Cultivating Good Team Collaboration
Photo by Daniel Norin on Unsplash
As a young father, I was enlisted to coach my daughter's youth soccer team against my will. I have never played soccer, but no other dad was willing or able to step in. So, each night before practice and the games, I was on the internet trying to figure out rules, scoring, strategy, and drills to make the team a little better (and not look like a complete fool as a coach). But the first couple of Saturdays, the girls were playing "herd ball." You know what I mean- all of the girls from both teams are wholly massed around the ball, trying to impose their will toward one goal or the other. They looked like a herd of animals all cloistered together at feeding time. Since my great coaching was not working, I called the girls together one day during practice and asked them what we could do better to win a game. They suggested that we spread out our players, play positions on the field, and pass the ball down the field toward the opponent's goal. Brilliant! Of course, I had been advocating for the same thing for weeks. However, opening up the problem-solving process to include the player's input built ownership and a different result. Collaboration was born--and we won a few games.
The desire and need for team collaboration is at an all-time high. Gallup found that 84% of U.S. employees are 'matrixed,' meaning they work across multiple teams or report to different managers. In situations like this, teamwork and collaboration become increasingly important. Another study from Queens University in Charlotte found that 39% of employees believe their workplace teams need to collaborate more. Yet, 75% of that study's employees rate teamwork and collaboration as "very important." One final statistic points to the importance of the team leader. Harvard Business Review reports that 90% of workers think decision-makers should seek their employees' opinions before making a final decision.
But what does it mean to collaborate? What are the important elements in achieving good team collaboration? According to Merriam-Webster, to collaborate means to work jointly with others or together. It means to cooperate with one another or to willingly assist. All of this is focused on problem-solving—an idea, a method, or a perspective. The word has a Latin derivation, which means to labor together to achieve a better result than one that could be completed individually.
Cultivating collaboration requires at least three critical elements, which I will summarize in three words: Lenses, Elevation, and Shared.
Lenses. To collaborate well as a team, each team member must be intentional about seeing the presenting problem from the other team member's perspective. If you only see the problem through your own lens, through your perspective and vocational contribution, then you will likely miss the true nature of the problem and settle for a low-grade solution.
Elevation. Each team member must also see the presenting problem from a higher elevation, from the vantage point of the whole organization (or department). If you only see the problem from your current elevation, you will solve it only for that scenario and will likely need to solve it again somewhere down the road. However, consider raising your elevation to see the problem from an organizational perspective. In that case, you have a better chance of seeing all of the ramifications of potential solutions and will be more likely to solve the problem in the long term.
Shared. To cultivate healthy collaboration, you must also have a few shared elements. There needs to be a shared understanding of the problem at hand. As the saying goes, a problem well defined is a problem half solved. A problem equally shared will enlist much more significant focus, energy, contribution, and ownership. You also must have a shared workload. Each team member must participate in the active problem-solving process and the implementation of the agreed-upon solution.
Team leaders are critical to this collaborative process. They must sort through all the potential problems a team could give their time to and choose the most highly leveraged ones requiring real collaboration. Not every problem requires team collaboration. If you fall prey to this, you will wear your team out. Once the team leader has chosen the most highly leveraged problems for collaboration, she must clearly define the problem and communicate the necessary gravity as to why this problem is essential. Finally, the team leader must engage in an open and honest collaborative process and solve the problem without overly exerting authority or biases. This will give the team the best chance at scoring a collective and meaningful "goal."
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