The 3 Imperatives of Effective Collaboration
The biggest barrier to collaboration? All the strong individuals companies hire!
How did we get to the team effectiveness framework explained in my book, Lessons from Mars.? Here was our journey - grab a seat.
How do you get Achievement-motivated individuals to collaborate?
McClelland’s Needs Theory
I worked at IBM for three years where I learned about motives, specifically McClelland’s Needs theory. I applied that knowledge several years later to the insights I developed while working at Mars. I was trying to understand why people there weren’t collaborating as much or as effectively as they could.
The question I formulated based on that confluence of knowledge and insight was, “How do you get motivated individual achievers to work together?” Phrased as the quest I felt I was on, I was seeking to get highly driven individuals to see collaboration as just another thing to be achieved, to feel that collaboration was as compelling and important as the individual tasks they’d been assigned. To use a word I’ve used several times already in this series, I sought to stimulate more intentional collaboration, collaboration that was more thoughtful, more planned.
The answer to my initial question and the object of my quest turned out to be simple. It was clarity. One of the clearest findings after reviewing my interview data was that team members repeatedly said something like, “Hey, I know I should collaborate more, I just don’t.” At the time, it struck me as odd. Especially since one of the questions I regularly asked in my interviews was, “What are your shared goals and targets?” They always had answers.
Shared goals are necessary but don’t motivate teamwork
My review of the interview data reminded me that their answers to the shared goals question were all over the place. In the same team I might be told it was top-line growth, market share growth or retention of key employees. Their answers might have included a whole list of things but whatever they were, they were rarely aligned.
For a few years I focused on goal alignment with teams because I assumed that having that clarity would help them operate better as a team. What I learned through my research was that my well-intended alignment efforts weren’t helping collaboration. It wasn’t just about shared goals, I realized. To get more intentional collaboration, teams needed alignment on which work, which specific tasks required collaboration and which didn’t.
What is the shared work and why is it important
There’s another level to this idea of clarity of shared work. To tap into the achievement drive that was so prevalent at Mars, team members required clarity about why their shared work mattered, why it was important. Just because you tell someone, “Go do this with Bill,” doesn’t mean that they’ll do it if it doesn’t feel compelling to them.
At this stage of the research phase I posited that intentional collaboration demanded clarity of why collaboration mattered and what specific work would deliver the goods. I sometimes refer to these two aspects as the Big Why and the Big What of Clarity.
Another significant insight from my research was that teams were terrible at doing what they said they were going to do in areas like meetings and consistent operations. Their team processes were not effective regardless of the kind of team or their level in the organization.
The Three Imperatives of Effective Collaboration
The Three imperatives
With these insights in mind, a three-part model started to take shape. Teams, in order to be more intentional, needed greater clarity about why collaboration mattered and which specific work required it. And, they needed a modicum of discipline to take advantage of the intentionality that clarity would spawn, enabling them to deliver consistently on their Big Why and that big What.
I dubbed these the Three Imperatives and began to capitalize them. Clarity enables Intentionality and is supported by Discipline. The Three Imperatives was the first model, the first hypothesis I developed from my research. It wouldn’t be the last because as useful as it was for framing a potential solution, it was more a prescription than a remedy.
More details will be coming up in my next Blog. From there we’ll journey through the practices that grew out of The Imperatives and that are the foundation of our framework for collaboration.
