Whether it’s between countries, companies or business schools, collaboration is something that will propel your business forward.
Some recent examples of collaboration include: the UK and the Philippines’ collaborative research pact, brand collaborations for Valentine’s Day and numerous partnerships between business schools. Separate bodies when brought together can bring fresh perspectives, new ideas and better practices.
And while collaboration between organisations is a decision that can have a positive outcome, successful collaboration within a company is essential. According to a recent McKinsey study, 97 percent of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project.
So, if you’re looking to help your team collaborate better, read on, as we have collated some of the best recent studies on collaboration.
Think about your company’s culture
To boost collaboration within your company, you might want to first consider whether your company’s environment inspires a collaborative environment.
To do this, look to the CEO, a new study finds. A corporation’s leader often influences its culture and performance, reveals a new study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Stanford professor, Charles O’Reilly, was inspired to run this study after spending five years in the US Army. There, he witnessed the divide between good and bad leaders, and noticed the huge influence they had on the people who worked for them.
To assess the personalities of 460 CEOs at more than 300 companies O’Reilly and his co-authors used a natural language algorithm on earnings call data. They then analysed 1.2 million Glassdoor employee reviews to calculate the firms’ organsational cultures, including factors such as collaboration, execution and performance.
The results showed a significant correlation between a CEO’s personality and their firm’s culture.
“What we’re suggesting in this article is that [when hiring a CEO] skill sets and experience are important, but that it’s also probably worthwhile thinking about the personality of the individual,” O’Reilly writes on Insights by Stanford Business. “The intuition is that culture and strategy need to fit, and therefore personality needs to fit as well.”
While CEOs might be aware of their company’s culture, many of them aren’t particularly good at managing it, O’Reilly explains. But CEOs who are willing to shift their focus to their company culture can improve performance, employee satisfaction, team dynamics and longevity, the study suggests.
To change company culture, leaders must begin with mapping the culture, says Hazel Rose Markus, a professor of psychology at Stanford. Leaders must define what matters most and what they value in order to both instil it and create it in others.
“In so many organisations we’re working with now, there’s a gap between what leaders feel their values are, what they care about, and what the employees are experiencing,” she says. “What we see is that it’s important to give the employees chances to get together to talk about this and have some company time, some paid time, to discuss these issues.”
Getting your team to collaborate
Encouraging employees to talk is one step. The next is facilitating opportunities for them to work together. When people in a team are used to completing tasks individually, it can be difficult for leaders to implement a collaborative atmosphere. According to Adam Grant, Professor of Management and Psychology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, collaboration can be encouraged with the right leadership practices, team processes and systems.
There are several steps businesses should take to encourage collaboration he writes in Knowledge at Wharton:
- Choose the right leader
When choosing a leader, more often than not companies mistake confidence with competence and choose someone talkative – the so-called babble effect – rather than the person with the best leadership skills. “Collective intelligence is maximised when leaders put their mission above their ego,” says Grant. “Their goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room but rather to make the room smarter. They make sure every voice is heard.”
- Brainwrite, don’t brainstorm
Research shows that individuals working separately tend to generate more creative ideas than groups brainstorming together. This is largely due to the pressure to conform, the fear of looking foolish and the difficulty of breaking through the noise. “Collective intelligence requires individual creativity and group wisdom,” says Grant. He suggests instead encouraging what he calls “brainwriting” – where individuals can submit solutions to a problem anonymously and then discuss these ideas as a group.
- Create a lattice hierarchy, rather than a ladder
A lattice system uses an organisational chart with channels across levels and between teams, which provides many possible paths to the top. The goal is to give you multiple leaders who are willing and able to help move you forward and lift you up.
Collaborating with Gen Z
Gen-Z are a generation that has been frequently criticised for their attitude in the workplace. Whether it’s about their approach to work-life balance, a perceived lack of motivation to put in long hours or their approach to collaboration, three-quarters of managers in a recent survey said they found Gen-Z difficult to work with.
However, Heidi Brooke, a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the Yale School of Management, says the question should not be ‘What is wrong with Gen-Z‘, but instead ‘How can we engage all employees, including Gen Z, to craft a workable world of work where humans and business and the environment can thrive?‘
“I believe that the intergenerational tensions raised by working across generations bring the need for new mindsets and approaches into sharp focus,” Brooke wrote on I, by IMD.
“Much has been written and talked about the necessity of ‘training’ Gen Z to integrate into the workforce. But perhaps leaders and managers should be considering how to nudge collaborative capacity across generations, taking a journey of discovery, with the objective of co-creating updated workplace norms.”
With four generations now working in the same workplace, leaders need to be able to combat any potential friction between different age groups. Of course, due to large age gaps, there are likely to be differences in the ways these individuals work and the challenges they face in their day-to-day.
For example, the types of health challenges, especially in mental health, vary by age: higher levels of anxiety are often found in the young, and greater depression in the elderly.
Similarly, elderly people in the workplace are more likely to suffer from ageism, disaffection, and poor accessibility.
Dr. Celia de Anca, the Deputy Dean for Ethics, Diversity and Inclusion at IE University, shares three ways businesses can help different generations collaborate better in the workplace.;
- Spark conversations and build new narratives: Inspire conversations grounded in honesty and humility, and endeavour to educate all parties about different ages and life cycles, in order to help to create new narratives,
- Allow greater flexibility: Make structural changes that enable greater flexibility and allow the chance for everyone to work, in the way that they best can, towards a common goal,
- Promote inclusivity: When different age groups are finally working together towards a common goal, the result is often a mix of universal and targeted solutions that deliver accessibility for all.
The workplace of the future
The modern workplace is made up of an assortment of people of different ages, with different backgrounds and types of work experience, but also with different perspectives, circumstances and needs.
Long gone are the days where people would stay with one company for their entire working life, and recent studies show that this has been accelerated by the pandemic: employee turnover rates have increased by nine percent since 2019.
This, in conjunction with the swift changes in how our industries operate means that people are constantly moving, working in new places, on new projects with new people. Therefore, creating a workplace where individuals feel comfortable and inspired to collaborate and share their ideas is essential.
Is your organisation equipped to bring your people together, even when apart? If not, collaborating with the ideas expressed in this article might just help you take a step in the right direction.
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