Organizational Culture

  • Constructive Confrontation at the Clinton Library and Museum

    When I’m on the road, I keep my eyes open for collaboration insights.

     

    This week I was in Memphis and made a detour to Little Rock. In Memphis, I stayed at the Peabody Hotel, the grand old hotel of the south famous for the daily parade of ducks from the hotel roof to the fountain.  The site of several ducks marching in formation through the hotel lobby certainly requires coordination and arguably collaboration.

     

    Here in Little Rock…I’m staying at the Capital Hotel, which has an elevator big enough to supposedly have accommodated Ulysses Grant and his horse. Also, the Capital serves one of the best hotel breakfasts I’ve ever eaten. Everything is made from scratch! All of this in a gorgeous, old-world dining room.

     

    Back to collaboration. Regardless of politics and how you may feel about Bill Clinton, any leader would do well to take note of Little Rock’s favorite son and his thoughts about hiring, culture, and decision-making:

     

    “I don’t care how smart you are…” Bill Clinton’s voice boomed into my audio tour headset at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. “Success and failure depends on how well the staff and cabinet debate honestly and openly and then unite once you’ve made a decision. “

     

    I was standing in the replica of the White House cabinet room, and President Clinton was setting the scene for the debates that occurred in that room on his watch as the 42nd President of the United States. “You never can tell when somebody who’s in an unrelated agency will have a really keen insight…thinking people, caring people who came from all different backgrounds from all over America.” Amen! Cross-functional collaboration!

     

    President Clinton was essentially talking about constructive confrontation, one of the Ten Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in my book, The Culture of Collaboration. To effectively collaborate, the culture of any organization—whether it’s the federal government, a large enterprise, a non-profit, or a small business—must encourage debate and constructive confrontation regardless of level, role or region. 

     

    Constructive means that the confrontation is about making a better decision rather than personality conflicts or posturing. At some point, debate ends and an organization coalesces behind a united position.  Smart organizations encourage debate as President Clinton did among his staff and cabinet rather than blind agreement with the boss.

    Oval Office Replica

    The Clinton Library and Museum includes a replica of the Oval Office as it was when President Clinton occupied it. According to the staff, the former President often moves objects around or borrows them during his monthly or bi-monthly visits to the Library (he has an apartment upstairs with room for his secret service agents). 

     

    The docents tell me that President Clinton knows them all by name and is closely involved in almost everything that happens at the Library. I spoke at length with one docent, Jane Cazort, whose father-in-law was lieutenant governor of Arkansas and whose granddaughter went to school with Chelsea Clinton.

     

    Coincidentally, next week I’ll be attending the Fortune Brainstorm: Green 2009 conference in Laguna Niguel, California at which President Clinton is speaking.  More on that later.

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  • Collaborating out of the Downturn Focus of Blog Talk Radio Interview

    I discussed collaboration with Zane Safrit yesterday morning on his hour-long Blog Talk Radio show. You can listen to the show here.

     

    When he was CEO of Conference Calls Unlimited, Zane masterfully used blogging as a marketing and business tool. His small company, based in a rural Iowa community, adopted collaborative culture and tools as an advantage in a marketplace saturated with large players. Zane is a super-capable, collaborative leader.

     

    Our conversation ranged from common denominators and motivators for companies wanting to adopt collaborative culture and the biggest mistakes companies make. We also discussed the need to replace star-oriented culture and the role of collaboration in an economic recovery.

     

    Zane asked me how companies can balance the need for collaboration with the need for consistency, routines and procedures. It’s a thoughtful question that organizations should consider. I explained that it’s necessary to include collaboration in policies and procedures, so that people are consistently collaborative J.

     

    Towards the end of the show, we focused more on the economy. Zane asked me about the biggest trends regarding collaborative culture over the next two years. Here’s what I said:

     

    People are going to realize what collaboration is and what it isn’t, and I absolutely believe that collaboration will help deliver us from the downturn. We need to abandon the herd mentality. I blogged about this on March 15, 2009 with a call to action. You can read the post here.

     

    There’s a misconception that collaboration is about running with the herd. Real collaboration involves constructive confrontation….coming together to hash out issues, make decisions, improve processes and develop products and services. And it’s much broader than companies. It’s about governments collaborating across agencies and departments, with citizens and with other governments. It’s about people working together to create value in our communities.

     

    It’s about changing education so that we’re developing collaborators. The more educated people are, the more competitive they are. Our educational system beats collaboration out of us. That’s changing.

     

    I’ve lived and worked in smaller communities where many people get jobs right out of high school. They’re used to working together to cook dinner at the VFW or help neighbors repair tornado damage. It’s this type of attitude that we need to nourish in our country, in higher education, in companies, in and among governments. Coming out of this downturn, star culture and internal competition are unaffordable. Collaboration will drive the recovery.

     

    “How will that change our economy, culture, country?” Zane asked me.

    I responded:

     

    It’ll be back to basics…working together to create real value. The mortgage mess, the financial collapse were rooted in artificial value. We gave the keys to the country and the economy to star competitors… the best and the brightest who went to top schools and competed for themselves without considering the bigger picture. Now we need to entrust our companies, governments and communities to collaborators. And we’re going to build long-term, sustainable value.

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  • Telepresence and Formality

    Cisco’s use of TelePresence last Monday to announce its Unified Computing System sparked an interesting reaction on the New York Times Bits blog. The Times republished the blog post in today’s print edition.

     

    Cisco Unified Computing Launch The post by Ashlee Vance takes aim at Cisco for the “scripted” feel of the 14-site TelePresence session for reporters and analysts. You can read the story here. Some reporters who showed up at Cisco headquarters for a news conference were apparently frustrated that Cisco CEO John Chambers was in another suite upstairs rather than in the same room with the media. Vance also writes that the question-and-answer session that followed the two-hour event also felt scripted in that Cisco apparently muted microphones and prevented follow-up questions.

     

    OK. It’s time for a discussion of formality and telepresence. First, let’s separate the event from the technology. I did not attend the event, so I can’t comment about its execution. However, I did participate in a launch event and news conference last October for Cisco’s public TelePresence suites. You can read about it in my October 15, 2008 post.

     

    Like last Monday’s Cisco event, executives at the October 15, 2008 event were in a separate TelePresence suite from reporters and analysts who were in the same building. This worked well, because the local group was relatively small, and each participant had a seat at the TelePresence table. Also, the approach was particularly appropriate in that the subject of the event was TelePresence itself. During the event, which linked about six sites, I had no problem asking follow up questions and engaging in an extended dialogue with Cisco senior leaders.

     

    In contrast, holding a 14-site news conference like the one last Monday certainly can increase logistical issues and reduce the question time per reporter. The benefit, though, of using TelePresence for the event is that it significantly increased media participation globally, so that a reporter in Asia could gain the same access as a Silicon Valley-based reporter for The New York Times—access to Cisco CEO John Chambers and other participating CEO’s including Paul Otellini of Intel, Joe Tucci of EMC, Paul Maritz of VMware, and Bill Green of Accenture.  

     

    Despite increased access for geographically-dispersed journalists, there was clearly a disconnect between Cisco and at least some reporters who showed up at Cisco headquarters expecting a same-room news conference. Here lies the problem. Some reporters may have felt that Cisco was insensitive to their needs, and these reporters failed to grasp the benefits and potential of TelePresence. Consider the potential power of this tool…people coming together regardless of level, role or region and interacting in an immersive virtual environment that approximates across-the-table, same-room interaction. Some reporters missed this, in part because of formality.

     

    This disconnect highlights the need to ensure that the use of telepresence mirrors in-person interaction and preserves in-person etiquette.  Reporters on deadline get restless and frustrated if they must wait two hours before asking questions, and they always want the option to ask follow-up questions. Otherwise, they feel controlled at best and muzzled at worst.

      

    It would be unfortunate, though, if New York Times readers confused any concerns about event execution with the technology itself. The greatest potential for telepresence and TelePresence (the spelling with capital letters is Cisco’s brand of the technology) is for informal, spontaneous interactions. Currently, telepresence is used primarily for scheduled meetings and events. The most collaborative organizations use real-time, interactive video for on-the-fly encounters. I profile some of these organizations and describe specific ways companies can create value through informal, spontaneous interactions in my current book, The Culture of Collaboration.

     

    Since the publication of my first book, Personal Videoconferencing (1996), my team and I have been conducting research on—among other aspects of collaboration— using visual communications for spontaneous, informal interactions. Recently, I formalized this research effort by establishing The Culture of CollaborationÒ Institute. My future books and derivatives will leverage the Institute’s research. If your organization is interested in supporting our work, let me know.

     

    Organizational culture, environment and business processes are key to enabling spontaneity and informality. Tools including telepresence—used effectively—are critical enablers in extending and enhancing an informal, spontaneous culture. I highlighted the role of informality in collaboration during an interview with CNBC’s Donnie Deutsch on the “Collaboration Now” primetime special. You can view a video clip here.

     

    Telepresence is a key element in collaborative enterprises and will soon become available at much lower price points for consumer use. Without informal, spontaneous uses of the tool, vendors run the risk that people will view telepresence as a tool only for formal, scheduled events and meetings. The real value of telepresence is enabling on-the-fly encounters, sort of a virtual water cooler.

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  • Toyota’s Collaborative Leadership Involves “See it for Yourself”

    In selecting Akio Toyoda as its next president, Toyota is reaffirming its commitment to collaborative Akio Toyoda culture and methods. A key tenet of Toyota is genchi genbutsu which means "see it for yourself.” This is related to the leadership method practiced by HP’s David Packard and Bill Hewlett beginning in the 1940’s and later dubbed “management by walking around.” The idea is that to figure out what’s really going on in an organization, a leader needs to get out of the office, go to factories and loading docks and retail outlets, and get his or her hands dirty.

     

    That’s exactly what Akio Toyoda did when he visited a Toyota dealership in Ann Arbor, Michigan last summer. He wanted to personally investigate a pickup truck recall. A story by Micheline Maynard on February 15, 2009 in the New York Times says Toyoda made a trip “so secret that Toyota’s public relations staff didn’t know he was here.” While at the dealership, he reportedly got down on his hands and knees to examine the undercarriage of a truck. At the news conference in January announcing his appointment, according to the Times, Toyoda announced he would pop up everywhere as he did in Ann Arbor.

     

    Genchi genbutsu or “see it for yourself” fits squarely into collaborative culture and methods. However, it’s not always possible to fly across the world to see what’s happening. That’s where collaborative tools come into play. Through unified communications, we can find one other and connect regardless of level, role or region. We can escalate IM to voice, web conferencing or videoconferencing and spontaneously hash out problems and make decisions. Visual communications is a critical enabler. An ideal solution is telepresence, which makes people feel practically as if they’re sharing the same physical space regardless of distance.  

     

    Our research at The Culture of CollaborationÒ Institute has shown that almost all highly-collaborative companies have integrated some form of real-time, interactive video into their operations. As I describe in The Culture of Collaboration book, Toyota uses a custom-designed visual communications system coupled with product lifecycle management and advanced computer-aided design tools that has become essential to its operations. The system links people at design facilities, plants, and at business partner sites and provides a rich virtual environment for developing and producing vehicles.

     

    Two other areas involving collaboration that Akio Toyoda will likely re-emphasize:

    1)     Making decisions based on long-term goals rather than on short-term developments

    2)     Nemawashi or making decisions slowly by consensus

     

    While collaborative culture is never about one person, Akio Toyoda is certainly one role model for collaborative leadership.

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  • Architectural Collaboration and the California Academy of Sciences

    As I gazed at the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper and other amazingly-clear star formations last Thursday evening, there was no distraction from city lights or from the fog that often defines San Francisco.

    I was sitting in the world’s largest digital planetarium, which uses real-time data from NASA plus immersive video technology. The NASA data accurately represents the current night sky, and the immersive video technology makes visitors feel like they’re travelling through space.

     

    The star-studded evening program was a departure from the usual daytime planet presentation in honor not only of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday last Thursday evening, but also of the launch of NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences. NightLife is a weekly Thursday evening event featuring bars, food plus all of the Academy exhibits. 

     

    I walked, Lagunitas India Pale Ale in hand, through the recently-reopened museum and marveled at the Rainforest Exterior four-story glass rainforest with its colorful poison frogs and Borneo bats and the graceful movement of jellyfish in the Steinhart aquarium, which includes thirty-eight thousand animals. Aside from official certifications that the Academy is the “greenest” museum on the planet, I found the museum’s “Living Roof” stunning and unique.   Living Roof The 197-thousand foot roof features seven hills containing many native plant species. The concept was to blend the building’s environment with that of Golden Gate Park and to reduce the Academy’s energy needs by creating oxygen, capturing rainwater and avoiding the heat-trapping disadvantages of tar-and-asphalt roofs.

     

    After a decade of planning and $500 million in expenses, the Academy reopened last fall to much fanfare.

    At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an interesting story by John Cote that described how the Academy’s board of directors chose an architectural team for the project. By July of 1999, the board had reportedly narrowed its search to five finalists. According to the story, a British architect arrived with five associates, two trays of slides and detailed mockups of two specific designs. He spoke for an hour and a half.

     

    When it was Italian architect Renzo Piano’s turn, he began by rearranging the room chairs in a circle. He then used a blank pad to sketch as he listened to board members describe the importance of nature, biodiversity, and naturalistic forms. Renzo Piano Ultimately, Piano and his team got the job because of his collaborative approach. Rather than simply presenting options to the board, Piano engaged and involved his client. The result reflects broad input and the collaborative sessions between architect and client.

     

    Too often in organizations, people make decisions in a vacuum. Those decisions are handed down to people who must implement them. This causes a chasm between the decision makers and the decision implementers and many others who are impacted by decisions. Then there’s a lot of talk like “They want us to ….” Or “they’ve decided that we’re supposed to….” So, an “us and them” mentality develops and sucks the motivation, innovation and value out of an organization.

     

    In contrast, collaborative organizations make decisions by involving and engaging people across levels, functions, business units and regions. When people have a stake in decisions, “us and them” dissolves. I’ve written in The Culture of Collaboration book and in this blog about the interplay of culture, environment and tools in sparking collaboration. In his initial session with the Academy’s board, Renzo Piano used all three. He changed the culture by involving the board in the conceptual process. He redesigned the environment by rearranging the rooms chairs in a circle. And he used a blank sketch pad as a collaborative tool.

     

    It’s a reminder—one that we stress in The Culture of CollaborationÒ Workshop—that collaborative culture can begin with a team gathering or a spontaneous exchange. In the case of the California Academy of Sciences, the result is an extraordinarily functional and “green” architectural masterpiece.

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  • Innovation Value Institute Enhances Collaboration and Unlocks IT Value

    As I stepped into the new “innovation zone” outfitted with leather couches, lounge chairs and café-style tables and stools at Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon, California yesterday, ideas were flying. The Innovation Value Institute, a consortium focused on enhancing information technology’s role and demonstrating its value, has set up shop for two days at Chevron and yesterday announced its efforts. You can hear the announcement and see slides here. Collaboration is fundamental to IVI in that:

     

    1) Competitors are collaborating in the consortium

    2) IVI’s framework will enhance collaboration between IT and business units

     

    The core consortium includes oil and gas competitors Chevron and BP, competing consulting firms Boston Consulting Group and Ernst & Young, and software companies Microsoft and SAP. Northrop Grumman is also part of the core group as is Intel. In fact, Martin Curley, Intel’s global director of IT innovation, co-directs the Institute, which is housed at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Each company is sharing intellectual property, and the partners are all getting more out of the collaboration than the IP that they’re investing. Through the consortium, according to Curley, the members are shifting their thinking and approach from “competitive advantage to collaborative advantage.”

     

    IT is evolving from a service to a “business-embedded” role within enterprises. “IT organizations grew up with the service business model… acting as waiters and waitresses. What technology can I serve you today?” notes Natalie Stone, director of business strategy for Northrop Grumman. “We’ve come pretty far, and we’re poised to take the next leap.”

     

    That next leap for the consortium members involves developing an IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) of 36 interconnected processes—things like service analytics and intelligence, enterprise architecture, and innovation management. The idea is to establish a common language and standards for measuring how IT creates business value.

     

    So, how does IVI quantify the value? Ralf Dreischmeier, partner and managing director of the Boston Consulting Group, says the consortium is focused on “50/50/50.” That means increasing IT return-on-investment by fifty percent, reducing time-to-market by fifty percent, and reducing business costs by fifty percent.

     

    Consortiums often deliver little more than announcements and joint news releases, because of the lack of collaboration. “Five to ten years ago, this would have been dead,” insists Dreischmeier. “People were much more protectionist, thinking only about their little environment.”  IVI is succeeding because of the premium its members are putting on trust, sharing and innovation. These are three of the Ten Cultural

    Elements of Collaboration that I identify In The Culture of Collaboration book.

     

    In parallel, businesses can create greater value if there is more trust between IT and business units. “If you don’t have the trust, there’s no way you’re going to make IT better,” acknowledges Chevron CIO Louie Ehrlich. Environment is another element, and Chevron’s “innovation zone” is designed to enhance collaboration and experimentation. “Chevron likes to do things with quality or not at all, but sometimes we need to lighten up and make mistakes,” insists Jack Anderson, Chevron’s innovation specialist, a consortium participant who is also championing collaboration within his company.

     

    I’ve blogged and written in my book, spoken and advised organizations about how cultural diversity enhances collaboration, enables broader input and contributes to better decisions and products. Culture may be regional, organizational, functional, or departmental. The IVI includes cultural diversity on all of these levels. “Diverse groups work much better together,” is how Edwina Fitzmaurice, partner with Ernst & Young, sums it up. Fitzmaurice, based in Ireland, has a diverse professional background including stints as CEO of Prudential Europe Management Services and CIO of J. Rothschild International.

     

    Many of the consortium members—and many other enterprises and IT vendors—have developed their own frameworks for IT value. Microsoft is no exception. There’s broad agreement, though, that an industry standard framework makes more sense for vendors and enterprises. “We can then talk about our product portfolio in a way that resonates rather than being product-centered,” says Samm DiStasio, senior director for business architecture and optimization in Microsoft’s enterprise and partner group.

     

    Ultimately, ITI’s work will be publicly available—but it will never be finished. The nature of a collaborative framework is that it’s dynamic. As business shifts and IT evolves, ITI’s model will also change.

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  • Early Input Enhances Collaboration

    The most collaborative organizations get broad input into decisions early and often.

     

    President-Elect Barack Obama got into some hot water recently when word leaked out that he planned to nominate Leon Panetta as director of the CIA. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, incoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, publicly attacked the decision partly because of Panetta’s lack of intelligence credentials and partly because nobody apparently consulted her about the appointment.

     

    Aides to the President-Elect insisted that they were planning on getting Feinstein’s input regarding the Panetta appointment before going public.  However, getting a key stakeholder’s input late in the decision-making process is less collaborative and less valuable than getting early input. Requesting late input is often political rather than collaborative and provides an opportunity for the decision-maker to sell key stakeholders on a decision rather than really consider their perspectives.  

     

    Collaboration means people participate in decisions regardless of level, region, business unit or function. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about how Toyota makes decisions and the role of nemawashi, which essentially means consensus building. Before the automaker changes the wheel base on a car model, the company gets broad input from those who design and assemble the vehicle. The decision takes longer, but implementation is swift because stakeholders have already anticipated and addressed potential problems.

     

    In contrast, faster decisions without broad input may appear more efficient, but such decisions often run into hurdles during implementation and ultimately absorb more of an organization’s resources. Without broad input, people who are impacted often criticize a decision because they had no voice and no stake in the outcome.

     

    Had the Obama transition team involved Senator Feinstein earlier in the process, the decision on the CIA director nomination would have reflected her input—and the transition team would have avoided the resulting perception that the President-elect and his staff are making decisions in a vacuum. Ironically, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been focused on making the intelligence community more collaborative. For more on this, see my December 18, 2008 post.

     

    Getting early, broad input into decisions enhances collaboration and creates greater value whether the organization is a government, a company, a non-profit, a school, or a club.

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  • Virtual Events Becoming Economic Necessity

    Companies in many industries are slashing conference, trade show and sales meeting budgets and replacing traditional events with virtual ones. Publishing is one such industry. According to a story in last Monday’s New York Times, Macmillan will hold two out of three of its 2009 sales conferences virtually via web conferencing. This contrasts sharply with the sales and marketing meeting Macmillan held at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego last month during which participants participated in wine tastings and got massages. 

     

    However, it takes more than adopting tools for virtual events to become a collaborative organization. For many companies, true collaboration requires a wholesale shift. Exigent circumstances can raise consciousness for the shift even in otherwise intransigent cultures. Exigent circumstances include industry realignments, disruptive technology, new competition, and economic downturns.

    Facing market challenges in the current recession, many companies are getting a wake up call. 

     

    Sparked by reduced budgets, many companies are accelerating their adoption or use of real-time collaborative tools to transform their events and meetings into virtual encounters. These tools include virtual worlds, telepresence, web conferencing and videoconferencing.

     

    The right tool choice depends on situations and cultures. For external events such as trade shows and job fairs, it’s necessary to create an experience that will draw people to a brand. To recreate that experience virtually, the 3D immersive quality of virtual worlds like Second Life or Qwaq makes sense. Qwaq is geared to business users and combines an immersive experience with web conferencing functionality. So users can work together while sharing applications in a virtual auditorium or conference room. CNN recently ran an interesting story on virtual trade shows. You can view the story here.

     

    For leadership retreats, strategy sessions and board meetings, detecting subtleties such as eye movement is critical. Therefore, telepresence fits the bill, because of its quality visual experience and the feeling that participants are sharing the same space.  To replace a data-driven sales meeting, web conferencing makes sense because the focus is on the slides or spreadsheet more than people. For a cross-functional meeting that includes, say, sales and marketing people, relationship time is necessary before plunging into data. In that case, telepresence or videoconferencing is appropriate.

     

    For Macmillan and other organizations, creating value through collaboration requires more than holding two out of three sales conferences virtually. So, perhaps Macmillan is considering adopting collaboration more broadly. It’s time to move beyond sporadic, scheduled use of collaborative tools. Value-driven organizations are integrating collaborative practices and tools into work styles and collaborative culture into organizational DNA.

     

    In this downturn, the smart money is rethinking how we do business, reconsidering command-and-control approaches, and moving collaboration to the front burner. This will help organizations survive short term and thrive long term.

     

     

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  • Creating Collaboration Incentives

    Too often organizational culture and processes recognize and reward internally competitive—rather than collaborative—behavior. This creates a significant barrier to creating value through collaboration. Companies may say they embrace collaboration, but the culture and processes often say something different. A key process is the recognition and reward system. Organizations committed to collaboration must reevaluate these systems to make sure they reinforce rather than undermine priorities including collaboration.

     

    Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States Intelligence Community has been making wholesale changes in how it operates. Among the many recommendations of the 9/11 Commission was that the sixteen federal agencies that comprise the intelligence community share information. The challenge was to create ways to share and collaborate across agencies in a culture that embraces secrecy. The impetus for cultural change is the desire to prevent future attacks.

     

    On the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence invited me to speak to the intelligence community. Some senior intelligence officials had read The Culture of Collaboration book and asked me to talk about its key themes plus other collaboration ideas relevant to intelligence.

     

    In the speech, I provided a series of steps the intelligence community could take to institutionalize collaboration. One step is realigning the recognition and reward system around collaboration. I noted that in both corporations and government agencies there is a tendency to hoard—rather than share—information, because people view information as power. If they give up the goods, they feel they become weaker. Information hoarders embrace their role as the “go-to” people on a given subject. This is exactly the issue that the intelligence community and many private sector companies must address.

     

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is making progress in multiple ways on the collaboration front.  Regarding incentives, ODNI has publicized a new policy for fiscal year 2009 that makes information sharing a factor in performance reviews. The policy applies to agencies that handle terrorism-related information.  The policy requires agency executives to hold managers and team members accountable for sharing what they know. As part of the directive, information technology departments at these agencies must build or modify systems to enhance information sharing and collaboration across agencies.

     

    The key for the intelligence community—and any organization—is that information sharing becomes proactive rather than just reactive. It’s one thing to share information when it’s requested. It’s another thing entirely to take the initiative to share. In a collaborative organization, people reach across departments, functions, business units and regions to proactively share information so that the organization can pounce on opportunities. For the intelligence community, the opportunity may be thwarting an attack. For a company, the opportunity may be making a process improvement, creating a new market opportunity, making a sale or retaining a customer.

     

    Organizations must ensure that collaboration is more than a buzz word, more than a check mark or mention in a performance evaluation, and is instead part-and-parcel of how people work.

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  • Mentoring Key to Collaboration

    Business is rediscovering mentoring, and the economic downturn is accelerating this trend.

     

    In this challenging economic climate, organizations are realizing that the expertise of veteran team members coupled with the fresh ideas and enthusiasm of younger team members can drive innovation and profitability. Besides developing deep industry and functional expertise over time, veteran team members have weathered previous economic storms—so that experience is an added driver.

     

    Mentoring is essential to collaboration and is therefore a critical component of a collaborative culture. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I identify eleven approaches a leader can use to instill collaborative culture, and establishing a mentoring system is at the top of the list. Mentoring systems can be formal or informal. Intel has established a formal mentoring process that includes an intranet-based system that matches protégés with mentors. Intel has also institutionalized mentoring through job sharing. Two leaders with complimentary skills may co-lead a business unit.

     

    According to an August 18, 2008 story in The Wall Street Journal by George Anders headlined “Companies Try to Extend Researchers’ Productivity,” Texas Instruments is formally matching new hires with mentors called “craftsmen” who coach their protégés. New design engineers, writes Anders, can become “fully effective” in three or four years instead of five to seven.

     

    Some companies that were founded on collaborative principles or have developed a collaborative culture over decades have successfully used informal mentoring. In these organizations, people naturally seek out mentors throughout the organization. Many Japanese companies, notably Toyota, successfully practice informal mentoring. For less-collaborative companies seeking to instill a collaborative culture, however, it’s essential to establish a formal mentoring system.

     

    There are many types of mentoring relationships relevant to organizations. The traditional relationship is between an older, wiser mentor and a younger, motivated protégé. For this approach to work, the organizational culture and HR practices must value the contributions of team members regardless of age and must acknowledge that team members develop at different paces. Some team members contribute the most late in their careers, and typical performance evaluation systems fail to account for this. Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t, addresses the disconnect between evaluation methodology and individual talents. For more on Gladwell’s Outliers, see my June 6, 2008 post.

    Mentoring can transcend the traditional age-oriented mentor/protégé relationship. People with complimentary skills can mentor each other. For this arrangement to work, people must easily morph from the role of mentor to that of protégé in much the same way as a graduate student may teach undergraduates in the morning and become an apprentice to a professor in the afternoon.

    Mayo Clinic’s collaborative leadership model pairs a doctor with a professional administrator for each leadership role. Aside from bringing his or her medical knowledge to decision-making, the doctor’s responsibility is to advocate the patient’s perspective in developing policy. The administrator brings a complementary perspective involving things like business processes. Dr. Glenn Forbes, CEO of the Mayo Clinic’s Rochester, Minnesota campus, told me when I was researching the book that he has had about a dozen leadership partnerships at Mayo. In some partnerships, he has played more of a mentor and in other cases he has played more of a protégé. The mentor and protégé roles are dynamic in a collaborative culture.

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