Rules for Collaboration

Collaboration is becoming more complex than ever – and more difficult to get it right.

Today, companies are asked to demonstrate integrated cross-functional, project based team work in their operation. In the tech and finance world, for example, IT experts are asked to connect with commercial and finance organization to work projects and develop a product together. Team member may be working together not only from different offices but on different continents. Also, team member coming from different environment might have different emotional and development needs

In an attempt to make this work, we need to develop systematic approach to teamwork that relies on continuous, real time testing, learning analysis, adaptation and improvements.

Develop Operating system

This mean creating building blocks for the way team member collaborates, create change and support one another. The idea is to develop an understanding how teams creates value, what teams are supposed to achieve, the technical skill each member is expected to contribute, the process through which work will be managed and the cultural norms and mindsets of constructive collaboration that will guide the behavior.

One way to think about this is to apply way we work (WWW) model – that reframes, and improves on principals of agile team work. To their work team must be able to bring together best thinking, analysis, coding design expertise while be able to collaborate across geographies and scale.

Action plan – hold kick-offs, conduct one-on-ones and take stock of progress.

Invest in active real time measurement

The system should allow you measure the outcome of actions and determine how changes in the inputs affects results. How do we monitor team’s needs and performance in real time and then hypothesize, test, learn and adapt.

One tool – weekly survey can help us by sending a simple question, how are you feeling?

Define what constitutes success. This could be any number of things, such as increased revenue, improved employee and client experience etc etc. then build digital system to track these metrics with little disruption. Finally, use those system to learn what combination of inputs lead to better outcome.

Create a system for continuous improvements and innovation

We can create WWW center of excellence, this team experiments with innovative practices and monitor relevant flow of data to improve performance.

Identify which metrics are most important, hypothesized which actions that could improve performance in those areas and embed technologies in the operating system to enable continuous improvement.

One example could be rapid prototyping and testing of digital solution into standard procedures to help team improve speed and quality.

To conclude, it is extremely difficult to manage teams from multiple geographies, different time zones and diverse background, the number of factor at play here at just too many. However, many leaders tend to portray/believe otherwise, assuming that by addressing the issues at top will hide fundamental crack embedded within. In my humble opinion, we could at best make an attempt to manage and establish rules of the game, let alone be at the top of our game.