Two Heads Really Are Better Than One

It seems like common sense, doesn't it?

As social creatures, it would seem that people should work together in a group rather than alone. Division of labor and all that. Synergies. Sparking ideas. Great chemistry. We've heard it all before.

So, then why does it take so many people so long to "get" collaboration? Why don't people want to work together?

"Collaboration is key to making everyone in the organization better," explains Adam Hayes, of AH Digital FX Studios in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "Everyone has specific skill sets that they possess and are thus beneficial in improving the overall quality of any given product."

When we interviewed corporate communicators and business leaders and asked them about the collaborative capabilities of their new employees - those employees hired with the understanding that today's workplace calls for collaborative skills - over 40% of those incoming employees were rated at or below average ability. Is that setting ourselves up for failure?

After looking into this problem, the short answer is that we are often too hard on ourselves. Collaboration is not easy. Some cultures have a greater difficulty with the concept than others - but the fact is much of what it takes to be a great, collaborating organization is counter-intuitive to accepted business practices.

Today's business environment - the one that calls for greater collaboration - faces serious economic challenges that requires each employee to be more productive and requiring less oversight. In short, we are asking people to be more autonomous and more collaborative at the same time. This apparent contradiction works thanks to advancements in communications technology.

We know the traditional communications channels (e.g. meetings, call reports, e-mail) won't cut it any more. Some take too much time, others are not easily modified to meet the needs of multiple recipients easily and efficiently. Still others are one-to-one communications that quickly become confused and inefficient when shared with parties outside the original relationship. Instead, co-workers need to find the best ways to communicate and collaborate that combine technology and technique.

The management challenges of structuring a more autonomous and collaborative workplace are signficant. Believe it or not, management's success boils down to its ability to communicate and it's willingness to trust employees. More on that here.

Ironically, we may already be training our workers on the new collaborative processes of the future through online entertainment and other media. While blogs, wikis and other social media has been stealing the thunder in the business workspace, online games like Second Life and other social interaction role-playing games have been teaching people how to work together without even being in the same time zone.

The secret for success in the coming generation of employees may lie in an ability to identify those prospective employees with the greatest collaborative training. "Identifying this skill (collaboration) in potential new hires is a skill in itself and our capabilities here could be improved," says one corporate marketing director.

Finally, there is one last area of collaboration that has been long-recognized as being a high-value practice among businesses: collaborations with customers and suppliers. The economic benefits of collaborations in these areas (whether they are joint ventures, preferred customer/supplier relationships, etc.) are fairly obvious. There are marketing disciplines growing up around this phenomenon (i.e. word-of-mouth marketing, customer evangelism, etc.). You can read more about that in our Brand Crafting blog (re: consumer collaborations) and our Business of Business Marketing blog (re: supplier/customer collaborations).

And, of course, because this is a blog, please feel free to contribute to this discussion at any time.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Collaboration, Partnership, Hawthorne Effect, Customer Relationships, Vendor Relations, Leadership, Culture

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