OPINION: Critical factors for effective collaboration
Are collaborative behaviors necessary to reach your business objectives? If your company doesn't highlight collaboration as an important area of focus, will your business suffer?
Successful relationships are a necessary pre-condition for collaborative communication – that’s the key phrase that started to formulate in my mind at 2:30am as I lay awake thinking over this topic a few weeks before publication deadline.
The next day, that statement drove me to rethink a few central questions: “In terms of communication, what is relevant to your strategic success?” and “What do you need to be successful in your operations?” in the context of collaborative or unilateral communications. Or, looked at from a different perspective: “What adverse operational and strategic effects can non-collaboration give rise to?”
The path to enabling collaboration
Of course, as an overarching tool, the rapidly developing technologies of communication infrastructure help us nurture and develop collaboration across regional boundaries or silos. We rely a lot these days on the internet, emails and mobile technology to connect us and deliver the information we need quickly, ubiquitously. But more importantly, there’s the human side of life and communication and its processes, not just the mere application of technology to communication.
There’s an existing culture focused on honing and developing one’s interpersonal skills set, especially in negotiations where you want to create win-win outcomes. My focus is more on recognizing the need to have strong interpersonal relations skills as a prerequisite to establishing collaboration in the first place, otherwise you will meet with resistance, push-back, and territorial conflict in reaction to forced collaboration, akin to coercion.
Obviously, organizational units work more harmoniously when there is broad consensual agreement about what will be done, but also how it will be done. In other words, ensuring the common business communication processes are aligned, not all regions doing their own thing, paves the way for collaborative successes. Seeking regional input during communication planning lays some of this groundwork. No outcomes are ever guaranteed but within such settings trust and generative dialogues often emerge.
The necessity of partnering and technology
Collaboration is the future of business. In today’s wired world, our capacity to connect using hi-tech tele-communications networks and devices allows us not only to coordinate, but also to build cooperative relationships with colleagues and clients so our pan-regional or even global businesses operate more effectively. The technology-driven engineering we use for our engine to get from point A to point B in this wired world is nonetheless, fundamentally still dependent on the success of collaborative people relationships. No matter how sophisticated and ubiquitous the architecture and gizmos.
There are times where organizational communicators from business, industry and government manage unilaterally, but that is most-often not the case in today’s broader socioeconomic climate given the potential for reach, influence and impact. As a matter of fact, effective national and international internal communication, for example, is most-often preluded by the necessity for pre-established cooperative relationships with a supportive and engaged communication network of stakeholders and processes across geographical boundaries to ensure smooth and effective implementation. This principle may sound simple or obvious, but it isn't necessarily that easy to do.
Then what are a few prerequisites and critical success factors that play into collaborative communications environments nowadays? Collaboration among stakeholders is precluded by cooperation and gets built on established, trusting relationships for sure. The literature, training and methods for creating and nurturing effective interpersonal relationships are innumerable and corporate libraries are packed with the latest approaches on how these skills are applied to meet organizational needs.
A sustainable communication network, one that operates in real-time is essential.
Delayed communications from HQ to regional satellite offices is really an anachronism in our current age of mobile apps and cell phones, emails, and social networks on the internet. We want it fast, we want it now. Immediate gratification, technologically-speaking. Reaching audiences reliably across the country or even around the world depends on a robust and agile infrastructure. Without this, we are destined to fall behind in our desired business outcomes.
Creating the correct environment
Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but distributed communications initiatives from HQ to regional satellites or vice versa rely on complementary interaction between HQ and regional satellites in the first place. Although sophisticated communications instruments navigate in a big landscape, using common communications channels among local and regional offices still requires a foundation in relationships, a priority.
Fundamental to all this relationship-building is enabling the climate for collaboration to happen. So, as you probably expected employee engagement and connectivity with the objectives and priorities of an organization’s business lines is a necessary ingredient in the recipe. It’s the need to get plugged in. No outcomes are ever guaranteed but within such settings trust and generative dialogues often emerge.
People and processes go hand-and-glove, yet managing the relationships through collaboration across the enterprise is still the forerunner for success in our hi-tech world.
Have your say
How do you enable the climate for collaboration at your company? Share your stories...
Recommended resources:
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Internal communication should encourage organizational collaboration
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