Big Picture Collaboration: The Key to Business Agility and Adaptability
Irrespective of your previous investments in training, business methods such as Agile, Scrum, DevOps or Lean, or the latest modern organizational designs the most important criteria for business success and high performing cultures is measured by how well your business works together or not.
Releasing the Skills from the Box
In an era of unprecedented change, there is broad agreement that problem-solving, critical thinking and adaptability skills are more important to the business than they have ever been. So why is it, if the great majority of job candidates can demonstrate these skills, that organisations are still relatively slow to adapt? Its the organisations inability to engage the whole company resources to collaborate on the big issues, this wastes valuable resources which reside within organisations, the lost opportunity for employee engagement on solving business issues and developing new ways to serve customers is wasted.
It is all too common for staff to collaborate only within their teams. When people have little or no interaction with others outside the walls of their silo, the organisation is wasting powerful resources. The adaptive organisation allows staff to express these skills in a “big picture” way – across departments, across different business units – and even across suppliers. When this happens, we start to see the power of real collaboration, problem-solving and critical thinking.
The problem is not the people. It is the organisation itself.
The biggest problem with the silo mentality is not about what happens within silos or departments. The specialisms within the silos are important to the operation of the business, but this does not mean that conversations should be locked within the silo. It is vital to address what happens – or does not happen – in the gap between the silos.
This is the gap that customers usually end up falling into and from which they need rescuing. Thus, it is vital to have systems and job roles designed to provide business information from outside, and also to identify and address key inter-department issues.
Reorganising the Collaborative Model
Big Picture Collaboration looks at issues related to running the business and building delivery capability to serve customers. Not simply the products and services.
To address the “silo gap,” organisations need to ask themselves some key questions. How do we collaborate end-to-end – in the horizontal, and in the vertical? How do we create the opportunities for communication in these channels? The solution is to create a different collaboration model which enables the organisation to address organisational constraints so that it can move quickly to change whatever is needed, when it is needed. Collaboration is about everyone knowing how everything fits together. To achieve it, there must be a process of dialogue where people from different departments learn about each other’s key challenges. This kind of interdepartmental understanding enables people to do their jobs more effectively. And when something goes wrong, it gives them a network outside their area to contact immediately.
Adaptability requires much higher levels of collaboration and necessitates new relationships between managers, staff and leaders.
Grow your Own: Why recruit what you already have?
The adaptive organisation makes full use of the problem-solving, critical thinking resources within its existing workforce. Staff, including top managers, not only think outside the box, but they are aware of what is outside the box, so they can work outside it too. The more minds this organisation brings together, the greater its problem-solving power. Put another way: release the potential of your people and they will realise the potential of your business. Why look to recruit collaborative problem solvers when you already have them in your organisation?
Business success, innovative products and new delivery solutions are not solved by individual silos. Businesses need to be managed as a business and in today’s world that means everyone is involved. Even if technical departments don’t want to get involved and stick to their technical domains, they are still involved because not getting involved has a serious negative impact on the ability of the business to change in response to the market, engaging clients in new innovations and fragments the common understanding, communications, decision making, quality, loss of business intelligence, the application of new learning is restricted and frustrates the ambitions for all who work within the endeavor.
Release the potential of your people and they will realise the potential of your business.
The 3 Steps for True Collaboration:
1. Identify and understand the fragmentation.
Managers identify and address inter-departmental misalignment of goals and targets. How is what we are doing inhibiting the way we drive products and services to customers.
2. Enable work outside the box.
People begin to see what is outside their boxes and they develop an intimate appreciation of what others are doing and how it is part of the big picture.
3. Work outside the box.
Thinking outside the box is not enough; we must now work outside the box.
Managers encourage their staff to work upstream and down, and horizontally between departments, with vast improvements to their own and others’ effectiveness.
When staff are made to work within their own boxes, they have little chance to engage in true collaboration. They know very little about other parts of the business and how they operate, and can only use their skills in myopic ways. This is not what makes an adaptive business. In today’s fast-paced environment, the whole organisation has to understand and shift. The challenge is for management to “let go” a little and allow people to work outside the box, while still trusting them and still maintaining control.
Adaptability in the context of business focuses on the ability of the broader workforce to continually adapt and change their job roles, processes, measurement systems, reward systems and structures to create new organizational and operational capabilities, while developing and delivering new forms of value for customers.
Put simply, adaptive organisations develop staff, managers and leaders to collaboratively seek out and remove organizational constraints, systematically removing obstacles that impede the ingenuity and learning of teams and the flow of continuous value to customers.
If you would like to know more about how to create a dynamic, collaborative work climate, please get in touch.