Читать книгу I Don't Agree - Michael Brown - Страница 9

Step three: Drop the C-bomb

Collaboration: why are we obsessed and are we any good at it?

One of the irritating things about collaboration is that it’s difficult to achieve. Uniting everyone around a single vision is no mean feat – the average collaboration risks collapsing in on itself under the collective weight of the egos in any given team. Especially if you’ve overindulged on the ego-stacking front (a term I use to describe a personal temptation to overload a team with too many big personalities in the belief that they’re the most likely to get things done).

A lot of conflict can get stirred up that way.

The other irritant is the sheer frequency with which this C-word gets used. It’s sprayed around so liberally inside organisational life that, if you’re like me, the mention of it sets your teeth on edge. I worked for one CEO who would have sprinkled collaboration on his chips if such a thing were possible. He dropped the word so often, he must have thought that by this simple act of repetition it would just happen.

The Maitland report, discussed in the previous chapter, listed 28 FTSE 100 companies claiming collaboration – or its first cousin, teamwork – as one of their corporate values. Back in 2012, IBM’s global C-suite study of 1,709 CEOs found that 75% saw collaboration as the key to future success and recruited with this in mind. When you learn that a large chunk of the Forbes 1000 also claim collaboration in their values framework, it becomes apparent: we’re obsessed. Whenever the person at the top of an organisation is speaking or writing, the chances are that, in a game of buzzword bingo, collaboration will keep the fingers on the buzzers very busy.

BUT. Are we any good at it?

I believe this ongoing preoccupation is actually because successful collaboration in business is elusive. We’re not very good at it at all. While we can all see collaboration’s huge potential to change our fortunes, it streaks by overhead, comet-like, to remind us that we don’t really understand how to do it.

The same is true in politics. With the loudest voices gathered at the extremes, the rest are drowned out. Even views that are just a few degrees to the left or right of the noisemakers are shouted down, encouraging people to retreat to a safe place where everyone holds an identical view: the infamous bubbles of social media. Yet, many people wish that those in politics could reach across the divide to achieve consensus, to work together cross-party to solve the big problems. If only they were not hemmed in by their ideologies! Here again collaboration becomes comet-like – streaking across the heavens to taunt those below.

As for me, I’m looking heavenwards and being taunted like everyone else. A report I recently read (more on that in the next section) claimed group collaboration projects fail most of the time. Admittedly, this must mean they also work out at least some of the time. It’s worth asking, though – does the benefit of success outweigh the cost of failure?

The dream for any team leader would be to possess the managerial superpower of a sixth sense that could identify in advance which collaborations would fail – they could then invest everyone’s time into the guaranteed wins. Imagine the positive effect that would have on your culture. Morale would be stratospheric, the energy-sapping drain of interpersonal politics might be reduced to zero and, once everyone’s palms got too sore to continue high-fiving, this would leave everyone with more time to generate still more growth in the enterprise.

Is this the type of dream that only occurs in pipe form – or can we really and finally remove what stands in the way of success?

The barriers to effective collaboration

The report I alluded to above makes a compelling case that successful collaboration may well be beyond our grasp. At least if you don’t get the basics right. It’s a 2015 study involving 106 European and US companies participating over a period of six years called, ‘Why Supply Chain Collaboration Fails: The Socio-Structural View of Resistance to Relational Strategies’. Despite the less than snappy title, it’s a critical read with far wider implications than supply chain economics.

There were a couple of specific barriers that stood out:

Barrier one: tarnished reputation

Managers struggled to assess in advance the true value of any collaboration. The resulting poor return on investment was said to tarnish the reputation of future collaboration strategies.

Organisations ‘invested scarce resource in collaborations that offered no unique value co-creation potential’.

It’s easy to see how these frustrations may lead to…

Barrier two: territoriality

Seventy-three percent of companies cited territoriality and turf wars as the most problematic barrier. The report highlighted evidence that showed partners could not break out of their siloed mindset to make collaboration happen. It contained a telling remark made by a senior manager;

“People are more concerned about who will get the glory or the blame rather than evaluat[ing] whether or not a decision will benefit the entire company.”

This resonated with me. I recently asked a close colleague to help me with a collaboration project. There was a momentary faraway look in his eyes which seemed to suggest he was mentally grasping for the unobtainable. He then snapped out of his reverie to answer thus:

I totally get that. He’d been burned before. In our sector of industry, several specialist businesses often come together at the request of a joint client to work on an integrated marketing campaign. I see these as a cocktail of roughly three parts optimism to one part trepidation.

They can be an exciting business opportunity, but the path is strewn with trip hazards related to human nature. Even the slightest problem, one partner in the endeavour failing to meet a deadline for instance, can cause crab-like behaviour in which everyone scuttles back to their silos and may only emerge again to point an accusatory claw at the others. Once this happens, the issue becomes amplified and the management energy required to get things back on track may undo any benefits of the collaboration.

Setting aside the findings of the report, there are other hurdles to seamless collaboration. For me, the main flashpoint occurs at the intersection of two planes.

When worlds collide: the horizontal versus the vertical

I think of collaboration as a horizontal occupation – organisations are tasked to work side by side in partnership to achieve a single aim.

Each partner also has their day-to-day obligations outside of the partnership – a budget target to achieve and a bottom line to protect; I think of this in vertical terms.

It’s in this intersection, where the horizontal and vertical meet, that opportunities for conflict arise. If business in the vertical needs attention – a poor-performing quarter, client crisis, or even a high-performing quarter when you need all your people back in the room – then these things will take priority. If you need to cut back on resource commitment in the collaboration, the other partners may grow to resent that – especially if they have to fill the gap left by you.

I’ve also found that because each partner is tasked with hitting hard targets in their vertical, some are tempted to compete to maximise their share in the partnership to justify the time spent in collaboration. It may even become tempting (in the worst cases) to actively undermine other partners, or to make a big deal over any mistake they make. I’ve been on the receiving end of that. It hurts. I’ve also driven that sort of behaviour in my teams. Karma.

Going back to the research, I raised an eyebrow as I read that 73% of companies cited a refusal to share important information between partners as a source of frustration. Similarly, 63% reported a lack of faith that individuals in one business would do anything to benefit another. If true, this is clearly defending of turf; siloed thinking writ large. I’ve certainly been guilty of that.

It’s not just group collaboration either. The difficulties at the intersection of the vertical and the horizontal occur between people embroiled in interpersonal conflict. A happy resolution in a disagreement is the common goal on the horizontal plane, reached only through a collaborative process. Competing against that in the vertical plane of each combatant are individual preconceptions, assumptions, desires and needs. Not to mention all the stuff that informed their formative years, as discussed in earlier chapters: the drive to differentiate, the urge to compete, our well-rehearsed conflict abilities.

I mean, really, when faced with a potential collaboration project, who can blame my dear colleague for posing the question: what’s in it for me?

Hopefully, we can restore his faith.

Better collaboration – make a list, get a ritual

I’m going to get temporarily biblical on you. Luke 4:23 to be precise.

‘Physician, heal thyself’ is an ancient Greek proverb. Luke, who was a Greek scholar, quotes the phrase in his telling of Jesus’s return to Nazareth to do a hometown gig at his local synagogue.

Jesus gets a little giddy with the occasion and tells everyone he’s the son of God. Presumably after a short period of pin-drop silence, the locals, who knew Jesus from a boy and couldn’t reconcile this claim with someone they knew to be the lowly son of a poor carpenter, become incensed.

According to Luke, Jesus then says: “Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country.” For those not familiar with biblical geography, Capernaum was (and still is) a nearby town on the shore of Lake Galilee. Jesus had been there curing blind lepers, and word that the Messiah was in town had spread to Nazareth. The Nazarenes thought that surely this Jesus, familiar to them from his days in short pants, couldn’t possibly presume to be the son of God. They demanded he perform miracles as proof.

Jesus, more superstar than wedding DJ, never did requests. Unimpressed, the locals tried to kill him for blasphemy. A salutary tale – Jesus created a lot of conflict. What Luke was trying to draw attention to was that even messiahs need to check themselves.

Way before it was quoted by Jesus, the phrase had been an invocation to ward off hypocrisy. It asks us to attend to our own faults before pointing out the same in others. Which is good advice for aspirational leadership gurus, as well as would-be messiahs. It’s also a pertinent consideration for those struggling with a collaboration exercise.

In attending to our own faults, it’s vital that we’re able to recognise those aspects of our nature we may not readily confess to. It’s even more helpful, just to keep ourselves grounded, to sometimes remind ourselves that we have flaws – otherwise we will all end up claiming to be the offspring of a divine entity.

There’s a very simple way to avoid this…

Make a list

I have no qualifications in psychology, but I’m pretty sure most people have enough self-awareness to know their weaknesses. Even if it’s rare to admit those faults to anyone you like or love, it’s the admission to yourself that counts. From there it’s easy to set them down in list order. There are some good reasons why you might want to do that.

Why lists work

Atul Gawande is an American surgeon, health campaigner and writer. In his 2008 bestseller The Checklist Manifesto, Gawande showed how the introduction of tick-box checklists achieved impressive results in aviation, large-scale construction, and his own profession – medicine.

At the time of Gawande’s writing, there were 230m major surgical operations happening annually. On average, 7m people were left disabled and 1m died from complications arising from their care. Gawande attributed this to human fallibility and inattention. Seemingly mundane details were easily overlooked or skipped, which sometimes happens when medical people are confident in their abilities but under pressure because they are elbows deep in their patients.

According to The Checklist Manifesto, there are over 2,500 different types of surgical procedures. The care teams administering these procedures perform, on average, 178 actions every day to every person in intensive care. These are undertaken by a range of specialists often acting in isolation to the others under difficult working conditions. During observation, doctors and nurses only made an error in 1% of these actions – this still amounted to almost two errors daily per person.

For example: a central line is a catheter passed through a vein into the chest portion of the vena cava, the large vein that returns blood to the heart. They are used to administer chemotherapy and other drugs. A five-point list – which included a prompt to wash hands with soap for 30 seconds, clean the patient’s skin with antiseptic, and wear a sterile gown – reduced central line infections from 11% to zero in the hospitals tested. Or, in other words, spared the hospital 43 infections, eight deaths and $2m.

Initially these lists struggled to gain acceptance. That’s because they weren’t technical; they dealt with basic tasks. You can see how that might seem like an insult to the intelligence of experts who have spent years both training and practically applying their knowledge in highly skilled roles.

However, the results spoke for themselves. And one in particular stood out like the proverbial sore thumb (suitably swabbed with antiseptic). This returns us to the problematic theme of collaboration.

A 19-point list, developed by Gawande for the World Health Organisation (WHO), was designed to enshrine collaborative behaviour in the small army of medical experts gathered around their patient stretched out on the operating table. You’d think that, there of all places, the collective weight of medical knowledge would be able to pin down collaboration, to stop it streaking about the firmament to help save a life.

Yet, in a survey of 1,000 operating-room staff in the US, Israel, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, only 10% of anaesthesia residents, 28% of nurses and 39% of anaesthesiologists felt their operations had high levels of teamwork. By contrast, 64% of surgeons – the operating theatre equivalent of the boss – reported high levels of teamwork.

The mismatch is striking to me and reminiscent of my former CEO, who thought going on about collaboration would summon it into existence. Gawande reported the sense of teamwork he’d experienced in theatre was more due to luck than design. He described the lack of it as a consequence of the complexity of his job, which creates a division of tasks by expertise. This resulted in highly skilled people sticking narrowly to their domain.

Here I see the vertical plane of the personal clashing with the horizontal goals of collaboration. Even more so when I learned that surgeons often walked into the room fully gowned, expecting everyone to be in place, including the patient, unconscious and ready to go. If you are a member of the supporting team, the surgeon may not even know your name – a common occurrence. That’s not collaboration; it’s command and control.

It turns out that knowing the names of the people working across any kind of collaboration makes the output more effective, and it is precisely this that Gawande included in his WHO safe-surgery checklist. Before the first incision into skin is made, the checklist requires everyone to confirm they have verbally introduced themselves to each other by name and role. The team are then prompted to confirm they have discussed the details, concerns and goals of the procedure. The patient is included – one item on the list ensures the patient has confirmed their identity, the site (on their own body), the procedure and given their consent to operate.