A couple of ideas from a great book for Project and Change Leaders
Collaboration by Morten Hansen
In his book Morten Hansen identifies 4 key barriers to Collaboration…
1. The not-invented-here barrier (people are unwilling to reach out to others)
2. The hoarding barrier (people are unwilling to provide help)
3. The search barrier (people are not able to find what they are looking for)
4. The transfer barrier (people are not able to work with people they don't know well)
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.
Hansen talks about the necessary combination of teamwork and individual ownership that leads to disciplined collaboration: without the value of teamwork, it is hard to collaborate. Without the value of individual ownership, people shirk.
The book suggests that 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.
If a bird flying high looked down at the myriad relationships among people in your company, what would it see? Would it look down on a map of islands with very few connections between them, or would it see a good number of relationships across the islands?
To gain a bird's-eye view of their networks, leaders need to first create a network map. A cross-unit network map consists of all informal relations spanning units. You can identify these relationships by administering a network survey to people in the company. The sum of their answers will show where there are many cross-unit interactions and where there are few or none.
Managers must act forcefully when they see a situation involving weak cross-unit ties (silo relationships) and complicated knowledge (the type of information that can't be learned from an email). They must switch the team to strong ties immediately, by bringing the cross-unit team together at the beginning of the project in one location for a few days and building a one-team culture.
Disciplined collaboration means identifying the weak spots in a companywide network and designing specific solutions for each one. If the problem is lack of connections among isolated units, then it's best to work on developing more bridges (e.g., by starting a job rotation program).
If the problem is lack of diversity, then you should get people from different kinds of units to mingle.
If the problem is lack of connections between technical areas, then start communities of practice focused on a technical area that involves people from across the company—and so on.
This approach is vastly different from saying, "Let's do an annual retreat to help our people network." That's a shotgun approach that only adds costs without pinpointing specific problems.
I think there is a lot we can learn from the above for our organisations and our government.
THE AUTHOR
Tim Rogers is an experienced Project and Change Leader. He is founder of www.ciChange.org and curator for www.TEDxStHelier.Com . He is Programme Manager for the commercialization of Jersey Harbours and Jersey Airport, and previously Operations Change and Sales Support for RBSI/NatWest, and Project Manager for the Incorporation of Jersey Post. He is also Commonwealth Triathlete and World Championships Rower with a passion for teaching and learning and is a Tutor/Mentor on the Chartered Management Institute courses. He is a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society, has an MBA (Management Consultancy) and is both a PRINCE2 and Change Management Practitioner.
Email: TimHJRogers@AdaptConsultingGroup.com
Mob: 07797762051 | Twitter @timhjrogers | Skype timhjrogers
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