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How to Calibrate Collaboration

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When to team and when not to team, and how to keep overachievers engaged when others aren't pulling their weight

How to Calibrate Collaboration

What does your typical organizational day look like? Do you find you’re spending a lot of time on teamwork? According to a study by Ernst and Young, senior executives report that they’re spending about half of their time in teams and team meetings, an increase of more than 50 percent over the past two decades.

I'm a huge supporter of teams but only when they are productive. How many times have you sat in a meeting and wondered what you were doing there?

First Order Questions

When should you use a team and when not?

First consider the work: Is it complex or simple? The former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot once said, “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don't appoint a committee on snakes.” Some work is independent, requiring one person to make a quick decision. For anything that's complex and requiring innovation, it’s a great time to get a team together to capture the mind power of many different people.

Do we have time?

Agility matters so much in business these days. One person may need to take charge just to keep the business running. Even so, you usually only have time to bring together the expertise that you really need, and no one else. Mercy invitations are not acceptable; someone who is not needed can derail an entire meeting. A client of mine has 18 people on a conference call, yet the director with whom I'm working once told me, “Only five are needed. The rest are wasted resources.”

Do you need a team or a group?

In The Wisdom of Teams, a group is defined as a set of individuals who rely on the sum of “individual bests” for their performance. A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to common purpose or performance goals for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

The main difference between a group and a team is the level of alignment. Consider a set of all-star players: these “individual bests” may actually be the best technical players but unless they are aligned around a common purpose or strategy, they may never actually perform well. Alignment is key.

The best teams that I’ve worked with have had strong individuals with their own perspectives, all coming into alignment. But alignment is not agreement. It may not be possible to get everyone on the team to fully agree with every decision. Alignment means that the team keeps discussing until everyone is comfortable and can commit to aligning behind it 100 percent. The difficulty is when teams do not have a fulsome discussion in the meeting room and the real decision takes place outside.

Collaborative Overload

Recent research by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant found that up to one-third of value-added collaboration comes from only 3 to 5 percent of all employees. Research by Ning Li and her team also found that a single member can drive team performance more than all members combined. These individuals are called “extra milers” and they frequently contribute beyond the scope of their role. If teams are not careful, these extra milers can end up dissatisfied, disengaged, and feeling like they’re doing too much. That's what can happen when organizations are not careful about calibrating the right level of collaboration.

According to Cross and his colleagues, there are three types of collaborative resources in organizations:  informational, social and personal.

  • Informational resources are an individual’s expertise, knowledge, and skills. These can be easily exchanged because they can be recorded or put down on paper.
  • Social resources are an individual’s position in a network or access, which can be leveraged to open doors to help someone make a contact.
  • Personal resources relate to one’s time and energy.

Interestingly, there are gender differences in how these collaborative resources are used. The evidence shows that women are more likely than men to experience emotional exhaustion because they are more likely to contribute their personal energy and time. So, what can organizational leaders do about this?

Here are three effective strategies to consider using:

  • One is to encourage women to invest their time and energy differently. Rather than simply investing their personal energy, Cross and his colleagues suggest they be encouraged to offer other types of collaborative resources.
  • Organizations can also consider giving credit for the time people put into helping others, not just for the outcome of collaboration. This does require an investment in developing metrics around what will be rewarded in terms of helping behaviour.
  • Leaders need to give permission to employees to say no to collaborative work and offer guidelines to help them. One good rule of thumb is for employees to be on two teams at the most. A second is that they should redirect requests for inputs that do not fit their expertise to a colleague.

Any of these options can help shield those who may feel they are collaborating too much, and ensure that their positive energy is tapped most efficiently.