Cultivating Organizational Collaboration
In Part Two of a four-part series, Cisco discusses how cultural and process changes are key to making the most of new collaborative technologies. Part Three will post Nov. 30.
Photo
Illustration by Michael S. Wertz
Features
The Case for Collaboration (Part I of this series)
The Journey to Greater Organizational Collaboration (Part III of this series)
Cisco Creates a New Generation of Collaborative Leaders (Part IV of this series)
The Three Phases of Organizational Collaboration
Podcast
Successful Collaboration: Advice from an Expert
Related Link
Nov. 16, 2009
by Charles Waltner
Though technology has been getting all the attention when it comes to collaboration, experts agree that improvements in organizational collaboration require focus on what Cisco refers to as "people" and "processes."
Also described as the "cultural" aspect of collaboration, the people component of the Cisco Collaboration Framework looks at ways to influence people's attitudes and collaborative behaviors. This encompasses what employees believe is important to their jobs and what they think is proper behavior. The ways organizations influence the people factor include leadership expectations, management practices, performance measurements, incentives, role models and hiring policies.
According to the Collaboration Framework, new behavioral expectations need to be clearly defined, developed, and incorporated into an organization's culture. Leadership and management systems must align to new collaboration efforts in order to create new collaborative behaviors.
Cultural changes go hand-in-glove with process changes. Collaborative processes are the institutional support structures necessary for helping people carry out collaboration. Processes are all about how employees get their work done and include such things as governance, decision making, skills cultivation, funding and operational logistics, with a strong emphasis on review-and-improve cycles.
Valuing Collaboration
Most importantly, to change the way an organization works together, you need to change its value system, says Randy Pond, Cisco's executive vice president of operations, processes and systems. For corporations, that means compensation and promotions.
And while it isn't a simple matter, collaborative efforts need to be quantitatively assessed. "People don't pay attention unless something is measured," Pond says.
Collaboration: First Steps
Perhaps the most important advice is this: Just get started. The Cisco Collaboration Framework provides the guidelines for designing your development roadmap. And that journey starts with a few simple steps.
Step 1: Begin by investigating the various collaboration tools available.
Step 2: Draft a collaboration vision statement.
Step 3: Run a series of workshops.
Step 4: Benchmark key metrics.
Step 5: Start building collaboration capabilities.
Step 6: Establish test-and-learn processes.
To adjust processes to best support collaboration, organizations should develop business and management models encompassing staffing, priority setting, support services, executive development, data sharing practices and accountability systems. Management models need to change in order to reward and recognize the right behaviors. Pond says such efforts combine equal parts carrot and stick.
Cultivating such collaborative behaviors also requires a detailed examination of how a company operates, adds Ron Ricci, Cisco's vice president of corporate positioning.
Ricci, who has led development of C-Change, Cisco's model for how its councils, boards, and teams work together, learned early on just how important it is for a company to thoroughly explore all aspects of its collaborative behaviors.
In his efforts to develop C-Change, Ricci asked some Cisco executives gathered in a meeting to define "strategy." One by one, MBA after MBA, each person gave a different answer. Such experiences inspired Ricci to make establishing a common vocabulary the first step in the C-Change program.
"If you are going to collaborate effectively, everyone in the organization has to be speaking the same language," he says.
Deploying Technologies for Collaboration
While people and processes are the most crucial aspects of collaboration, organizations should not underestimate the efforts required to fully deploy and integrate new collaborative technologies throughout a company, says Francois Joanette, a management consultant who assisted Cisco in developing the Collaboration Framework.
It is relatively easy for a team to use a Web-based workspace, but quite another thing to integrate collaborative tools into existing corporate applications, he says. And far-flung organizations need to ensure that collaboration technologies such as video conferencing are ubiquitous throughout an organization so that all team members can participate and benefit equally.
Organizations can build efficiency into collaborative tool development by finding replicable models, such as "virtual expert" or "virtual teaming" modules that can be repurposed into a wide range of business scenarios. These kinds of models focus on the type of interaction rather than on the business situation or operational function. Cisco estimates up to 80 percent of all collaboration processes can be addressed by replicable tools.
Also, organizations need to look at ways to integrate packages of tools into a single collaborative environment, such as pulling virtual workspaces, video sharing, wikis, blogs and forums onto a single intranet portal. Importantly, these tools, while standardized, should also provide individuals with personalization options to best support their unique needs.
But whether it is technology, people, or processes, there's an underlying all-or-nothing imperative to organizational collaboration. If only part of an organization (or a team within an organization) collaborates because of cultural, logistical, or technological reasons, then collaboration is crippled from the start and its ultimate benefits are capped short of its potential.
"If you are going to collaborate, you have to make a full commitment," Ricci says. "If only half a team is collaborating properly, then that's not really collaboration."
And for an organization to make progress on collaboration, it needs to consistently press forward on all three fronts, Pond says.
Most importantly, these multi-faceted collaboration efforts need to be driven by an organization's leaders. Executives provide the all important commitment and role models for how the rest of the organization should behave.
"It absolutely starts from the top down," Pond says.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Read Part I of the series, "The Case for Collaboration."
Charles Waltner is a freelance writer in Piedmont, Calif.
