The Building Blocks of Real Collaboration
This morning I had coffee with a couple of old friends and we ended up in a conversation about collaboration. I shared with them a point of view that I picked up from an article I read many moons ago. I wish I could remember the source so that I could credit the author*.
Anyhow, it’s very simple. There are two key ingredients:
- Mutual trust and respect
- Comfort with dissent
Imagine that three colleagues are brainstorming solutions to a business problem.
If there is a sense of mutual trust and respect amongst the team, but they’re not very comfortable with disagreement or critical feedback, they don’t really get very far. There is a lot of head nodding and encouragement, but the ideas are likely to be underdeveloped and lacklustre.
Conversely, if they lack respect and trust but they’re happy to tear each other down, they will end up spinning their wheels and/or getting into a heated debate.
The very worst scenario (which is all too common) is when trust, respect and comfort with dissent are all missing. In these cases there is a lot of “yeah…” (pause, blank face, gentle nod) “ooo, but what if we did this…”.
Imagine for a moment that all three of the individuals have worked together before. They trust each other. They respect each other. They are all willing to have an open and honest conversation in which all the thoughts and ideas including their own, are critiqued. In this case, the time they spend together is hyper-constructive. Thoughts are shared, listened to (for real), deconstructed, interrogated, and improved upon.
“Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process”. Ed Catmull. President, Pixar
When I think back to the days that I’ve come home from the office feeling most fulfilled, it’s when I’ve done that kind of work with the people whom I have those kinds of relationships. We’ve spent 3 hours on a whiteboard in a state of flow, breaking the thinking down and slowly building it back up. There were moments where we’d get riled up and overly passionate, but the conversation was always constructive and we’d emerge with a robust idea.
The common misconception is that people have to like each other to collaborate effectively. I don’t believe this to be the case, it can definitely help, and there are other ingredients that can enhance collaboration, but the two essential building blocks are trust & respect and comfort with dissent.
Can teams develop and strengthen these all important things? Yes! Here are a couple of things to consider:
Mutual Trust & Respect
- Practice active listening. It’s amazing how bad teams can be at listening to each other. It’s important for two reasons. Firstly, it’s impossible to build on each others’ ideas unless you understand them. And secondly, if you’re demonstrating (verbally or non-verbally) that you’re not paying attention, you’re telling the other person (or people) that you’re not interested in collaborating with them.
- Ask smart questions. Thoughtful questions, framed and phrased in the right way are immensely powerful. Apart from demonstrating that you’re actively listening, it can also push the people you’re working with to strengthen their line of thinking. Asking questions can be a good alternative to pointing out perceived flaws in an idea too.
- Be a team. As the idiom goes, there is no ‘I’ in team. It might seem like semantics, but how a team talks to each other is important. Encourage your team-mates to talk from the perspective of the team: our mission, and the challenges we’re faced with.
The other thing to mention is that having experience in working together helps a lot. If you’re working together for the first time you’re essentially trying to establish a working rhythm at the same time as achieving your goal. That can be challenging.
Comfort With Dissent
- Create the conditions. For some people dissent is difficult, and even more so in organisations that refute it. My advice to leaders of organisations is this: encourage and support free speech and debate amongst your teams if you want collaboration to flourish. For exampe, Pixar Animation Studios created the Brain Trust, a meeting type designed for ‘real talk’ in which candour is not only promoted but expected.
- Hire people with an opinion. Your teams need to be filled with smart, diverse and passionate people who are capable of giving, receiving and building on feedback and new ideas. The term ‘creative teams’ is often reserved for the likes of Pixar or advertising folks, but that’s a fallacy; practically every team in every business in the 21st century needs to be a creative team, adept at problem solving and idea development.
- Be kind and constructive. No idea is above scrutiny, no person is beneath dignity. This is a phrase coined by Maajid Nawaz and I believe it to be a universal truth. Treat ideas and people differently. Ideas are most effectively developed when they’re interrogated and built upon. People are most effectively developed when they’re supported. Embrace dissent but always, always be respectful of your people.
*UPDATE* Thanks to Aaron Dignan for finding the original article by Ben Thompson.
