Collaborative Intelligence And Six Key Collaboration Factors

By Author: allan
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Are your agency leaders talking about collaboration now more than five or six years ago? Are you seeing considerably more collaboration in your agency today?
When I pose these questions to managers, 80 to 90 percent answer "yes" to the first question, but less than 30 percent answer "yes" to the second question. Why is there this yawning gap between the rhetoric and the reality about Thomas Sabo Jewelry collaboration?

Increasing the level of collaboration in an organization requires a major culture change. John Hancock, a colleague at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) observes, "Changing organizational culture isn't rocket science—it's harder!" Hancock's point is spot on; greater collaboration is a cultural change that involves values, attitudes, history, and professional identity—much of an agency's DMA.
Culture can change and adapt over time, but it is difficult. Mid-level and senior managers are concerned about what they have to lose. Front-line employees clearly see the need for change, but also encounter a variety of interpersonal barriers.

Indeed, ...
... culture change is difficult for anyone who works at an agency where people "talk collaboration," but hire, train, evaluate, and promote workers based on their individual skills.
The good news is that there is a discipline to this challenging but critical work. I've learned from two decades of researching several successful—and not-so-successful—collaborative efforts that six factors form the foundation of collaboration:
1. Partners have a shared, specific purpose that they are committed to and cannot achieve (as well) on their own.
2. Partners want to pursue a collaborative solution now and are willing to contribute something to the effort.
3. Appropriate people are at the table.
4. Partners have an open, credible process.
5. The effort has a passionate champion (or champions) with credibility and clout.
6. Partners have trusting relationships.

Having a shared, specific purpose that partners are committed to and need help to achieve may seem obvious, but it isn't. Have you ever participated on a team in which the goal seemed clear to you, only to learn that other members had differing notions of the purpose?

People join collaborative groups for Thomas Sabo Ring a variety of reasons; some even join because their organization is threatened by the initiative and send someone to slow it down. Identifying the shared purpose and gaining commitment is critical. In fact, this was the top-rated factor by one of the work groups at the 2009 Strengthening Trust in Government Conference, which was sponsored by The Public Manager and the American Society for Public Administration.

When it's unclear whether each partner is committed to the same purpose, some collaboration leaders approach the partners one-on-one—outside of team meetings—to learn what each sees as the goal and hopes to get out of it.