In our fast-paced world focusing on efficiency, we know we need to collaborate in order to grow, improve quality, and be more productive. In my work focusing on mediation and conflict resolution, I often found that inability or unwillingness to collaborate to be the central issue internally within any given firm. Teams knew they needed to be efficient, improve productivity, and collaborate with others in their market for the long term, or they would be sidelined in their industry. And so, job one in every firm was to find the sweet spot between collaboration and efficiency. In this post, we discuss the rationale and offer practical tips for achieving efficient collaboration.
Collaboration
Collaboration makes their products better and generates ideas for continual improvement. Bringing in diverse viewpoints from multigenerational experiences, diverse backgrounds, and varied interests makes a positive difference. With more people returning to the office at least a few days a week, employers are seeing renewed relationships that encourage increased understanding from an interpersonal perspective. Others have taken the initiative with virtual coffee breaks, happy hours, and other initiatives to ensure authentic connecting relationships and informal networks that inspire connectivity.
Listening actively to others to understand professional and personal perspectives builds trust.
Making listening actively a part of the culture can yield more. Listening deliberately requires patience and practice. Effective listeners include sensing, understanding, judgment, responsibility, predictability, accountability, respectability, reliability, forgivability, embraceability, achievability, endurability, retainability, resistibility, marketability, thrivability, and profitability, according to Dr. Manny Steil.
Efficiency
To be effective, firms have to be efficient and have a work environment that effectively uses its people, resources, and skill sets. With fewer resources, tighter budgets, and more work, it is critical for firms to be competitive and make a profit to stay in business. Increasingly, firms are trying to do more with less, increasing stress on employees, with seemingly less concern about burnout, retention, and balance between work and home life. The result can improve in the short run, but at what cost? It makes sense to step back and explore interests to work together to find appropriate solutions at times like this. At times, collaboration can be inefficient if not managed well.
Steps to consider
It is possible to start properly by being guided by a plan, setting goals, specifying responsibilities, setting up milestones, and taking specific actions. However, things happen. New members may be very talented, but not knowing the culture or background may cause the team to lose focus, go off on tangents, and negatively impact the result. The intention may have been to enhance collaboration, but this change can derail the team's efficiency.
Sometimes, great ideas are generated at meetings, but who will do what, and when was left out of the conversation.
There needs to be a clear understanding and follow-up on actionable items within time frames. Without this mandatory step, it can be incredibly challenging to move forward efficiently. So, what should you do?
Bring on only who is needed.
Who is at the meeting and why? Why does anyone need to be there? Bring in only the right people. With the people there, ensure they understand why they are there, their role to play, who will do what as actionable takeaways from the meeting, and when they will accomplish their task. Delegate appropriately and clearly to ensure what is needed. Collaborate at high and working levels. When interacting with others, ensure everyone knows what they are asked to do. For example, don’t ask someone from one budget area to think they can approve actions in another.
Move from ideas to action
Brainstorming and prioritizing ideas is fun for some people. They are great ideas, people. When carrying out the task, they may have limited energy or may not be on board. When ideas have been initiated and vented and a straightforward course of action identified, be specific on the path in the future and stay on task. Watch out for tangents and expansion of the task beyond the original scope without consideration of deadlines or other impacts (for example, on other projects). Team feedback is essential, but the leader should be capable of keeping the team focused on the result. It is necessary to maintain a collaborative environment and remain efficient if these considerations are implemented.
Case example in mediation
In brief, the issues presented above were uncovered in the mediation. The organization lacked a strong leader to keep the team focused, and some key technical people had excellent skills in their areas of expertise (causing many in the organization to pull them off on other projects) but did not have good administrative skills to stay on task. What was initially a negative situation and a lot of finger-pointing became a listening session to understand others’ constraints and perceptions. Once uncovered, there was consoling, forgiveness, and understanding. Changes were made on who would lead what. One of the leaders hated being in the position of making hard calls and keeping the team on task. An administrative person was assigned a top technical person to ensure he was spending time where he was transferred and only working on other tasks approved by his manager. This allowed him not to have to say no to others in the organization who wanted his input and pulled him away from his primary task. These examples resulted from allowing team members to share their concerns, voice their interests, and work together to find workable solutions.
There is a balance between collaboration and efficiency.
Finding that balance results in a workforce that wants to be there, does better work, is more productive, cares about each other, and is more profitable. Learn from this experience and consider what you can do to apply some of the lessons learned here in your organization. Working in varied environments to address these types of concerns is my pleasure. Recent examples involved a law firm, a union, a medical environment, and an indigenous tribe. We all need some help now and then, and it is my pleasure as a mediation and conflict specialist to help in these environments.
If you want to read additional sources, check out these links to expand your insights into collaboration,conflict resolution, or improving your servant manager skills