“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” — H.E. Luccock
What we have learn why people do not collaborate in initiatives?
When the team is performing in the higher unknown unknown area, the only means we have is to deal with the unknown factors, which is through collaboration and experimentation. We co-create the solution with many teams.
This is one of the dominant issues in most of the teams in today’s organization, specifically in legacy enterprise.
Why so?
From what we have witnessed, there are a few top issues
Tribe leader Anurag is a passionate leader who has been holding this position for a long time. This tribe is one of the essential for the banking application stacks team that is managing. He wants to succeed in this role. He has grown in the last few years on the corporate ladder.
Missing compelling purpose: In his tribe, 15 squads are working on diverse projects and products. The conflict among these squads is very high. Many coaches are engaged with this tribe to improve the ways of working. Customer complaints are high. Anurag is not amenable to dealing with the reality. He is not comfortable facing it. He is a bold leader but not equipped for collaborative ways of working.
Our coaches were helping Anurag and his product owners to do a workshop with a different setup to ensure collaboration elements become norms in this tribe. They tried such attempts for more than 6 months to make this habit norms. It worked to convey a unified message to all the teams consistently. There are fallbacks but right persuasion the unified message came back to routine.
One major point, we realize, is that an obvious, compelling purpose for the transformation is one of the major causes we bring out from our many conversations with many team members. Team members were not finding any reason to collaborate.
The Leadership team is excessively busy with their meetings, so no time to connect with the Squad members. There is no common platform or any cadence to talk about progress. Open communication with all the team members was a significant issue.
Though Scrum events are going on like rituals, there is something missing. Team members are not able to connect to all the different releases and their actual benefits. The demos are not connected among teams as a result, team members do not feel why they should be part of the tribe! Most of the leadership teams are showing emotional outbursts as the pressure to delivery is there. The shared purpose is that one of the items is pending for a long.
One size fitting was another issue! Other tribes are doing certain practices, so “cut and paste” those practices is a failed attempt. Team members are not owning, as it is not their solution. It does not resonate with the team members. The leadership team is asking why there is no result coming as the new approach has been tried! Everything has been injected as per text but not showing the outcome. Product owners, with the support of Coaches, began building a working agreement; when do we say we are successful and what we can do together to accomplish this. We will all commit to this agreement. It did work!
With the help of coaches, constant reinforcement has been provided to abide by the agreement.
The products teams are working hard; it is also new AI and data analytics work area. Most of the time, team members are struggling to solve such problems. There is no moral boost to try something new in the team. That is one of the tough parts, leaders are only saying we have to do this, do that, but not understanding many real challenges. Many consultants are hired to solve this problem, but cost parameters are increasing. Leaders are also concerned about this. There is a blame game that is high when things are not working on such an assignment.
Mutual respect is one of the keys in such a condition as subjects are complex. Several times in the meeting, it has been observed that individuals are not adhering to this. It is complicating the situation. There are several social events conducted to address this issue, but things have not improved. Whatever little progress individuals are getting, they want to grab that! As a result of that, teams are not helping each other. Individuals are cautious about snatching credit. Anurag did of office workshop on this with the leadership team. Many cultural issues came out in the organization.
Grabbing each other’s credit is another issue! An action plan was taken with the director of the unit. HR was also involved in this situation to address this competition culture which spoils the whole collaboration ambient. Things have started showing slight improvement as HR and leaders are actively addressing this situation.
There was a separate recognition construed as a best “collective intelligence” team, where many data points were collected to demonstrate the collaboration. The Squad “data sync” has got first this award as the team members demonstrated many such traits of collaboration thought which they solve many complex problems. They shared their stories with many team members.
For Anurag and his team, it is a continuous journey of several years to bring about some kind of collaboration among all his squads. Many communities were established to ensure the recommended mindset grows into the tribe; individuals can visualize the happening across so that they can look at the walk the talk by all team members.
There are a few key takeaways:
- Invest time for collaboration, it takes time to identify the unknown, be patient, and keep discovering the unknown with your team.
- Successful collaboration involves a cooperative spirit and mutual respect. Let us guard down a little and extend a little bit of vulnerability. Acknowledge that our ideas may not be the finest ones
- Give credit to all the team members when it is deserved.
- Be an efficient facilitator and facilitate various collaborative conversations
- Identify team impediments and fix those hurdles with the support of team members
- Build a working agreement with many parties and ensure team members follow those.
- Ensures that we continue to build a relationship with other departments and teams, covering our team. Enables our team members to associate with many teams and team members
- Help the team to diminish conflict. Good conflict resolution skills, such as empathy, negotiation, and settlement enable teams to minimize team conflicts.
- A belief that collective intelligence is the strongest. A collaborative mindset team’s recognizes that the finest ideas and solutions come from an array of sources.
- Let us build a community of individuals who learns from each other by sharing many things, including challenges.
You will discover more such knowledge in my fourth book on “A Guidebook of Coaching High-performance Team” which is showing up in January 2022!
