Editorial
Some collaborations are more important than others. But what makes a collaboration truly high-stakes?
Last month I asked 60 organizational leaders from a wide range of sectors to share their thoughts on high-stakes collaboration. In addition to asking them to describe the highest-stakes collaboration they had been a part of, I asked the following: What do you see as the defining features of high-stakes collaboration? How common is it in your sector? What justifies undertaking high-stakes collaboration in the first place? What are the biggest challenges encountered along the way? And, most importantly, what advice do you have for others undertaking their own high-stakes collaboration?
Here’s what I learned.
Examples of High-stakes Collaboration
In my research, I heard from leaders in a range of sectors including higher education, mining, technology, entertainment, philanthropy, national security, and business administration. I asked them how common high-stakes collaboration is in their line of work. Twenty-five percent said “Very Common,” another 43% said “Common,” and 26% said “Occasional.” Only 6% said “Rare” or “Very Rare.”
When asked to describe the most high-stakes business or organizational collaboration they had been a part of, leaders shared their bold undertakings. For example, one executive described competitors, representing every major company in their industry coming together to co-create a technology tool that would ultimately be adopted industry-wide, but which none of them could have developed — much less implemented — on their own.
Others described organizational turn-arounds and mergers and acquisitions, highlighting complex interdependencies, competing demands and concern for the real people whose livelihoods would be impacted by the executives’ decisions. A government employee described multinational work to protect the safety and well-being of refugees, and an IT Director pointed to a massive data migration project, noting that if the project went sideways, “billions of dollars of business as well as huge amounts of data would be lost.”
Rather than being a niche tool employed by elite forces in a fringe field, high-stakes collaboration is oft-used by leaders across sectors to make big things happen.
Related Article: 7 Tips for Centering Effective Collaboration Amid Rapid Growth
What Are the Defining Features of High-Stakes Collaboration?
Across these examples and others, leaders pointed to three characteristics that make collaborations particularly high stakes.
First, they involve multiple perspectives. Whether working across functions, disciplines, organizations, sectors or cultures, high-stakes collaboration involves engaging with and integrating and leveraging the insights of people who see the challenge at hand from very different perspectives.
This viewpoint diversity means key players may use different jargon, activate around different incentives, optimize for different outcomes and hold different assumptions. While these differences can create communication and operational drag, they’re also at the core of collaboration’s power.
Next, high-stakes collaboration involves a large investment of resources. Money, time and human capital all play a role in making collaborative magic happen. When asked what made their exit to private equity particularly high-stakes, one SaaS leader put it bluntly: “costs, investments, liquidity events and people's lives.”
Finally, high-stakes collaboration is high-pressure. Due, in part, to the large resource investments just mentioned, expectations and scrutiny are high. An instructional designer said that failure would “make our team look like we don’t add value.” Another person wrote, “failure = job loss.”
Importantly, these three characteristics often go hand in hand: nine of every 10 leaders endorsed all three of these features — multiple perspectives, large investment of resources and high pressure — as present in their highest stake collaboration.
What Are the Biggest Challenges in High-Stakes Collaboration?
No surprise here: high-stakes collaboration brings with it a host of challenges. Chief among them include decision making (noted by 80% of respondents), communication snags (79%), coordinating and tracking complex efforts (69%), and stakeholder management (69%).
A researcher leading a major grant project talked about the interrelated challenges of money, timeline and jurisdiction: “We were working with substantial amounts of money, had a very challenging problem with a tight deadline and were working across several different institutions (three universities, two companies). If we couldn't collaborate effectively, there would have been short-term and long-term consequences.”
Anticipating the long-term consequences is a challenge echoed by a non-executive director of a corporate board: “The long-term impact of decisions made now can create and or destroy value, more than just money. Sadly, so many people in these collaborative teams think short term and are driven by value extraction, not creation.”
A testament to the skills and efforts of the people involved, the least commonly endorsed challenges were: outcomes falling short of expectations (15%), distrust (21%) and mental health hits (23%).
Related Article: Want Your Organization to Collaborate More? Social Psychology Can Help
Why Should I Pursue High-stakes Collaboration?
Given these challenges, why bother engaging in high-stakes collaboration at all? Three clear drivers emerged: financial impact (endorsed by 79% of respondents), strategic impact (77%) and reputational impact (72%).
An independent director in mining noted, “In the project world there is a lot of talk about collaboration, but differences in perceived or real power, coupled with a lack of trust, make real collaborative efforts challenging and rare. But when they do happen they yield great results.”
The president of an international logistics firm added, “If done right (and there's no for-sure way of doing it right every time), everyone shares in the win.”
Advice for Successful High-Stakes Collaboration
What advice did these organizational leaders have for others undertaking their own high-stakes collaboration? Here are my 10 favorite nuggets from the lot:
- Communicate, communicate, and communicate more!
- Embrace and accept uncertainty — you can have the best plan and you must anticipate making shifts throughout the process.
- Be curious about other people's perspectives, not immediately disdainful.
- Get clear on what matters to you. Why are you involved in this project? Get to the deepest level you can. Then, get clear on what matters to your immediate boss. Why are they involved in this project? Get to the deepest level you can. With those two pieces of information, you can navigate everything to come.
- [A]ll players are in the middle of a high-stakes process. They view it from a different vantage point of view, but they have no less on the line.
- [U]nderstand the most important motivators for each side.
- Frontload the hassle. Don't skip the ‘soft’ stuff you need to do upfront in order to get folks aligned, bought in, feeling they belong and their contribution has value. It's all about the people factors.
- [You] need clarity about what a ‘good/great/excellent/unsatisfactory’ result would look like to each partner prior to signing on.
- A shared enemy or concern is a stronger motivator to kick off a collaboration than a shared hope or desire.
- Learn as much as you can so you can do better in future attempts.
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In sum, high-stakes collaboration is at once common and mission critical, potentially touching every nook and cranny of organizations big and small. They have the potential of impacting everything, and everyone. Because of this, a DEI director advises, “do not lose sight that, at its core, [the collaboration] involves people …. It is never just a reorg, just a restructure, just an M&A.”
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