Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results by Morten Hansen

Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results
by Morten Hansen

Spot the Four Barriers to Collaboration Modern management is the enemy of collaboration. Managers have installed extreme decentralization to foster entrepreneurship, individual freedom, and accountability. This is a great system that yields many benefits, but it is also hard to collaborate across a loose collection of units. The solution is not to centralize, but to spot barriers to collaboration among units and tear them down. That’s a decentralized and yet coordinated model. Research shows that four barriers block collaboration among decentralized units. – Not-invented-here: People are not willing to seek input from others outside their unit. – Hoarding: People are not willing to provide information and help others when asked. – Search problems: People are not able to find information and people easily. – Transfer problems: People are not able to transfer complicated knowledge from one unit to another. The first two barriers are motivational problems—people don’t want to collaborate. The latter two barriers are ability problems—people are not able to collaborate well.

Three fundamental unification mechanisms allow a leader to translate the lofty aspiration of unity into concrete measures: (1) creating a unifying goal, (2) inciting a common value of teamwork, and (3) speaking the language of collaboration. These mechanisms are effective in making people more willing to collaborate. They reduce the not-invented-here and hoarding barriers.