7 Being Truly Collaborative
The 1962 Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. A brilliant book, The Essence of Decision, demonstrated that its unfolding couldn’t be understood by considering the US and Soviet governments as rational, monolithic institutions.1 That’s because key groups nested within each government (e.g., the State Department and the Foreign Ministry; the Central Intelligence Agency and the KGB; the Defense Department and the Defense Ministry) had their own goals, policies, and processes that could run counter to those of the others.
That powerful insight is still relevant but usually ignored: The field of strategy addresses collaboration at the organizational level, while the field of organizational behavior addresses collaboration among people and teams. Neither takes the other into account. Collaboration in the digital epoch must be seen as a phenomenon that occurs at two interlocking levels.
The first level of collaboration, between organizations, has become more consequential than ever before. It is often essential for merely getting core work done, not just for reducing marginal costs or for increasing marginal revenues. Without it, a product or service might not even exist. Examples discussed earlier include Nokia and its battery partner, Boeing and the thirteen companies on three continents that created the hardware of the Boeing 787, airline alliances that enable seamless transfer of passengers, and consulting companies that field teams that span offices worldwide.
In the digital epoch, it is rare for a company to control every element of intellectual property it needs. Once a company sources intellectual property from another, the fates of both get tied together for long periods. Regardless of Steve Jobs’s brilliance, without Corning’s “Gorilla Glass,” the iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch—and one of the world’s largest market caps—wouldn’t have existed. Very few other companies can create comparable glass. Apple could have worked with another company, but then its fate would have been tied to that company’s.
Moreover, the initial choice of intellectual property can foreclose subsequent options.2 A simple example is MacOS versus Windows. Until Apple replaced IBM-produced chips with Intel-produced ones, Windows software couldn’t even be installed on Macs. Since then, each operating system can emulate the other, but performance suffers. Optimal performance requires software native to the operating system. Similarly, changing the vendors of software used to run businesses (e.g., ERP, CRM, and PLM) usually requires changes in policies and standards, procedures and practices, and even cultures.3
The second collaboration level is of the teams, perhaps from different companies, that work together. Each must adjust its work in response to what others do.4 When multiple teams are present, “intensive” interdependence plays out; it is far more challenging than “reciprocal” interdependence between two teams. Professional (varying disciplines and skills), demographic or identity (varying genders, races, nationalities, cultures, and ages), and individual (varying behaviors) diversity add more challenges.5
The Global Survey showed that across the world, businesses executives don’t collaborate well at the team level (see figure 4.4). Problems they mishandle, and opportunities they lose, can impact organizational collaboration. For example, in the Boeing 787 project, persistent problems with work at one facility forced Boeing to buy it out from a partner company.6 Conversely, bad blood between organizations inevitably affects the teams actually working together.
Therefore, leaders of organizations that wish to collaborate need clear lines of sight to team-level collaboration. Without this, the many moving pieces in VUCA environments will inevitably produce major problems.
Developing the Collaboration Instinct
Asked what he looked for in potential partners, former Nokia chief procurement officer Jean-François Baril (introduced in chapter 4), replied: “A diamond in the rough. The technology is good enough, not necessarily great, but their people have the will to continue to fully polish it.”
How can you find and work with “diamonds in the rough?” Three issues are key.
First, key people must be trustworthy and “relatable.” Blockchain technology records in public digital ledgers all transactions relevant to the provenance of items of interest. Social credit systems—the ratings people give online—can also indicate someone’s trustworthiness. So tech-savvy young professionals often proclaim, “Digital technologies will make trust irrelevant.” Their beliefs may be right someday, but for now, are simplistic.
Blockchains assure “transactional trust” in arms-length transfers of products or services (“A sold <this perishable food> to B after transporting it at <this temperature>.”). Social credit systems offer insights relevant to comparable situations (“Should I offer delayed invoicing on shipping to a vendor with a two-star rating on eBay?”). Neither can tell whether someone is likely to collaborate well with strangers at an unknown future date to creatively resolve an unknown crisis that might strike.
A key challenge in collaborating effectively is overcoming concerns that someone’s betrayal of trust will cause harm.7 “Risky trust,” when extended to strangers, is based on known capabilities—“This person is an experienced lawyer”—and known processes—“This is a reliable early warning system.”8 Nevertheless, such trust can fade very quickly,9 and distance can magnify concerns.10, 11 So experienced executives often assess the trustworthiness of their counterparts in other organizations and use that as a surrogate for organizational trustworthiness. Baril gave an example:
Trustworthiness is about [a person’s] core values. I was working with an American company making a passive component. I met their head of sales for dinner. He told me that he was the president of his church. I said I worked closely with people of all faiths and with atheists. He then added, “By the way, I don’t believe in God. I do it because believing in God is good for doing business in America.” That I don’t understand, I can’t. That’s where I have a tremendous issue. I told him, “How can I trust you when there is such a big disconnect between who you are in private and the face that you show in public?”
Inauthentic leaders can easily lose their credibility in the digital epoch (chapter 9 addresses this point). The American executive’s in-person confession of inauthenticity eliminated the likelihood of real collaboration at a distance. He had sought to establish himself as worthy of trust by sharing a dark secret. Instead, he communicated that he would sacrifice any commitment if doing so served his interests.
As a variation on this, Susan Sobbott, the former president of global commercial payments at American Express, said that an executive’s “credibility is directly correlated with relatability.” On trips to corporate outposts, she would be “empathetic with team members and understanding of their situation.” She’d talk about “their unique challenges about tactical or competitive points that were representative of their day-to-day experiences.” She looked beyond “high intelligence—that’s a baseline requirement”—and the ability to “synthesize lots of inputs and connect the dots” to whether they were
good at collaborating with others in ways that consistently impressed me. Do they talk about connecting with colleagues, customers or direct reports? Do they proactively partner with others to execute and acknowledge their contribution? Do they have the resilience to overcome setbacks, resist feeling threatened, and keep going, to keep productive in the face of input or criticism?
People who often complain about others or those who are “lone soldiers” wave “red flags” which suggest they can’t trust and aren’t trustable. Just like a growth mindset is needed to be open to new ideas, a collaborative mindset is almost always a prerequisite for high performance.
Compare this with the core attribute of scientific management—what does an individual do?—or even the core attribute of the quality movement—working collaboratively (primarily) with colocated colleagues. Not only must you collaborate, but you also must collaborate well at a distance—or you can’t be a high performer.
Second, recognize true collaboration is a strategic choice, not an inviolable ethical norm. The prisoner’s dilemma, a game-theory model, elegantly captures the concept of win-win collaboration.12 Two people suspected of a crime are kept apart by the police. In exchange for a lighter—or no—sentence, if either blames the other, the police get the evidence to imprison the latter for a long period (“win-lose”). If neither breaks, they both get a light sentence or none at all (“win-win”). If both break, both get longer sentences than if they had kept quiet (“lose-lose”). A lose-lose outcome usually materializes because unless they talk with and/or trust each other, win-lose is the best option for each prisoner. If they are habitual (inept!) criminals who expect to partner indefinitely, the dynamics change. The likelihood of repeatedly facing the same choices makes keeping quiet—win-win—the optimal decision for both.
Win-win, the prisoner’s dilemma suggests, happens under very specific conditions—communication, trust, and repeated interactions. Its pursuit can be valuable because working collaboratively, the parties to a negotiation may be able to identify benefits they hadn’t foreseen initially. Expanding the set of possible outcomes with these unforeseen benefits could allow both sides to give up something the other party wanted while gaining something they valued.
Win-win has become a buzzword, however. People constantly announce their intentions to seek it even when there isn’t any reason to do so. In the process, they ignore the critically important nuances mentioned above. Perhaps they believe that win-win is an ethical norm, wrongly conflating it with the common moral stricture to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This creates another problem: Reciprocating a win-lose move with a win-lose move (i.e., a tit-for-tat) is more likely to ensure long-term cooperation than repeatedly responding to repeated win-lose moves with hopeful win-win ones. Stated differently, while “an eye for an eye” could “make the world blind,” it could also prod people to collaborate.
Casual overuse of the term win-win makes true win-wins hard to achieve—for example, by precluding the tit-for-tat strategy. More importantly, overuse sharply drains the term’s meaning. The concept of ethical fading (discussed in detail in chapter 9) essentially says that virtues professed abstractly from a distance become hard to maintain in the face of precise knowledge of real stakes. Baril metaphorically described this reality: “Most people collaborate like the kings of old, to show they are magnanimous. But the very first time their interests are threatened, they revert to being kings, doing what is best for them.”
Worse, because of ethical fading, the human mind reinterprets actual behavior and wrongly remembers it as being consistent with the espoused virtue. Over time, as win/no-lose outcomes—personal victories that don’t excessively annoy others—get called win-win, true win-wins become hard to distinguish.
If you truly value collaboration, choose your words carefully. Words matter. Don’t speak of win-win when it isn’t meaningful. Don’t seek it when it isn’t necessary. It is possible to reach equitable outcomes that don’t bring with them unforeseen benefits. There is no ethical loss here. By limiting win-win’s use to situations, people, and organizations where collaboration is important, you will be more likely to do the hard work needed to achieve it.
Finally, collaborative leaders measure successes against their own prior achievements. In collaborative endeavors, focus on creating a bigger prize than you could alone. If you do better than your expectation or your past performance, declare victory. Focusing on the division of spoils inevitably foments negativity.
Richard Parsons became chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2001, at a time when AOL and Time Warner executives were locked in an internecine battle that was destroying the company. He unified the factions and turned the company around when no one thought he could do so. Later, as chairman of Citigroup, he navigated its recovery after the 2009 global fiscal crisis. A consummate collaborator, he once told an interviewer:
When you negotiate, leave a little something on the table. … I think people get hung up with their advisors, investment bankers, lawyers, and others, and every instance becomes a tug of war to see who can outduel the other to get the slightest little advantage on a transaction. But people don’t keep in mind that the advisors are going to move on to the next deal, while you and I are going to have to see each other again.13
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, however, there is one ethical exception to this recommendation: It is appropriate only when the division of rewards is basically fair so that concerns about shares of spoils are at the margin. This is another reason why win-win should be seen as a strategic choice, not an ethical imperative. When basic fairness is missing, win-lose—taking more at the expense of another—may be the truly ethical choice.
Here’s why: Societies worldwide have long deprived women and minorities of their fair shares of the benefits of success. Women often get paid less than men doing the same jobs (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average 13.8% in 2016).14 This is also true when they negotiate large contracts such as those of Hollywood actors.15 In these situations, ignoring the sharing of benefits and focusing solely on prior achievements perpetuates injustice. Raising women’s pay to achieve parity may keep some men from getting deserved raises, but that win-lose outcome isn’t necessarily wrong.
Driving Collaboration at the Organizational and Team Levels
A baseline requirement for both the organizational and team levels is abandoning command-and-control leadership, the antithesis of collaboration.16 Command-and-control leadership fails complex organizations hoping to innovate while collaboration serves multicultural, multi-organizational pursuit of innovation and creativity.17 Assuming you agree and have a collaborative mindset, what could you do?
At the organizational level, assess which network members should be partners. Typical digital world networks include many organizations. Not all of them contribute equally: A company that sells a commodity is not the equal of one that contributes valuable intellectual property. Everyone doesn’t merit equal treatment: The intellectual property provider may be a valued partner, while the commodity provider is easily replaceable. The intellectual property producer’s contract may assure win-win compensation, while the commodity producer’s may simply offer market price.
Deciding who does merit a win-win partnership isn’t hard. Honestly answer a two-part question: Will we be hurt if they leave? Will they be hurt if we leave? Two “Yes” answers makes win-win essential, if and only if the other party also feels similarly. A “Yes” and “No,” respectively, may lead you into a win-lose situation. A “No” and “Yes,” respectively, isn’t a license to be nasty; it should be seen as a reason for achieving a fair outcome (e.g., market price payment).
Moreover, when you talk to another company, do service-level and legal agreements dominate the discussions? Even in the best of relationships, you must occasionally consult such documents. But if you’re tempted to always keep them handy, you lack the mutual trust partnership requires. Move on when you can.
At the organizational level, elevate partnership norms and specify consequences of failure. An organization doing what it contractually must isn’t a partner any more than a stranger doing the bare minimum society expects. Put in place much higher standards whose breaches can’t be easily explained away.18 Be clear on the implications of their violation. Partnership must have not only privileges but responsibilities.
Baril gave an example that, stripped of idiosyncratic details, can be good model. His supplier network had an inviolable policy: Every member had a right to make a decent profit. Partners widely considered the measures of “decent profit” fair, even generous. When a new business head at a long-standing partner complained about heavy losses, his words challenged this norm. Baril:
“This is terrible!” I said. “I make sure that all companies working with Nokia make more money with us than with anyone else. That is why I can ask for, and get, favorable terms, priority access to new technologies, etc. If you are truly losing money, I am obliged to end doing business with you. I do not want you to lose face in your organization.” He asked for time to look into the numbers again. He returned to admit he was wrong and indeed, Nokia was his most profitable customer.
At the team level, build trust and a shared identity early. Trust takes three distinct, but mutually reinforcing, forms.19 Purposive trust exists when people on all sides believe that their intentions are aligned and symmetrical. Cognitive trust requires needed capabilities to exist or be acquired. Procedural trust exists when requisite processes and systems needed to perform are or will be in place.
You must not only ensure that all three exist but also repeatedly highlight the fact that they do. Such positive championing is always useful. It is particularly critical for one variety of purposive trust—the inclusionary mindset, behaviors and actions discussed in chapter 5.20
Equally importantly, you must also talk up the importance of trust to the group’s mission21 and set and monitor group norms. Doing so creates a shared identity and carries the early trust forward.22 Similarly, you must ensure early that people understand, or can readily access, answers to “who know what” questions about resources and expertise.23 Lack of knowledge of existing resources can erode trust.
At the team level, ensure people understand they are not their jobs. Research on why smart executives fail spectacularly suggests that one behavior in particular hampers collaboration:
They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests. … Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves. And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold.24
Initially, such executives may believe disagreements with their organizations are attacks on them. Over time, this logic can reverse direction: They may characterize whatever benefits them personally as beneficial for the organization and whatever harms them personally as attacks on the organization.
Baril argues that a failure to separate people’s jobs from their personal selves often turns work-related, issues-driven conflicts into relationship conflicts:
Good leaders manage conflict well; they don’t take it personally. You are in a role, say as head of marketing. People are not fighting against you, they are challenging the role, the interests, you represent.
So, you need to respect, and earn respect as a person. You have to love people. I am not shy to say that. I ask a lot of questions about people. I do so because I want to know more about them. And if I don’t respect them, I ask myself why.
To lead a collaborative organization, you need to be able to defuse conflicts. You are not here to fight; you are here to find a solution.
You are in a chair to do a specific job. You need to be able to stand up and look at the chair. Then there is no emotion. If you can’t separate the chair from yourself, you will see everything as a criticism.
Amy Edmondson and and consultant Diana Smith have argued that mental processes similar to System 1 and System 2 govern how conflicts unfold in organizations.25 The “Hot System” is impulsive like System 1, while the “Cold System” is thoughtful like System 2. Once the Hot System takes over, cycles of finger-pointing dominate. Breaking or forestalling this cycle requires the Cold System to reframe issues in ways that drain their emotional content. “Stand up and look at the chair” metaphorically captures this powerful idea.
At the team level, create psychologically safe environments. We’ve all been in situations where people felt powerless to speak up, or feared ridicule or punishment, or worried about looking ignorant, incompetent, intrusive, or negative. These situations weren’t “psychologically safe.” In them, people usually react by keeping quiet and trying to remain unnoticed. They hesitate to offer information, even key information they alone possess.26 They feel particularly threatened when they feel isolated (a common problem when they aren’t colocated) or when they hold a minority view.
Edmondson urges leaders to build psychologically safe environments. In addition to seeking out people’s observations or ideas, they must “Embrace messengers … who come bearing bad news, questions, concerns or mistakes.”27 They should also give peers and subordinates a model to emulate by being “open about what you don’t know, mistakes you’ve made, and what you can’t get done alone” (emphases added).
Providing psychological safety isn’t tantamount to overlooking unacceptable or repeated serious errors.28 Edmondson urges leaders to consider the context. An avoidable failure that endangers life is inexcusable, and the consequences should be steep. On the other hand, small errors that cascade to create crises shouldn’t necessarily cause heads to roll; they should trigger improvement efforts. For that, people must feel they can speak without retribution. If not, the problems will fester, and innovation and creativity suffer.
At both levels, regularly assess and improve the health of your network. Flat information flows benefit collaboration. Those who need to communicate should be able to do so. You must encourage this and create conditions that enable it.
Diagnose your situation by creating network diagrams that capture who communicates with whom, how, when, and why. Analytical software to do so exists, but when people at a whiteboard do so manually, they get motivated to apply the lessons. Different types of dots, colors, widths of lines, and uni- or bidirectional arrows can help represent different categories of people; conversation types; and when, how, and why the communications occurred.
Even simple network diagrams can help diagnose collaboration issues. Consider figure 7.1, which shows software-generated who-communicates-with-whom data from a real company. It shows three groups that communicate extensively among themselves: Most of the arrows are bidirectional. Two groups (IT Consulting and Business Process) have multiple people who communicate across group lines. Within all groups and across these two groups the interaction is reciprocal and even intensive.
Network analysis of three groups in a company.
Source: Michael Johnson-Cramer, Salvatore Parise, and Robert Cross, “Managing Change through Networks and Values,” California Management Review 49, no. 3 (Spring 2007).
The links to the third group (Database Management) are limited and primarily occur through one person. While the work may demand such centralization, this person could also be a command-and-control boss. Simple questions not captured by this diagram could determine the truth: What organizational benefit accrues from centralizing information handling? Could those benefits be acquired at a lower cost (or additional benefits be acquired at the same cost) by distributing the information flow?
Even without additional investigation, the diagram gives two indisputable insights that establish this network has problems. If the centralized point of contact in the Database Management group quit or got hit by a truck, the work of all three groups would suffer. Besides, the Database Management group has three isolated members.
You can also draw similar network diagrams across geographical regions (see figure 7.2). When work is distributed (Principle 3), if a geographical region is marginalized, visibility into VUCA conditions that originate there and access to unique knowledge housed there can be lost. A network diagram will give you insights into these potential problems.
Network analysis of three geographies in a company.
Source: Michael Johnson-Cramer, Salvatore Parise, and Robert Cross, “Managing Change through Networks and Values,” California Management Review 49, no. 3 (Spring 2007).
Network diagrams can also help identify key people in the “informal organizations” that power most workplaces. They may have no obvious authority but may possess something far more valuable—credibility. These people energize and motive those around them. Their organizational knowledge “keeps the place running … in a way that is fair to everyone.”29 Among technical people, they have a “disproportionately large” impact on the success of knowledge work.30 Do you know them? Are you protecting and rewarding them? You must if you’re to be a truly effective collaborative leader.
Collaboration is critically important because the digital, VUCA world requires leaders to bring together knowledge, resources, and diverse peoples in the pursuit of goals. If you’ve done your job right, you’ll be able to devolve authority for mission-critical endeavors even if you have to report—as Baril did—to the board. You’ll be able to say, “We have a great distributed team in place and an amazing network of partners. They have all the processes and resources we need. They’ll solve this problem. I don’t have to look over their shoulders.”
Equally importantly, collaboration is essential for the pursuit of creativity, the subject of the next chapter.
Notes
1. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999).
2. Kim B. Clark, “The Interaction of Design Hierarchies and Market Concepts in Technological Evolution,” Research Policy 14, no. 5 (October 1985): 235–251.
3. Li-Ling Hsu and Minder Chen, “Impacts of ERP Systems on the Integrated-Interaction Performance of Manufacturing and Marketing,” Industrial Management & Data Systems 104, no. 1: 42–55.
4. James Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
5. Praveen Pinjani and Prashant Palvia, “Trust and Knowledge Sharing in Diverse Global Teams,” Information & Management 50, no. 4 (2013): 144–153.
6. McDonald and Kotha, “Boeing 787: Manufacturing a Dream.”
7. A. Elangovan and Debra Shapiro, “Betrayal of Trust in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review 23, no. 3 (1998): 547–566.
8. Faaiza Rashid, and Amy Edmondson, “Risky Trust: How Teams Build Trust Despite High Risk,” Rotman Magazine, Spring 2012.
9. Brad Crisp and Sirkka Jarvenpaa, “Swift Trust in Global Virtual Teams,” Journal of Personnel Psychology 12, no. 1 (2013): 45–56.
10. Armstrong and Cole, “Managing Distances and Differences in Geographically Distributed Work Groups.”
11. Ranjay Gulati, Franz Wohlgezogen, and Pavel Zhelyazkov, “The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances,” The Academy of Management Annals 6, no. 1 (2012): 531–583, https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520.2012.691646.
12. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
13. Julia Boorstin, “The Best Advice I Ever Got,” Fortune, March 21, 2005.
14. Gender wage gap, OECD data 2016, https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm.
15. Elahe Izadi, “Michelle Williams Got Paid Way Less Than Her Male Co-Star. It’s a Sad Hollywood Tradition,” Washington Post, January 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/01/10/michelle-williams-got-paid-way-less-than-her-male-co-star-its-a-sad-hollywood-tradition/?utm_term=.1bb1684bc314.
16. Morten Hansen, “How John Chambers Learned to Collaborate at Cisco,” Harvard Business Review, March 4, 2010.
17. Herminia Ibarra and Morten Hansen, “Are You a Collaborative Leader?,” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2011.
18. Elangovan and Shapiro, “Betrayal of Trust in Organizations.”
19. Rashid and Edmondson, “Risky Trust.”
20. Pinjani and Palvia, “Trust and Knowledge Sharing in Diverse Global Teams.”
21. Rashid and Edmondson, “Risky Trust.”
22. Crisp and Jarvenpaa, “Swift Trust in Global Virtual Teams.”
23. M. Travis Maynard, John E. Mathieu, Tammy L. Rapp, and Lucy L. Gilson, “Something(s) Old and Something(s) New: Modelling Drivers of Global Virtual Team Effectiveness,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 3, no. 3 (April 12, 2012): 342–365.
24. Eric Jackson, “The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives,” Forbes, January 2, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/#4865834e516b.
25. Amy Edmondson and Diana M. Smith, “Too Hot to Handle? How to Manage Relationship Conflicts,” California Management Review 49, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 6–31.
26. Roderick Swaab, Katherine Phillips, and Michael Schaerera, “Secret Conversation Opportunities Facilitate Minority Influence in Virtual Groups: The Influence on Majority Power, Information Processing, and Decision Quality,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 133 (2016): 17–32.
27. Amy Edmondson, “Strategies for Learning from Failure,” Harvard Business Review, April 2011.
28. Karen Christensen, “Thought Leader Interview: Amy Edmondson.”
29. Polly Rizova, “Are You Networked for Innovation?,” Sloan Management Review, Spring 2006.
30. Rob Cross, Peter Gray, Shirley Cunningham, Mark Showers, and Robert J. Thomas, “The Collaborative Organization: How to Make Employee Networks Really Work,” Sloan Management Review, Fall, October 1, 2010.