How has collaboration evolved? What is the current state of collaboration at Toyota, Mayo Clinic, Industrial Light & Magic, Boeing and other companies profiled in the first edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book? What are the keys to long-term value creation through collaboration?
These are questions I sought to answer as I went back inside collaborative companies to research and write the new, expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® book.
The expanded and updated edition has just been released, and I’m proud of the finished work. The 363-page business book includes 54 images and illustrations and a beefy index. By the way, 54 images and illustrations is no easy feat in 2024. Ever wonder why most business books lack pictures? It’s time-consuming to license even a single image from a large organization.
One thing I’ve learned is that deserialization and collaboration go together like peanut butter and jelly. Deserialization means removing sequences from the lifecycle of products and services. The idea is to collapse outmoded sequential approaches and replace them with spontaneous, real-time processes.
Deserialization also involves removing sequences from interaction. This means killing what’s left of the in-box culture. In short, deserialization is the key to long-term value creation through collaboration. That’s why the subtitle of the expanded and updated edition of The Culture of Collaboration® is: Deserializing Time, Talent and Tools to create Value in the Local and Global Economy.
I’ve also learned that despite best efforts, collaboration can stall within highly-collaborative organizations. Paradoxically, collaboration happens in companies in which the dominant culture is command and control. Likewise, internal competition and command and control exist in mostly-collaborative organizations. Many factors, as I explain in the expanded and updated edition, influence both the evolution and regression of The Culture of Collaboration.
More broadly… as I write in the preface, in some ways we’re less collaborative than we were in the early 2000s. Social media lets us broadcast opinions without refining ideas through real-time interaction. We join groups that make rules for how we should think. Videoconferencing enables interaction at a distance, but too often we’re wasting time in scheduled virtual meetings rather than creating value together spontaneously. While in the same room, we meet rather than collaborate. We leave meetings to work and then schedule follow-up meetings to review work. This serial process zaps value.
My objective in revisiting this topic is to consider whether we have evolved or veered off track and to provide a new framework for unblocking collaboration and unlocking value.
The answer is both, but we enter this world collaborative. We are naturally inclined to work together to create value. But competitive organizational cultures short circuit our collaborative instincts.
Lux Narayan, CEO of the data analytics company Unmetric, analyzed two thousand New York Times non-paid obituaries. In a TED talk, he describes how he used natural language processing on the first paragraphs of these obituaries and found that the word help appeared more than almost any other word.
The lesson is that people want to help. Our instincts are to work towards common goals. Psychologists including Sander van der Linden write about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. When we are intrinsically motivated, we take action because we want to help or because it’s the right thing to do. In contrast, competition involves extrinsic motivation which is derived externally rather than internally. An incentive system that rewards sharp elbows in an organization is extrinsic motivation.
The more educated people are, the more competitive they are. Our educational system has traditionally used extrinsic motivation to beat collaboration out of us. In high school, we compete to get into college. In college, we compete for admission to graduate school. In graduate school, we compete for grants and fellowships. We enter professions, careers and corporations conditioned to compete.
In smaller communities where many people get jobs right out of high school, people are driven more by intrinsic motivation—and they’re used to working together. They organize fundraisers and cook together at the VFW, fire stations and churches. They help neighbors repair tornado or hurricane damage.
It’s this type of attitude that we need to nourish in companies, higher education, government and in our communities. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini lit a spark that is taking hold at Aetna. In a "corner office" interview in Sunday’s New York Times, Bertolini describes how drugs and Western medicine failed him after a serious ski accident. His success with alternative therapies propelled him to introduce yoga, meditation and an enlightened approach at Aetna. According to Bertolini, the CFO’s initial reaction was “We’re a profit-making entity. This isn’t about compassion and collaboration.”
Nevertheless, leaders became more enlightened and began paying attention to the struggles of front-line team members some of whom were on Medicaid and food stamps. Aetna raised the minimum wage to $16 an hour and improved benefits. Next the company stopped giving quarterly guidance to investors and focused more on collaboratively creating long-term value.
Studies show we feel good physically and psychologically when we help people. Psychologists calls this the “helper’s high.” There’s no research I know of yet, but I suspect there is also a “Collaborator’s high.”
Fidelity Investments may replace a star-oriented fund management system with a collaborative approach after a consultant's report. As is so often the case when organizations suddenly consider—and often embrace— a more collaborative structure and culture, exigent circumstances precipitated the potential move. I call this phenomenon The Bounty Effect, and I’ve written extensively about it in the book by the same name. The Bounty Effect occurs when an event or circumstance creates a fundamental shift, changes the game and accelerates collaboration.
The Bounty Effect for Fidelity occurred because of two exigent circumstances:
Last year Fidelity reportedly fired Gavin Baker, manager of Fidelity OTC Portfolio, for allegedly sexually harassing a junior female staff member though Baker denies the allegations. This happened against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement. The apparent firing prompted Fidelity to conduct a “cultural review” of its stock picking unit.
The other exigent circumstance is the reported outflow of $40 billion from Fidelity’s actively-managed funds in 2017, according to Morningstar, as investors have increasingly embraced exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and passively managed index mutual funds meaning those linked to the performance of a particular index such as the S&P 500. Active fund management essentially means one star manager with a supporting cast of analysts attempts to beat a particular index. Fidelity built its reputation in the 1980s around successful active managers including Peter Lynch who managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund.
The decline of the “star” fund manager mirrors trends in other industries and throughout workplaces. Before the rise of human resources as a valued discipline, swashbuckling managers made hiring and tactical decisions based on gut and sometimes whim. Executives often made strategy decisions in a vacuum. As HR has become more data driven, the era of the swashbuckling manager has ebbed. Leaders make few decisions without input or at least without consulting HR, finance, IT, communications or some other function. Companies measure everything and everybody which, incidentally, can short circuit collaboration.
Fidelity would likely argue that “star” managers never made decisions in a vacuum but rather consulted Fidelity’s extensive research team and worked with analysts assigned to each fund. Nevertheless the funds industry—including Fidelity—has historically embraced star culture. And so have such industries as sports, food and beverage, medicine, journalism, the film industry and so many others. The media still goes to bizarre lengths to reinforce star culture, because media decision makers believe that personalities sell newspapers and drive viewership and eyeballs translating into advertising dollars. I’ve even read stories on “star” butchers. And while I appreciate the skill involved in selecting and cutting meat, putting certain butchers on a pedestal feeds a misleading perception that the vast majority of butchers fail to measure up to the so-called stars.
When we turn athletes, chefs, doctors, television hosts, movie producers and others into stars, these so-called “stars” start believing the rules that apply to everybody else never apply to them. This breeds bad behavior. Star culture has also diminished the contributions of people who work with “stars” which makes these people feel sidelined and less likely to provide valuable input. In short, star culture costs organizations dearly. In contrast, embracing a collaborative culture and structure creates value.
If Fidelity abandons its “star” manager system, the question is whether the move is window dressing or real structural change. We may learn that one person never really “managed” Fidelity’s actively-managed funds and that fund management was always an inherently-collaborative process among colleagues despite Fidelity’s marketing so-called “star” managers.
The recent rash of sexual misconduct accusations against prominent men provide a lens through which we can view the death of star culture. For generations, we have bestowed God-like status on so-called stars whether they’re politicians, chefs, entertainers, executives, athletes or show hosts. This exalted status makes “stars” believe they are special.
The #metoo movement is a proxy for rejecting star culture. And now this cultural shift is manifesting in other ways. Viewership for last Sunday’s Grammy Awards dropped 24 percent compared with viewership for last year’s Grammy Awards. We’re tired of stars.
If “stars” like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Mario Batali, Kevin Spacey, Charlie Rose, Steve Wynn and so many others get a pass on just about everything for being stars, our star culture is responsible for their transgressions. We elevate them to status so rarified that they may believe laws and standards of fairness and decency do not apply to them.
Star culture reinforces the false notion that we achieve great feats by ourselves. Whether the so-called star is a movie producer, chef, tv host, actor or executive, the reality is that he or she succeeds because of others. Nobody achieves great feats entirely on their own. Behind the scenes, many people work to make the movie, the meal, the talk show, the team, the business a success regardless of the “star.”
In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe the Myth of the Single Cowboy. This is the notion that one self-sufficient, rugged individual can achieve smashing success without help from anybody. When we perpetuate this myth, we make so-called stars feel that they’re a breed apart and can conduct themselves without consequences.
Star culture reinforced by the media and society at large also infects organizations. The result is that contributors who are not considered A-listers get sidelined. Their input and ideas are lost, and value creation suffers. Plus internal competition to become a star increases bad behavior such as sabotaging others and hoarding information.
Our excuse for star culture and for tolerating transgressions is that stars supposedly create more revenue. There is evidence, though, that the financial performance of stars is often overstated. NBC’s Today Show picked up more viewers after the network fired Matt Lauer.
Rejecting star culture is nothing short of a fundamental shift in our society. This shift will impact companies, universities, government agencies and organizations of all types. Smart organizations will get ahead of the curve and take the necessary steps to replace star culture with a collaborative culture
People who become stars often cheat to achieve or keep their rarefied status. Social media is a case in point. One way we measure star power is to count the number of followers on social media. Did we really think that stars are so popular that millions of people read their posts and tweets? It turns out that “stars” and wannabe “stars” pay for fake followers which create fake data on which companies base advertising and endorsement decisions.
A reporting team at the New York Times recently investigated a company named Devumi that sells Twitter followers and retweets. The company reportedly has at least 3.5 million automated accounts for rent. Customers include reality television “stars.”
So it turns out that star culture is related to another unfortunate phenomenon that compromises collaboration: measurement mania and the tyranny of data. Fake data is by no means limited to social media. In command-and-control organizational cultures that foster internal competition and information hoarding, team members get the message that the goal is winning at all costs. In this type of culture, numbers get fudged and corners get cut.
Fake data scandals cost these companies plenty. A recent glaring example is the fake bank account scandal at Wells Fargo. Companies that embrace fake data are often the same companies that promote “stars” and minimize the contributions of others.
Many companies have yet to catch up with our evolving society. Successful organizations use real data and replace star culture with collaborative culture.
Some companies are eliminating remote work or “telecommuting” because they believe their people must share the same physical space to collaborate.
I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” But apparently some organizations want to get more physical rather than virtual.
According to a recent Wall Street Journalstory, companies including IBM, Aetna, Bank of America, Best Buy and Reddit have ended or reduced remote-work arrangements as managers “demand more collaboration, closer contact with customers—and more control over the workday.”
Companies facing challenges are often the first to scrap or reduce remote work programs. In 2013, as Yahoo was struggling, then CEO Marissa Mayer defended her decision to eliminate work from home. Speaking at the Great Place to Work conference in Los Angeles, Mayer reportedly said “People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.”
No question people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together, but the point is people can be together virtually as well as physically. Many tools and technologies support high-impact virtual collaboration. Forcing people to endure a daily commute and interfering with their life/work balance reinforces command and control and disrupts collaboration and innovation. Also, remote work lets companies tap expertise regardless of geography. And teams are often comprised of people in multiple regions, so forcing people to work from a company location is unlikely to enhance collaboration within a team. It does make sense to encourage remote workers to spend some time at company locations to spark chance encounters in cafeterias, corridors and break rooms with people outside their teams.
Command and control culture is the opposite of collaborative culture so an organization trying to control team members by keeping them at the workplace short circuits collaboration. Ironically, my research interest in collaboration began in the mid-1990s when I was writing a book on personal videoconferencing. Early telecommuting programs experimented with PC-based videoconferencing so that remote workers could look each other in the eye and talk with colleagues while they were collaboratively working on spreadsheets, documents, design plans and other work. The issue then was whether we could collaborate as effectively at a distance as we could in the same room.
By the time I wrote The Culture of Collaborationbook, the tools and technologies supporting remote work had become pervasive and the culture supporting virtual collaboration had become widespread. People at many organizations were becoming accustomed to collaborating spontaneously from almost anywhere. So the challenge was changing. I wrote:
“Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.”
This is because same-room collaboration tools were lagging behind those used at a distance and people were becoming more accustomed to collaborating from applications on their notebook and laptop computers. Also, “presence” technology provided the capability to find colleagues, check their availability and begin collaborating with them on the fly from anywhere.
Spontaneity and organizational culture supporting ad hoc encounters is critical to creating value collaboratively. In some cultures, this means it’s okay to grab people out of meetings or interrupt their work for on-the-fly collaboration. But in mature companies walking back remote work, often this level of spontaneity is a cultural faux pas. So the most effective way to spontaneously connect in these cultures is often through online chat which can escalate into a collaborative group session (CGS). Organizations create far greater value by moving away from command and control and instead enabling team members to connect and collaborate spontaneously regardless of physical location.
As I demonstrate in my bookThe Bounty Effect, exigent circumstances including disruptive market forces, new competitors, or a regional slowdown are opportunities to accelerate collaboration and emerge stronger from the challenge. Eliminating remote work because of a difficult environment rarely enhances collaboration and instead increases command and control. The more effective approach is to seize the opportunity exigent circumstances provide and adopt a more collaborative organizational structure and culture which transcend physical location.
I was chatting with Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates last Tuesday about the thin line between constructive and destructive confrontation in the workplace. “Confrontation has to be constructive,” the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund told me. "You need to get everything out on the table.” Constructive confrontation is one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I introduced in The Culture of Collaborationbook. It’s also an aspect of Bridgewater’s controversial culture.
Ray had just finished an on-stage interview with Charles Duhigg on Bridgewater’s culture at the New York Times New Work Summit in Half Moon Bay, California. Collaboration was a central theme of the conference that brought together a few hundred chief executives, human resources leaders and others to share experiences, insights and challenges involving organizational culture.
“I want an idea meritocracy. I want independent thinkers who are going to disagree,” Ray told the audience. One way that Bridgewater accomplishes this objective is by capturing ninety-nine percent of meetings on video and making the archived video available to each of its roughly 1400 people at any time. The one percent of meetings not recorded involves personnel issues and proprietary trades.
“The most important thing I want is meaningful work and meaningful relationships, and we get there through radical truth.” Ray’s point is that radical truth and transparency build trust and curb hidden agendas and spin. “There’s no talking behind people’s backs,” according to Ray. “Bad things happen in the dark.” Bridgewater’s meritocracy, he explains, produces evidence which decreases bias and increases fact-based decisions.
Information democracy in which organizations widely share data and information is a key principle of collaborative companies. Trust and constructive confrontation are critical to collaboration. Hidden agendas and spin short circuit collaboration. So it would seem that Bridgewater’s brand of radical transparency would enhance collaboration. Right? Well, that depends.
There’s conflicting information regarding whether all confrontation is thoughtful and constructive at Bridgewater. That’s why I engaged Ray about the thin line between constructive and destructive confrontation and the need to keep disagreements thoughtful. Bridgewater makes performance reviews public and encourages team members to examine themselves before accepting areas for improvement, according to an April, 2014 article in the Harvard Business Review.
Performance reviews, whether public or private, can exhaust an organization and compromise value. Meetings, whether captured on video or not, waste time and energy. A more effective alternative to meetings, which I outline in my bookThe Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration, is collaborative group sessions in which people co-create something of value.
Self-actualization seems to play a role in Bridgewater’s culture. Rather than check one’s emotions at the office door, team members are encouraged to recognize their emotional “triggers” and to “recognize the challenge between the logical and emotional self” in Ray’s words. Then people can more easily set aside emotional triggers and baggage.
I was curious how Bridgewater's culture resonated with the conference crowd, so I continued the discussion over lunch. Capturing almost all meetings on video for everybody to see is one cultural attribute that fell flat. “That would never work in our organization,” one participant at my table insisted. She explained that her company values privacy and offers private drop-in spaces for on-the-fly interactions. Other attendees expressed similar views.
The down side of capturing almost all meeting video is that people may put on game faces whenever they’re in a “live” meeting room and that formality takes hold. In contrast, informality enhances collaboration which is why so many businesses have been hatched while doodling on napkins in bars and cafes. Floor proceedings in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate were once far less formal before these bodies allowed television cameras. Now there’s greater transparency but less collaboration across party lines.
Sometimes collaborators create greater value for the organization during small, private collaborative sessions either through technology or in the same room. Making video capture of these sessions widely available but optional may create the greatest value for collaborative organizations.
Clearly, radical transparency works for Bridgewater. Could the firm’s industry play a role? “You have to be an independent thinker in markets because consensus is built into price,” explains Ray. Then again, challenging the status quo creates value in many industries.
For organizations adopting collaborative structures and cultures, there’s much to learn from Bridgewater. But what works for one company in a particular industry may fall short for another company in a different business. Trying to implement a carbon copy structure and culture would undoubtedly be a mistake.
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf will testify before the Senate Banking Committee next Tuesday about the company’s sales practices. This word comes less than a week after Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million in fines from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Comptroller of the Currency and the City Attorney of Los Angeles. So what went wrong?
Well, I’ve seen similar disasters in other companies when the structure—and, yes, the culture—of the organization encourages competing with colleagues and cutting corners rather than collaborating with colleagues, customers and partners. The key building blocks of the organizational structure are principles, practices and processes. We get clues about Wells Fargo’s principles from its written “vision and values” which include:
“Our ethics are the sum of all the decisions each of us makes every day. If you want to find out how strong a company’s ethics are, don’t listen to what its people say. Watch what they do.”
So what exactly did Wells Fargo people do to cost the company $185 million plus untold damage to its brand and reputation?
According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wells Fargo opened over 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts and may have funded these accounts by transferring funds from existing customer accounts without consent or through “simulated” funding. This practice generated about two million dollars in fees from 85,000 accounts. The CFPB consent order also states that Wells Fargo submitted credit card applications, ordered debit cards and enrolled consumers in online banking without customer consent. Clearly, this behavior represents at best a disconnect between principles and processes particularly the reward system process.
Wells Fargo’s “vision and values” cover everything from ethics to doing what’s right for customers. But written “vision and values” and mission statements don’t tell the whole story for many companies. Often, the real principles that govern an organization are unwritten. These principles manifest in break rooms, cafeterias, meetings, “off-site” sessions and sometimes during dreaded performance reviews. At best, Wells Fargo’s unwritten principles echo its written values and the problem is a disconnect between principles and processes that culminated in widespread abuses.
At worst, the company’s unwritten principles are something like “win at all costs” and “loyalty above all” which by some accounts were the unwritten principles of Lehman Brothers. Lehman, once the fourth largest investment bank in the United States, no longer exists. Neither does Enron which embraced the principle of following orders without questioning them. The wrong unwritten principles or a disconnect between the right principles and processes can start small with, say, approving mortgages for people who don’t qualify and culminate in a near collapse of the financial system.
Many organizations espouse collaborative principles while short circuiting collaboration and value creation through reward systems that reinforce internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior which can easily morph into cutting corners and illegally fudging numbers. Along the way, trust dies among team members and ultimately among customers, partners, regulators and others. This happens in industries ranging from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and technology. And it doesn’t help that increasingly team members across multiple industries prefer to interact with devices and computer systems rather than with their customers.
Why would the third largest U.S. bank by assets—and a favorite stock of Warren Buffett—risk its reputation by cutting corners? The most likely answer: to keep the squeeze on team members through a reward system that the bank believed would deliver ever better quarterly returns.
When I hear analysts and others suggest that a company has a secret sauce shrouded in mystery that delivers outlier returns, alarm bells reverberate in my brain. This is also true of financial advisors touting a particular investment. In 2009, Warren Buffett suggested in a Fortune interview that there was something special about how Wells Fargo does business. “The key to the future of Wells Fargo is continuing to get the money in at very low costs, selling all kinds of services to their customer and having spreads like nobody else has.” This sounds sort of like a secret sauce—and there go the alarm bells. Sometimes there’s a reason why a company is an outlier. Mostly, what Buffett was referring to is the Wells Fargo practice of cross selling which is simply selling more products to existing customers. It turns out that cross selling involved phantom sales. Wells has told some team members to stop cross-selling amid the crisis.
So how can Wells Fargo be fixed? The company has fired more than 5000 employees, because of the illegal practices. But is the real problem these team members or the company’s principles, practices and processes? Wells Fargo CFO John Shrewsberry apparently feels it’s the former. Shrewsberry reportedly told the Barclays Global Financial Conference in New York on Tuesday that the team members who committed the illegal acts were “at the lower end of the performance scale” and they were trying to hold onto their jobs.
Wells Fargo senior leaders are missing the point. The real villain is the reward system they created or approved that drives the behavior of team members at bank branches. This system apparently rewarded employees for opening accounts regardless of whether customers funded these accounts with new money. What value does this create? None. In fact, it likely costs more to open and ultimately close an unauthorized account than to do nothing. It makes little sense to blame bank branch employees for trying to retain their jobs when senior leaders have likely created principles, practices and processes that prevented more than 5000 people from acting ethically, selling products and creating value.
As its CEO prepares to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, Wells Fargo announced today the company is eliminating sales goals for retail bankers. Fixing the reward system without systemic repair may help for a while, but a lasting solution requires a more comprehensive approach. I’ve learned that trying to change an ingrained culture fails without changing the organizational structure.
The unfolding crisis provides an opportunity for Wells Fargo and many other companies in multiple industries with similar issues to replace an obsolete organizational structure while revamping the flawed reward system. This involves focusing like a laser beam on the key building blocks of a value-creating collaborative company: principles, practices and processes. Only then can the culture evolve.
The in-box culture is dead, but that may be news to the mayor and officials in New York City.
New York’s City Hall apparently never got the message about deserialization. What I mean by deserialization is curbing the in-box or pass-along approach to work and interaction that is critical for collaboration and value creation. But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has sure received plenty of memos…decision memos, that is.
New York City’s City Hall reportedly embraces the pass-along approach to work and interaction
Before Mayor de Blasio makes many decisions, his staff prepares memos. And before these decision memos reach the Mayor, they reportedly require the signatures of at least eight officials including the first deputy mayor, the law department, the Mayor’s counsel, the budget director, the press secretary, the head of intergovernmental affairs and the deputy mayor with direct responsibility, according to a recent story by J. David Goodman in the New York Times. This is the antiquated pass-along approach.
The Wall Street Journalreports that a memo on flight rules for helicopters took at least nine rounds of revisions. Nine rounds! This is pass-along times nine. And we wonder why citizens complain that government is mired in bureaucracy. The Times story quotes the Mayor’s chief of staff Tom Snyder as saying the Mayor’s decision-making process is “extremely granular, engaged, semi-Socratic.”
Actually, Mayor de Blasio’s approach is anything but Socratic. Socrates believed that the way to the truth was through questioning and dialogue. Socrates rejected writing, because writing meant—quite literally in ancient Athens—that ideas were set in stone or wax and that the process of developing those ideas was dead. Socrates also rejected scripted speeches, because these are essentially the recitation of written words. For organizations making decisions, one form of the truth is accurate information—which is dynamic rather than set in stone. As the situation changes, sometimes hour-to-hour, what can be considered accurate information also shifts.
Using memos or email to make decisions compromises collaboration and disrupts value creation. This approach is a hallmark of command-and-control organizational structure and culture. By the time each department head or official has signed off on the course of action and passed the baton to the next official, the “truth” or facts have often changed. Socrates would roll over. Yet dialogue and questioning without a structure can also pose problems particularly for complex organizations such as New York City government and large, distributed enterprises. So what’s the alternative?
My most recent book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration, shows how to change the structure of organizations so that they can evolve from command and control to collaborative. And a fundamental element is creating an Open-Access Enterprise which enables the organization for spontaneous dialogue. In the Open-Access Enterprise, everybody has access to everybody else—and that access is immediate.
Using unified communications, we can see who is available and connect instantly. We can bring key stakeholders into collaborative group sessions (CGS) so we can hash out issues in real time, make decisions and create a work product without getting mired in the pass-along approach of memos and meetings. A CGS can occur virtually using unified communications and related tools or the session can happen physically with all participants in the same room.
Mayor De Blasio’s apparent goal of getting broad input into decisions makes sense. Embracing the Socratic method has merit. But the structure and processes of the Mayor’s office appear flawed and are short circuiting the goal. This is typical of many organizations that embrace collaboration as a concept but sabotage collaboration with a command-and-control structure that encourages bureaucracy and reinforces hidden agendas and internal competition. The solution is to adopt a collaborative organizational structure that leaves memos and traditional meetings in the dust. The in-box culture is dead.
It takes more than appearing collaborative to achieve The Culture of Collaboration.
As collaboration has become a trend, companies and people talk collaboration without being collaborative. Just as greenwashing involves deceptively promoting the perception that an organization’s products and policies are environmentally-friendly, something similar is happening with collaboration. It's called collaboration washing: promoting collaboration as a corporate or product trait without any real collaboration happening.
When the first edition of my book The Culture of Collaboration® appeared in early 2007, consciousness for organizational collaboration was just beginning. One prominent Silicon Valley company had pre-ordered thousands of copies of the book. A new chief marketing officer disliked the word collaboration, and so the books remained in the company’s warehouse until the following year when more people, organizations and media outlets began embracing collaboration. Then the technology company distributed the books to customers globally.
Now collaboration is a buzz word. Marketers link myriad products to collaboration, and human resources people embrace the word as a corporate culture label. And guess what? The meaning of collaboration is getting diluted. In The Culture of Collaboration® book, I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.”
Many people regard social media use as a mark of a collaborative company. As I’ve demonstrated to many audiences, it’s quite possible to use social media and create zero value. It’s also possible to use any collaboration technology without creating value and, therefore, without collaborating. Some consider a youthful workforce as an indicator of a collaborative culture. But I’ve observed, interviewed and worked with numerous engineers in their fifties and sixties who have designed everything from game-changing software to airplanes. Without significant collaboration, these products would have been dead on arrival. And it’s easy to find internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior among people in their twenties working in technology and other leading-edge sectors.
Real collaboration requires adopting a collaborative organizational structure as I outline in my most recent book, The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®. This goes well beyond buzz words and window dressing. The Bounty Effect is the second book in The Culture of Collaboration® series. The first book, The Culture of Collaboration®, is about raising the consciousness for a new way of working. The Bounty Effect focuses on how to achieve collaboration in organizations
Open-plan workspaces are a current popular marker of a collaborative company. Collaborative workplace design is much more than window dressing. It’s a key practice in adopting a collaborative structure, but it’s only one element. Citigroup is the latest Fortune 500 company to jump on the open-plan workspace bandwagon. Citi reportedly is adopting a “non-territorial” or “free-address” deskless approach similar to the one GlaxoSmithKline uses in its Philadelphia Navy Yard building. In The Bounty Effect, I explain GlaxoSmithKline's approach to collaborative workspaces and culture.
Citi CEO Michael Corbat told the Wall Street Journal that he is particularly excited about a “town square” space on the ground floor that will increase serendipitous encounters among team members. This, in turn, he expects will enhance communication and exchange of ideas. Also, Citigroup anticipates that the open-plan workspace will flatten hierarchies.
Essentially, Citigroup is taking a step towards adopting a more collaborative culture and structure. However, transforming a company into a global collaborative enterprise requires many more structural changes than the physical workplace environment. Many organizations such as police and fire departments, newsrooms and trading floors have operated with open-plan workspaces for years. Yet a lack of collaboration still compromises many of these organizations.
Citigroup and the increasing numbers of organizations adopting open workspaces can create incredible value through collaboration if they go beyond the most obvious manifestation of a shifting culture—the physical workplace environment—to embrace principles, practices and processes of collaborative organizational structure. These include everything from replacing the traditional organization chart and the traditional meeting to changing the recognition and reward system and keeping measurement mania in check.
Anything short of structural change is collaboration washing.
“The people under 30 get it. It’s second nature to them.”
“We have a bifurcated workforce.”
“Let’s just turn the keys over to the Millennials. They get it. We don’t.”
These are some snippets of conversation from well-intentioned change agents who overemphasize generational differences while attempting to transform their organizations into collaborative enterprises. In The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration®, I identify this scenario as the Generation Gap Trap. It’s a trap, because overemphasizing generational differences reinforces fear and internal competition which short circuit collaboration.
Undoubtedly, younger team members who are so-called “digital natives” are accustomed to using tools such as texting, instant messaging, and social media. It takes more than using tools, though, to collaborate. In The Culture of Collaboration®book, I define collaboration as working together to create value. And it’s quite possible to text, IM, or use social media without creating any value.
The point is that age is by no means a predictor of collaborative behavior. Some people right out of college or graduate school internally compete while they use “collaborative” tools and technologies. Meantime, collaboration is baked into the behavior of some team members in their fifties and sixties. Some disciplines like aerospace engineering or animation are inherently collaborative, and therefore experience in these fields is a better predictor of collaborative behavior than age. I have worked with some “boring” industrial companies in which people work together to create value far more easily and often than team members in supposedly collaborative Silicon Valley companies.
After seemingly endless media reports describing how millennials demand a collaborative workplace, a new CEB study indicates that millennnials—those born between 1980 and 2000—are the most competitive generation in today’s workplace. Among CEB’s findings are that millennials are more driven by performance relative to others than by absolute performance and that millennials are less likely to trust peers and their peers’ input. Trust, incidentally, is one of the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration that my colleagues and I have identified. Without trust, collaboration is dead on arrival.
In an August 1, 2015 “Schumpeter” column in The Economist, the unidentified columnist explores some of these millennial myths and cites the CEB study. The columnist incorrectly concludes from the research that to motivate young team members, organizations should put less emphasis on collaboration. The real take-away regarding the CEB study is that emphasizing generational differences is folly.
De-emphasizing collaboration because millennials are less motivated by it would pander to a generation without guiding it. Instead, doubling down on adopting collaborative organizational structures and cultures will ultimately motivate team members regardless of generation and create far more value than command-and-control and internal competition.
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