Building collaboration as an essential ingredient – not as a temporary fix

There is a trend emerging amongst organisations that have new structures, or new leaders, or new markets, that the leaders are aiming to reconsolidate their teams and align them in this new direction.  On the one hand this is refreshing to facilitate as the leaders and their teams seek renewal around a shared purpose and shared values. There is such a calling to reconnect and rebuild the team on a safe foundational space to work from to craft this exciting future. This brings a renewed belonging and sense of meaning to work, which has ofttimes been absent for so many during the desolate lockdown and turmoil years of the pandemic.   On the other hand many people are feeling bruised and battered from the harshness of these changes imposed on them. Trust has been broken in many cases as organisations could not keep their promises and people turned to their own survival, taking their eyes off of their teams. 

On a team level we need to rebuild collaboration and this requires spending time and energy on rebuilding trust.

“In the organizational context, trust is most often defined as an interpersonal relationship that forms when a person shows consistent proof of competence, benevolence, and integrity. This kind of trust takes a long time to build and is easily broken.” [i]

Intuitively we can all relate to this, we need to build relationships to build trust which is based on consistency and mutual understanding and care.

The rub comes in that most often collaboration is required in organisations from people working across functions and on projects based work. This means teams come together temporarily and find it difficult to build relationships and trust in such a short space of time.  The difficulty in these temporary connections at work is that team members focus on reinforcing their professional identity of being trustworthy. This dynamic often leads to face-saving behaviours in which we want to be perceived as being competent and do not want to reveal when we might be wrong or when we might not know The irony is then that in our attempt to be trustworthy we actually break trust.  So we cannot build trust as a precursor to collaboration – we need to build capacities to equip these teams to make high quality decisions, whilst building relationships.

Hugander (2022) argues that these organisational ingredients to support collaboration in these contexts are to build:

• Information sharing
• Perspective taking
• Effective turn taking

Teams can collaborate if they have the relevant and timeous access to accurate and necessary information and information flows. There would also need to be a balance of contributions and a respect for the diverse perspectives in the team.  These capacities are actually key to the future survival of businesses in these complex times. For organisations to be adaptive and dynamic there needs to be a symmetry of information flows, that the right people have access to and that they share the right information to enable devolved decision making.  And mostly there needs to be insight into multiple perspectives to enable better decision making.  The organisation is flexible if the work ebbs and flows between all team members too. So the trust is built when team members feel they are included (they are privy and share all required information), they feel listened to (perspective taking) and they feel respected in their contributions (turn taking).  These ingredients build effective collaboration and when members feel a sense of belonging and of meaning resulting in effective outcomes, so the teamwork and trust is built. 

The neuroscience of trust backs this premise. We build change through our behaviours and new neural pathways. Build in the patterns and systems for teams to collaborate with these ingredients and so we build the habits and way of being of trust. “Joy on the job comes from doing purpose-driven work with a trusted team” [ii]  The organisational way of working becomes one of collaboration when these dynamic capabilities are embedded alongside connecting with the purpose of the collaboration and a care for each other. 

The intrapersonal capabilities to fostering collaboration that underpin this are:

• Capacity to listen, be curious  [iii]and to respect multiple perspectives
• A balance of humility to learn with a boldness to share openly 
• A drive to create a better outcome together (moving beyond a desire for only personal status and success)

Some argue that some of these capacities cannot be taught and so the recruitment process ought to consider what profile of a person will build the fluid and collaborative organisation moving forward. Individuals do need to manage their own collaboration load and focus on those opportunities that help them move toward their purpose. 

In addition to the individual effort so too is collaboration a skill that must be taught in order to embed this as a way of work and culture across an organisation.  Collaboration cannot simply be tacked on as a dimension of work only required temporarily with additional projects. It is an ingredient for building dynamic organisations needed to survive and thrive into the future. Spend time with your teams and build these capacities to be collaborative. 

“Efficient collaborators draw people to collaborative work by conferring status, envisioning joint success, diffusing ownership, and generating a sense of purpose and energy around an outcome” (Cross, Taylor & Zehner, 2018) [iv]

[1] Hugander, P (2022) When trust takes away from effective collaboration, Harvard Business Review, May, 2022.

2 Zak, P.J.(2017) The Neuroscience of trust, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2017.

3 Delizonna, L (2017) High-performing teams need psychological safety. Here’s how to create it. Harvard Business Review, August 2017.

4 Cross, R; Taylor, S. & Zehner, D. (2018) Collaboration without burnout, Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 2018.

[i] Hugander, P (2022) When trust takes away from effective collaboration, Harvard Business Review, May, 2022.

[ii] Zak, P.J.(2017) The Neuroscience of trust, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2017.

[iii] Delizonna, L (2017) High-performing teams need psychological safety. Here’s how to create it. Harvard Business Review, August 2017.

[iv] Cross, R; Taylor, S. & Zehner, D. (2018) Collaboration without burnout, Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 2018.

[1] Hugander, P (2022) When trust takes away from effective collaboration, Harvard Business Review, May, 2022.

[1] Zak, P.J.(2017) The Neuroscience of trust, Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2017.

[1] Delizonna, L (2017) High-performing teams need psychological safety. Here’s how to create it. Harvard Business Review, August 2017.

[1] Cross, R; Taylor, S. & Zehner, D. (2018) Collaboration without burnout, Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 2018.