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Ron Ashkenas
April 20, 2015
Everyone seems to agree that collaboration across functions is critical for
major projects and initiatives. The reality, however, is that meshing the
skills and resources of different departments, each focused on its own distinct
targets, to achieve a larger organizational goal is much easier said than done.
In fact, it takes much more than people being willing to get together, share
information, and cooperate. It more importantly involves making tough decisions
and trade-offs about what and what not to do, in order to adjust workloads
across areas with different priorities and bosses. And despite all the
well-meaning cooperative behaviors, this is often where interdepartmental
collaboration breaks down.
Consider the following situations:
A large insurance company developed a new suite of products to meet unique
customer needs. But as the products were rolled out, it became clear that the
product development and marketing teams had not worked closely enough with the
IT and customer service teams that were supposed to support these products.
These teams knew about the general product development strategy, but they were
not included in the detailed planning and roll out decisions, so they were left
scrambling to catch up by the time the products were launched. As a result,
customers experienced delays and errors in processing, the call centers were
unprepared for questions, and the overall end-to-end cost of the new products
ended up being much higher than planned.
A global manufacturing firm wanted to customize a product component for one of
its major customers. Doing so required extensive design reconfiguration, with
changes to electronics, cooling, power, weight, pricing, and product delivery.
Although every function agreed to take on the changes that affected them, they
all worked on them independently and with different time frames. What each
function didn t realize was that their changes triggered adjustments for other
departments, and this led to a continual cycle of design changes. As a
consequence, the product manager was unable to finalize an integrated design
and still couldn t give the customer a firm quote or delivery schedule 18
months later.
The odd thing about these examples (and countless others) is that the managers
in these companies had been through various kinds of training about
collaboration, teamwork, and the like. But despite all of this education, they
were still unable to truly achieve the desired outcome because they confused
pleasant, cooperative behavior with collaboration. In the insurance company,
the product developers kept the back office and customer service people
informed, but they didn t actively engage them in a joint effort. In the
manufacturing firm, the design ball was passed from function to function with
the assumption that eventually all of the pieces would fit together each
believed the overall solution would be taken care of by someone else.
Having worked with hundreds of managers over the years, I ve seen that very few
admit to being poor collaborators, mostly because they mistake their
cooperativeness for being collaborative. And indeed, most managers are
cooperative, friendly, and willing to share information but what they lack is
the ability and flexibility to align their goals and resources with others in
real time. Sometimes this starts at the top of the organization when senior
leaders don t fully synchronize their strategies and performance measures with
each other. More often, however, the collaboration challenge resides with
department heads, product leaders, and major initiative managers who need to
get everyone on the same page and shouldn t wait for senior executives to
force the issue for them.
To start truly collaborating, here are two steps that you should take:
First, consider the goal you re trying to achieve. Map out the end-to-end work
that you think will be needed to get the outcome you want. What will your team
be responsible for? What will you need from other teams in the organization? As
you create this map, sketch out the possible sequencing of activities and
timing that might be required. You want to create an explicit framework that
will serve as a collaboration contract. When people know what s needed, in what
form, and by when, they can then tell you whether it s possible or not, and
then you can have a real dialogue about what can be done.
Second, convene a working session with all of the required collaborators from
different areas of the company to review, revise, and make commitments to this
collaboration contract. One of the biggest mistakes that managers make is
trying to foster what we might call serial collaboration , i.e. going from one
function to the next and trying to cobble together an agreement. Not only is
this time-consuming, but it rarely works since each change affects the next.
The better alternative is to get all of the needed collaborators in the room
together as early as possible to work through the plans, make adjustments, and
find ways to share resources and align incentives. In fact, in the
manufacturing case cited above, it was only when the product manager brought
together key people from all of the critical functions and disciplines into a
two-day workshop that she was able to finalize the customized design.
The bottom line here is that cross-functional collaboration is easy to talk
about but hard to do, particularly because we tend to get stuck in cooperating
mode. So if you are able to map out what s needed and bring the needed parties
into alignment around it, you ll not only make an impact on your organization,
but begin to develop some important collaborative skills that are often in
short supply.
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting. He is a co-author of
The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply
Effective.