration
Collaboration challenges can be a silent engagement killer and lead to employee burnout. Do any of these collaboration issues sound familiar?
- Meetings that interrupt work without adding any clear value.
- Conversations that are scattered across multiple groups and channels, creating duplicate efforts, confusion, and misunderstanding.
- More time spent discussing work than doing it.
All of these are signs of collaborative friction, and for many people, it may seem typical — just another day at the office — but they exact a huge toll. When interactions like these happen continuously, it drains employees and leaves them with little desire to take on additional responsibilities. The cumulative effect on organizations is a heavy drag on productivity, slowing down projects, limiting effort to the minimum required and depressing engagement.
No one wins.
Related Article: What Employees Want From Their Collaboration Tools
The Most Common Collaboration Pitfalls
You know those meetings where no one speaks, and the meeting host keeps asking if there are any questions — the perennial Bueller? Bueller? We’ve all been there. They are painful. It is similar to the team chat channel, where a manager keeps posting questions and no one answers. They both fall into one of the common collaboration pitfalls, the Ghost Town.
The following are the five most common collaboration pitfalls:
1. Ghost Town
Individuals are not engaged, no one takes initiative, and individuals often ignore or try to deflect requests to take on tasks.
2. Analysis Paralysis
While discussions are focused on the right issue, the ratio of talking to doing is high. Commitment is deflected because accountability is unclear, too dispersed or those with power are too controlling.
3. Drama Central
In this situation, there’s no shared commitment to the opportunity or challenge at hand. Heightened emotional tension creates the feeling and illusion of progress, even when there is none.
4. Brewing Storm
While similar in look and feel to Drama Central, a legitimate issue is at the core of the discussions here. If no one pays enough attention, the situation can erupt into a much bigger issue very quickly, seemingly out of nowhere. Because of that, responses are often insufficient or misdirected.
5. Clique
Here, a small group tries to control perceptions of progress to their own advantage and to the exclusion of others who often do more of the actual work. It is one of the fastest ways to disengage the most competent individuals on a team, who tend to care more about the work quality than individual credit.
Related Podcast: What It Takes to Build a Collaborative Organization
The Causes of Collaboration Issues
Anyone who has been a member of an institution, whether it’s a school, work or community group, will recognize these pitfalls. Whenever people connect to address a shared challenge, collaboration issues crop up, and while we all recognize the signs of problems, the root cause isn't always as obvious.
Below are some of the most common causes.
Strategic
- Lack of understanding and alignment on an initiative’s purpose, what success looks like, and how it will be measured.
- Orienting strategy and planning as a top-down, centrally-controlled process instead of part of a team’s collaborative work, missing the most effective way to get buy-in.
- Overly defined strategies, plans and expectations leaving little room for the team’s expertise, learning or new ideas as they progress.
Operational
- Lack of defined, discrete and distributed responsibilities.
- Lack of clarity and realistic expectations regarding responsibilities, accountability, timeline, commitment level and management time.
- There is no shared agreement on boundaries, expected behaviors or how to hold each other accountable for commitments, agreements and responsibilities.
- Lack of resources allocated for refereeing, mediating and modeling good team collaboration behaviors.
Tactical
- Too many tools and channels and no ownership or shared agreement on usage.
- Communication channels are poorly structured, leaving individuals with different expectations and usage behaviors.
- A lack of transparency in how the team collaborates and engages, making it hard to hold people accountable to each other and progress effectively.
Too often, how we collaborate is an afterthought with no acknowledgement that it needs structure and careful facilitation. We also view collaboration as a means to execute rather than seeing the entire team’s expertise and perspectives as critical to a collaboratively developed strategy and plan. Instead, we spend immense resources to create an exhaustive strategy and plan and only then give it to a team for execution.
This transactional view of processes prevents the creation of a deep shared understanding and commitment and leaves little room for adjustment as the team learns.
Related Article: Do We Collaborate too Much?
Program Leaders Need to Be Collaboration Referees
While everyone can improve their collaboration skills with more training and coaching, supporting those who lead cross-function and multi-stakeholder program teams results in the most leverage. By structuring the team system for collaboration, program managers align the information, opportunities, support and structure that makes good collaboration easy.
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What Does a Collaboration Referee Do?
- Facilitate Shared Decision-Making: Collaboration Referees facilitate the development of strategies, defining plans and making major decisions with the team rather than doing so in isolation or with a small group.
- Maintain Momentum: Collaboration Referees oversee scheduling, monitor the need for changes, coordinate with groups and individuals, and check in with team members to ensure they have what they need.
- Communications: Perhaps the most important role for Collaboration Referees is ensuring communication is ongoing and transparent, structuring communication systems for ease of collaboration and clarity of purpose, adapting communication approaches as needs arise, reminding individuals of their commitments, communicating progress and gaps, planning social gatherings or impromptu fun to keep the team connected, and maintaining trusting relationships with individuals.
- Reminding Team Members of Shared Commitments: Effective collaboration works best when team members make shared commitments to each other before work starts. The Collaboration Referee facilitates a discussion of these commitments, assesses potential issues or opportunities, ensures commitments and their implications are clear, suggests consequences when commitments are not met, and monitors how well the team is acting on its commitments.
The biggest challenge for leaders is shifting mindsets about the role of management and whether control is needed to ensure progress and success. Great collaboration thrives when the purpose and benefits of being involved are shared by everyone. Collaboration is a form of negotiation, and the Collaboration Referee acts as the arbiter, ensuring the shared purpose is maintained and the work results in shared benefits. When teams are included in these core decisions from the start and asked for their commitment, they have a vested interest in compromising and working together.
I have seen firsthand how powerful this shift in mindset can be and what it can unleash. Working with a client to facilitate the development of an annual strategy and plan, our goal was to support a small group of senior executives to collaborate and define it together. They each worked in different business units of a global organization, most of which were not financially invested in the program. They had no reason to commit their time except in its impact on improving the way their businesses worked. Ensuring they saw the objective as meaningful was the only way to succeed. From years of working in a top-down decision-making environment, my client's instinct was to prepare the strategy ahead of time, present it, and get their feedback; in other words, to do the work for them. While seen as efficient, it left little room for the team to share perspectives, debate options, and arrive at a decision together. It would not have been collaborative.
I was thrilled to hear that, with my client’s facilitation, the group defined a strategy and agreed on supporting tactics. What was more striking and gratifying, however, was that upon reflecting on what success required, they agreed to meet more frequently. That collective decision signified a successful transfer of ownership and commitment to the program’s success. Anyone who has seen the calendar of an Executive Vice President understands how significant that self-assigned commitment was. It transformed the work of the program manager from direction and oversight to support and empowerment, and with that change, layers of emotional friction were removed. She was no longer there to tell others what to do; instead, she was a resource supporting their ability to meet shared commitments. In flipping the dynamic, her work became easier, less stressful and more joyful.
Related Article: Communication and Collaboration at a Crossroads
So, You Want to Be a Collaboration Referee?
Less stress and more joy sounds pretty good, right? Well, as you may have guessed, Collaboration Referee is just a different name for a collaborative leader.
Here are three ways to learn more about collaborative leadership:
- All leadership starts with communication, and collaborative leaders communicate with the Language of Engagement.
- Read some of the many books about collaborative leadership.
- The Becoming Hybrid: A Team Collaboration Handbook is designed to help you facilitate a collaborative discussion with your team about how you work together. It will help you frame the opportunity in an inclusive way with exercises and discussion prompts.
Collaborative Leadership Has Never Been More Important
After years of pandemic, political division, misinformation and economic anxiety, we have seen the results of top-down, concentrated power: people distrust everything. Trust cannot be forced, mandated or explained. Trust must be earned – and the easiest way to earn that trust is to believe and include people. Trust must be extended to be received and it must be demonstrated rather than communicated. Including people in strategic decisions that affect them, inviting them to define how they will work together and asking them to commit to each other is how you demonstrate that you believe in and trust employees.
More than anything, collaborative leadership requires faith that everyone has valuable perspective to share, we are smarter together than any of us is alone, and that with the right support, people will make good shared decisions.
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