What makes collaboration effective

Large teams are often formed to ensure the involvement of a wide stakeholder group, the coordination of a diverse set of activities, and the harnessing of multiple skills. As a consequence, many inevitably involve people or more. However, our research shows that as the size of the team increases beyond 20 members, the level of natural cooperation among members of the team decreases. Today most complex collaborative teams have members who are working at a distance from one another.

Again, the logic is that the assigned tasks require the insights and knowledge of people from many locations. Team members may be working in offices in the same city or strung across the world.

Our research shows that as teams become more virtual, collaboration declines. Their diverse knowledge and views can spark insight and innovation. Complex collaborative teams often generate huge value by drawing on a variety of deeply specialized skills and knowledge to devise new solutions.

Again, however, our research shows that the greater the proportion of highly educated specialists on a team, the more likely the team is to disintegrate into unproductive conflicts. To answer that question we looked carefully at 55 large teams and identified those that demonstrated high levels of collaborative behavior despite their complexity. Put differently, they succeeded both because of and despite their composition.

Using a range of statistical analyses, we considered how more than factors, such as the design of the task and the company culture, might contribute to collaboration, manifested, for example, in a willingness to share knowledge and workloads.

Out of the plus factors, we were able to isolate eight practices that correlated with success—that is, that appeared to help teams overcome substantially the difficulties that were posed by size, long-distance communication, diversity, and specialization. We then interviewed the teams that were very strong in these practices, to find out how they did it. They fall into four general categories—executive support, HR practices, the strength of the team leader, and the structure of the team itself.

Investing in signature relationship practices. Executives can encourage collaborative behavior by making highly visible investments—in facilities with open floor plans to foster communication, for example—that demonstrate their commitment to collaboration. Modeling collaborative behavior. At companies where the senior executives demonstrate highly collaborative behavior themselves, teams collaborate well. Ensuring the requisite skills. Human resources departments that teach employees how to build relationships, communicate well, and resolve conflicts creatively can have a major impact on team collaboration.

Supporting a strong sense of community. When people feel a sense of community, they are more comfortable reaching out to others and more likely to share knowledge. Assigning team leaders that are both task- and relationship-oriented. The debate has traditionally focused on whether a task or a relationship orientation creates better leadership, but in fact both are key to successfully leading a team. Typically, leaning more heavily on a task orientation at the outset of a project and shifting toward a relationship orientation once the work is in full swing works best.

Building on heritage relationships. When too many team members are strangers, people may be reluctant to share knowledge. The best practice is to put at least a few people who know one another on the team. Understanding role clarity and task ambiguity. Cooperation increases when the roles of individual team members are sharply defined yet the team is given latitude on how to achieve the task.

However, the way they did that varied widely. Built around an indoor atrium, the new structure allows more than 3, people from the firm to rub shoulders daily.

The headquarters is designed to improve communication, increase the exchange of ideas, and create a sense of community among employees. Many of the offices have an open layout and look over the atrium—a vast transparent space. The campus is set up like a small town, with retail shops, restaurants, jogging tracks and cycling trails, spaces for picnics and barbecues—even a leisure club complete with swimming pool, gym, dance studios, tennis courts, and football pitches. To ensure that non-headquarters staff members feel they are a part of the action, Goodwin also commissioned an adjoining business school, where employees from other locations meet and learn.

The visitors are encouraged to spend time on the headquarters campus and at forums designed to give employees opportunities to build relationships. Indeed, the RBS teams we studied had very strong social relationships, a solid basis for collaborative activity that allowed them to accomplish tasks quickly. BP has made another sort of signature investment. Because its employees are located all over the world, with relatively few at headquarters, the company aims to build social networks by moving employees across functions, businesses, and countries as part of their career development.

When BP integrates an acquisition it has grown by buying numerous smaller oil companies , the leadership development committee deliberately rotates employees from the acquired firm through positions across the corporation. Though the easier and cheaper call would be to leave the executives in their own units—where, after all, they know the business—BP instead trains them to take on new roles. As a consequence any senior team today is likely to be made up of people from multiple heritages.

Changing roles frequently—it would not be uncommon for a senior leader at BP to have worked in four businesses and three geographic locations over the past decade—forces executives to become very good at meeting new people and building relationships with them. In companies with many thousands of employees, relatively few have the opportunity to observe the behavior of the senior team on a day-to-day basis.

Nonetheless, we found that the perceived behavior of senior executives plays a significant role in determining how cooperative teams are prepared to be. The Chartered Bank received its remit from Queen Victoria in The Standard Bank was founded in the Cape Province of South Africa in and was prominent in financing the development of the diamond fields and later gold mines. Standard Chartered was formed in through a merger of the two banks, and today the firm has 57 operating groups in 57 countries, with no home market.

At Standard Chartered the senior team travels extensively; the norm is to travel even for relatively brief meetings. This investment in face-to-face interaction creates many opportunities for people across the company to see the top executives in action. Internal communication is frequent and open, and, maybe most telling, every site around the world is filled with photos of groups of executives—country and functional leaders—working together.

Employees quickly learn that the best way to get things done is through informal networks. For example, when a major program was recently launched to introduce a new customer-facing technology, the team responsible had an almost uncanny ability to understand who the key stakeholders at each branch bank were and how best to approach them. A third important role for executives is to ensure that mentoring and coaching become embedded in their own routine behavior—and throughout the company.

We looked at both formal mentoring processes, with clear roles and responsibilities, and less formal processes, where mentoring was integrated into everyday activities.

It turned out that while both types were important, the latter was more likely to increase collaborative behavior. At Nokia informal mentoring begins as soon as someone steps into a new job. This is a deeply ingrained cultural norm, which probably originated when Nokia was a smaller and simpler organization.

The manager sits with the newcomer, just as her manager sat with her when she joined, and reviews what topics the newcomer should discuss with each person on the list and why establishing a relationship with him or her is important. It is then standard for the newcomer to actively set up meetings with the people on the list, even when it means traveling to other locations. The gift of time—in the form of hours spent on coaching and building networks—is seen as crucial to the collaborative culture at Nokia.

So what about human resources? Is collaboration solely in the hands of the executive team? In our study we looked at the impact of a wide variety of HR practices, including selection, performance management, promotion, rewards, and training, as well as formally sponsored coaching and mentoring programs. Although most formal HR programs appeared to have limited impact, we found that two practices did improve team performance: training in skills related to collaborative behavior, and support for informal community building.

However, we found that some teams had a collaborative culture but were not skilled in the practice of collaboration itself. Our study showed that a number of skills were crucial: appreciating others, being able to engage in purposeful conversations, productively and creatively resolving conflicts, and program management. In the research, PricewaterhouseCoopers emerged as having one of the strongest capabilities in productive collaboration.

PwC also teaches employees how to influence others effectively and build healthy partnerships. A number of other successful teams in our sample came from organizations that had a commitment to teaching employees relationship skills. The program is not about sales techniques but, rather, focuses on how Lehman values its clients and makes sure that every client has access to all the resources the firm has to offer.

It is essentially a course on strategies for building collaborative partnerships with customers, emphasizing the importance of trust-based personal relationships. These informal groups were responsible for projects associated with the implementation of new technology throughout the bank; one team, for instance, was charged with expanding online banking services. To succeed, the teams needed the involvement and expertise of different parts of the organization. The firm makes the technology needed for long-distance collaboration readily available to groups of individuals with shared interests—for instance, in specific technologies or markets—who hold frequent web conferences and communicate actively online.

The company also encourages employees that travel to a new location to arrange meetings with as many people as possible. No one knows the efforts that you go through better than the people who work closely with you every day.

Team members exchanging advice and constructive criticisms to each other will only improve performance, and build stronger relationships. The reasons for using team collaboration software are quite straightforward.

Using a tool like Zenkit comes with features that can further heighten team collaboration skills. For example, its integration feature with chat platform apps will make communication between team members easier and more accessible, and its visual scheduling system allows for project transparency, so that everyone is aware of their responsibilities, and how the project is coming along.

Here are a few tips you can try to keep the harmony going. Once the project has started, and you feel your team needs a little refresher, you can always set aside time to do team building activities to keep the momentum going. Every member will bring something unique and valuable to the table. The best way to encourage team collaboration skills is to showcase your own. As the project manager, your behavior and attitude influences how your team conduct themselves.

Be reliable, provide constructive feedback, communicate effectively, listen and compromise with your team, and ensure you are trained and well versed in using whatever team collaboration tool you choose so that you are on hand to offer any guidance or support that is required.

How do you encourage collaboration within your team? Share your tips with us in the comment section below! More from Armen Baghdasaryan. More from Vibhu Dhariwal. More from Asmo. At Zenkit, we strive to post helpful, informative, and timely content.

We want you to feel welcome to comment with your own thoughts, feedback, and critiques, however we do not welcome inappropriate or rude comments. We reserve the right to delete comments or ban users from commenting as needed to keep our comments section relevant and respectful.

We encourage you to voice your opinions, however in order for discussions to remain constructive, we ask that you remember to criticize ideas, not people. Comments that we find to be hateful, inflammatory, threatening, or harassing may be removed. Life and work is made better by letting other folks in. First you might need to rework your team dynamic into one that encourages effective collaboration in the workplace. That could start with something very basic: creating a positive work environment that reframes how your team thinks about the actual concept of collaboration.

Learn how to build a more connected, secure, and productive workforce with a single, scalable platform. When it comes to being collaborative in the workplace, team members need to be able to come together and treat one another fairly, which is why psychological safety is key. To create that sense of safety, the team will also need to simply be able to empathize with one another.

Instead, she says, effective collaboration in the workplace is a practice that requires building trust and really committing to systems put in place.

And whether your meetings succeed depends on the way you plan and execute them. Finding that common denominator is going to move everybody forward. Mailchimp has baked that philosophy into its DNA, too. Not to mention, it helps promote accountability.

It should be the responsibility of the entire team to collaborate constructively. So before pounding the panic button on an issue, go through the following steps to keep collaboration in the workplace productive and courteous. New data from a global survey of more than 9, knowledge workers shows how to step forward. Digital communication tools have no doubt revolutionized collaboration in office. But sometimes it takes some real person-to-person conversations to iron out misunderstandings.

You can catch people off guard and have a real open and honest communication, without a whole lot of editing. So make sure to ask yourself, Why are you saying this?