Collaboration. Businesses want it. Governments want it. Leaders frequently invoke the word whenever a formidable challenge emerges.
What better way to serve customers, respond to threats, and deal nimbly with unexpected events (say, a worldwide pandemic) than to bring together different parts of an organization?
Maybe you have found in your own experience, though, that the desire to collaborate does not always translate into positive results. In fact, all too many collaborative efforts fall apart because of a natural human tendency to be territorial.
Understandably, people identify most strongly with the people they already know and work with on their teams. And so, in the face of requests to join forces, these smaller groups all too often build up silos to protect their own people and resources.
Let me give you an extreme - and tragic - example. Before 9/11 happened, the FBI actually had enough information to prevent the attack. For example, a flight simulator school near Minneapolis reported suspicious behavior by one of its students to the local FBI.
In addition, a special agent in Phoenix, learning of similarly suspicious activity in Arizona, sent a July 2001 memo to a dozen FBI officials recommending that the agency compile a worldwide list of aviation schools.
But because local and federal FBI offices tended to build silos within their regions that shielded knowledge from each other rather than sharing it, this information failed to reach those who could have acted on it. Nor was anyone in a position to connect the proverbial dots.
Since then, the FBI has worked hard to adopt a more collaborative approach, all the way from the local level to the highest reaches of the federal government. In a series of cases on the transformation of the FBI, a colleague and I documented how silos inevitably develop and how best to defuse their negative influence.
Whether you work for a business or a government agency, a military organization or a nonprofit, you'll need to be on the lookout for silos. You'd think that a small business might be an exception to this, but that's not true. It all starts with a simple division of labor where a group of individuals divides up tasks.
Very quickly they create silos that then need to be coordinated. Even five or ten people can construct a silo to protect themselves and their turf, creating their own set of subcultures and sub-identities.
Given that silo building is natural human behavior, how can organizations respond to it? Back in 2007, I wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called "Silo Busting." (I also discussed this concept in my 2010 book, "Reorganize for Resilience": Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.")
In retrospect, the title "Silo Busting" was a misnomer, because we actually need silos. They are a valuable source of expertise, accountability and focus. However, given that they tend to become self-isolating and protectionist, leaders must take steps to build bridges between the silos within their organizations.
How can they do that?
Many leaders think it is enough to coordinate a response through such methods as creating task forces and working groups, and assigning common leaders for these groups. But without true cooperation among disparate groups, these efforts cannot be successful.
These are two very distinct and complementary facets of collaboration. Without both, you are likely to fail. At first glance, it might seem like coordination and cooperation are basically the same thing, but that is not the case.
Cooperation is about instilling a shared intention across an organization, through vehicles like a collaborative culture and a shared sense of purpose. Coordination is about aligning that intention and purpose to specific tasks.
I have found that leaders over-rely on coordination because it looks so tangible and implies immediate results. But coordination needs to meld with the energy of true cooperation in order to meet an overarching objective.
Absent cooperation, you will end up with a patchwork solution that isn't sustainable over the long haul. Melding these two components of collaboration is far from easy.
Cooperation ultimately happens between individuals, and no amount of initiatives or projects can guarantee individual buy-in.
I have found that company leaders can improve their chances of success if they place a greater value on multi-domain skills (the ability to work with a variety of products and services) and boundary-spanning skills (the ability to create connections between disparate parts of an organization.
This means leaders should reward and promote more generalists - a stark contrast to a continuing tendency to favor those with specialized expertise. Why is it important to understand these concepts?
Because in this time of unprecedented uncertainty and turbulence, only those who respond with the most agility to unexpected events are likely to come out ahead. The most agile players will be able to swiftly marshal their entire organization in a united response. The laggards will become so caught up in internal conflicts that it paralyzes them.
As noted in a management paper that I co-authored: "At best, conflicting interests can cause diminished commitment that gradually withers the relationship; at worst, they can lead to opportunism or the pursuit of self-interest with no regard for unenforceable commitments or moral obligations."
How can leaders build agility into their operating systems? By recognizing that internal silos will, at least initially, seek to optimize for their own internal benefit. A powerful way to counteract this is to harness purpose as a key enabler of cooperation.
Leaders will need to create a narrative that, while acknowledging silos, stresses and celebrates a shared purpose across the entire organization. From there, specific steps to carry out that purpose will be easier to accomplish. Only with an understanding of these nuances will organizations be able to thrive.
As Babe Ruth once said: "You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play together, the club won't be worth a dime." In baseball, as in business and beyond, playing together successfully depends on the right mix of cooperation and coordination.
Inc
