Getting back to Collaboration

Early tribes, on whatever continent, collaborated. They knew and accepted who was good at each task needed for the community to survive. Sounds like “specialization” you say? Well, there is a huge difference.

Modern managers learned to draw organization charts which basically separate specialties but many times these divisions end up neglecting the other important part of relying on people who are specialists – integration. Organization charts often create competition instead of collaboration as each box on the chart competes for resources, attention and the boss’s ear.

Smaller organizations might be able to operate more like a tribe, with everyone knowing and understanding the importance of each person’s contribution but, as the organization grows larger, visibility into other parts of the organization is often only available to the “chiefs.” This undermines collaboration. Collaboration says, “We will all work together to get the job done – using the best from all of us. We will all survive and prosper because none of us will survive on our own.”

In today’s large, complex organizations putting together multi-disciplinary teams to propose solutions can not only be win-win for the managers and the organizations but also for the people who gain insight into the rest of the organization’s functions.

Collaboration has been around since people became societal; yet we have somehow forgotten its importance. People want to understand their contribution and they want to appreciate the contributions of others. Is your organization chart inhibiting the creation of collaborative solutions?

How can you innovate new ways of stimulating collaboration throughout your organization?