Best Practices for Driving Collaborative Innovation, Remotely: Part 3
In Part 1 I shared the importance of knowing if you’re collaborating in a teaming environment or as a functioning team, Computer Supported Cooperative Work risks (to include isolation), and best practices around structures & technologies. In Part 2 I shared, while the myriad of technological advancements have resulted in improved distributed work, the key is all in understanding your people. I went on to share best practices for managing performance.
In Part 3, I want to share my best practices for cultivating culture.
Best Practices: Culture
Trust is core to addressing the fears of uncertainty, basic opportunity deprivation, and the situational effects across the spectrum of agency, freedom, achievement and wellbeing.
Recognize each community you’re collaborating with has different trust cultures. Identifying each across teammates will improve your likelihood in cultivating deep relationships. This is essential with balancing multiple relationships and producing creative tension.
Joachim Hafkesbrink and Janina Evers on generated embedded innovation findings from across more than three decades of leading research. They submit, collaboration trust mechanisms can be best described as follows:
Identification-based trust is grounded on collaboration among individuals with similar backgrounds and who share the same intentions with collaboration.
- With student teams this could come in the form of a degree major.
- Shared interests, role-models, etc. are great to align.
- I find the ice breaker and team builder exercises to be essential.
- Games and chit chats (i.e. what’s your favorite 90’s song) are great as well.
Institutional-based trust emerges when individuals trust the reliability organization’s structures as well as confidence in those managing the collaboration.
- This is a novel experience for most, especially many universities going full remote. Transparency and how you communicate at this time will be key.
- Students in particular will depend on professors and gain confidence in how they handle operating in these unusual environments. Practice and dry-run everything — especially new remote collaboration tools and how to facilitate conversations and support interactions in specified meeting-areas.
Competence-based trust is based on authenticity and reliability. Without recognition of professional competence, the innovation process will be delayed due to re-evaluation and control costs.
- If you have an experienced remote collaboration manager, single them out. Illuminate their past performance. Activate “role model” mentors to share their experience and show they can do it as well.
Process-based trust is probably the most difficult when teaming. It’s normally achieved based on long-term cooperation, past experiences and routine activities and structures.
- Establishing immediate shared policy, protocols, etc. increases reliable processes of interaction, necessary to build knowledge on the basis of shared expectations, values, and beliefs.
Calculus-based trust is rooted in rational choice, and depends on cost-benefit assumptions. It’s rational in the sense that everyone is collaborating towards the same outcome.
- Trust can erode when collaborators are seen as free-riding or opportunistic in behavior, so be explicit with communicating this very visible behavior and provide feedback/accountability swiftly.
Hafkesbrink and Evers view these trust mechanisms as “the cumulative expression of views, attitudes, beliefs, and value-systems” of those collaborating, as well as the guiding institution. Additionally, the more communities you have collaborating will require matching cultures within and across in order to deliver desired outcomes.
Forbes senior contributor, Dana Brownlee, captured some amazing first-hand accounts here in This is How Leaders Build Trust with Remote Teams that you may find helpful.
Managing collaborative innovation in person is hard enough. Going remote and the additional environmental implications of COVID-19 amplifies the already existing challenges with cultivating deep relationships, likely to result in a lack of creative tension necessary to generate unique solutions to complex problems.
Hourly, we’re seeing how these containment mitigation measures stress community resilience. I hope these best practices can reduce stress, have teams prioritize what matters most, and during these times continue to collectively learn, grow and innovate.
Together, we can create a new roadmap for how work is done — no matter the conditions. I encourage you all to share your best practices with the world in these challenging times. Stay healthy and safe out there!
