Perspectives 2: Is collaboration good?
This article contains an associate link to a book I purchased and read on Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
Currently, I’m enrolled in the EDUCAUSE Executive Leadership Academy. The academy is designed to help leaders who aspire to be executives develop the skills required for such roles.
For the last couple of weeks, our cohort has been exploring aspects of collaboration. Our primary assignment was to read a book called Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid Traps, Build Common Ground, and Reap Big Results by Morten Hansen.
Collaboration blew my mind! The most eye-opening lesson I found in the book is that collaboration is not always a good thing from a business standpoint. The author goes further to propose that not only can collaboration not be good, but it can be harmful.
“BAD COLLABORATION is worse than no collaboration”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been told that we should collaborate more and that collaboration is good. So this statement caught me by surprise.
Hansen suggests that collaboration for the sake of collaboration has an opportunity cost. The “collaboration premium” must be weighed against the potential outcomes of collaborative endeavors.
I’ve seen bad collaboration in my workplace before. Leaders encourage “collaboration,” so they create cross-functional committees composed of people who wouldn’t normally interact. They encourage these committees to meet without providing any goals, the assumption being that the members will discern what needs to be done. Dozens or hundreds of hours are spent with group members attempting to determine their purpose; or why they are meeting in the first place. In the end, the committee fizzles.
What a colossal waste of time. Imagine what could have been done with the time consumed by that bad collaboration. One of the thoughts that formed while I was writing this post is that such “bad collaborations” give collaboration a bad name. “Remember when we formed XYZ committee and wasted all that time?” How likely will people be to try to collaborate outside of their silo if all they remember are the lousy collaboration experiences?
In Collaboration, Hansen proposes the use of disciplined collaboration. That is an intentional discernment of when collaboration yields results.
The book goes on to discuss several important topics, including:
The opportunities and barriers of collaboration
Understanding when and when not to collaborate
Identifying the four barriers to successful collaboration
Three levers to creating successful collaboration structures
Growing into a successful collaborative leader
I particularly appreciated the straightforward writing style and insightful examples Hansen provided. It took about 5 hours for me to read this whole book, and I believe the time was well spent.
Reflection
Have you been involved in a collaborative effort that turned out to be a waste of time? What do you think were the primary reasons the collaboration didn’t work, and what could have been done to make it work better?
