How Good is Your Collaboration?
Signs you're probably getting it right
This past week I got to speak as a panelist at a Notion x Figma event for tech leaders. Marking the only time it will be useful to have the word “effectiveness” in my job title, the panel discussed different facets of what effective collaboration looks like, how to do it, and how to scale it.
Because the basic mandate of my job is improving organizational collaboration, I forget how rare it is for people to carve out time to think about this stuff. I hear conversations about collaboration everywhere, but like “alignment” or “innovation,” “collaboration” has become one of those words that is simultaneously empty yet bursting at the seams with meaning.
I regularly hear leaders extoll collaboration’s benefits and implore their teams to “be more collaborative,” while all the heads in the room usually nod along. Yet no matter how much we agree, we’re often not really talking about or thinking about the same thing in practice when we talk about collaboration.
This is partially to be expected: collaboration looks different in different contexts —and it should! Collaborative modes vary by flatness and openness, and unique organizational cultures encourage different types of team behaviors.
However, some ingredients for “effective collaboration” are nearly universal. This idea was the subject of one of the questions I fielded on my panel and the one I spent the most time lingering and discussing with others. In hopes of bringing you into that conversation, here are some of the thoughts I shared:
Q: What does effective collaboration mean and how should you measure it?
Like most things in business, collaboration can be painstakingly metricized and nudged upward if you’re determined to do it. Organizations use a number of metrics, maturity models, and scorecards to define successful collaboration. However, if you’re new to trying to help your team work better together, step away from the scorecards for a second.
I find that we are often hasty in quantifying our work because we believe that doing so will help us prove it’s important. And while diligent measurement is a crucial pursuit a lot of the time, it is also sometimes a superfluous one. My (perhaps unpopular) take is that collaboration, much like trust or good taste, is something you can see and feel more easily than you can figure out how to get it onto a dashboard.
Instead of getting lost in the science/art of quantifying collaboration, consider starting by just looking for the signs that you’re doing it well. Here are the three that, as of late, I find myself coming back to:
1. Everyone is working toward the same goal.
By definition, collaboration (from the Latin “com” → together and “labor” → work) is any act of laboring over a common objective. In theory, that means that if you’ve already set a shared goal, your team is collaborating. In practice, it’s never that simple.
Consider this: if you asked ten people on your team “What are we trying to achieve?” in a perfect collaborative environment you’d hear the same answer ten times. Then, if you asked each person to describe what that goal looks like in detail, you’d hear a singular answer again.
Nailing the answer to the first question isn’t the hard part. Many teams can do it (insert: their company mission, vision, topline OKRs). However, getting your whole team to truly share a vision of success requires uncomfortable amounts of crisp, repetitive communication. If you’re doing that communication well, you’ll likely see these telltale signs:
Everyone answers that second question in the same or similar ways
Your shared goal comes up almost daily in meetings and conversations
When teams get stuck on hard decisions, someone ties things back to the goal
Political conflict is disarmed by reminders that you’re all building the same thing
Not seeing these signs? Consider revisiting your goals to think about if they’re clear enough or if you’ve socialized them with enough care. Try explaining them to someone who has never heard them before and ask if they’re clear. And if it feels like people are a little off target, always start with the assumption that you haven’t drawn a clear enough target for them, not that they’re defiantly straying from the plan.
2. Collaborators are playing to their strengths and balancing each other’s weaknesses.
If you’ve ever played a team sport, you’ve probably experienced the joy of working with a group of people who are all good at slightly different things. I played highly competitive club soccer for many years as a child, and while I couldn’t sprint to save my life, I was loud and confident with a solid vertical jump. I was quickly cast as a goalkeeper, while my fastest friends played striker positions, and the tall girls with awesome kicking legs played defense. Technically, you could say we were all good at the same thing (soccer). But the secret to our team’s success was never that we had the uniquely most talented girls — it was always that we were well-balanced as a unit.
Sports teams are the masters of this collaborative superpower. They build rosters of players who can all be the very best at something while still being equals on the overall team. Yet, what team managers and coaches do so intuitively, so many corporate managers and leaders struggle to do at all.
Many of us hire people and build teams full of people who are eerily like us — whether we realize it or not. Conversations about hiring bias aside, it’s understandable why too. We meet people who share our beliefs and mirror our skill sets, and we can imagine the way the team will just gel together if everyone “gets” everyone else.
The trouble is, when everyone spikes high in the same superpowers and brings the same perspectives to the table, not only are you under-optimizing for the benefits of collaboration, but you’re also setting teams up for conflict and disappointment over peoples’ relevance and importance.
Employees may compete for tasks, one-up each other, or even when they exist in harmony, render each other duplicative because a manager over-built their team around one skill profile. As a leader, it’s important to build teams where you’re getting the maximum talent and contribution out of every member while giving the space and security to shine. This balance takes a lot of intention to nurture and maintain, but if you’re wondering if you’ve achieved it, look for the following signs:
People bring truly distinct perspectives and opinions into team meetings instead of just “plus one-ing” their peers’ contributions
Team members report understanding their roles and what they bring to the table
Employees aren’t battling for pieces of work or knowingly duplicating each other’s efforts
People report feeling like their expertise is respected and cherished
When you hire new people, it adds something notably new to the group
If you’re not seeing any of these things, you might need to think about how to assign work or create cross-functional working opportunities to let your people flourish in new settings where they bring something unique to the table.
3. People are striking the right balance between seeking context and focus.
The last, and arguably both the hardest + most essential, element of strong collaboration to look for is what I can only describe as an artful balance between context and focus.
I’m fanatical about context, and my colleagues hear me talk about it all the time. So often when our brilliant, well-intentioned peers make decisions we can’t make sense of, it’s not because they don’t know how to approach decisions… they’re missing critical context that would have let them make better ones.
As a leader, I obsess over trying to make sure my teams have the right amount of context. I want them to know enough about our market, our company’s long-term goals, other teams’ priorities, our employees’ emotional experiences, and the general backdrop of what’s happening at work to be able to make sense of the things they observe and hear about.
But concurrently, I also don’t want them to spend their days mining irrelevant Slack channels for every piece of information that might interest them or sitting in meetings where they maybe could be useful. This challenge is, in my opinion, the single hardest part of collaboration. Having the exact right amount of information to be useful and relevant but not so much as to get distracted by false flags and irrelevant side quests is impossible, but teams that get the closest to right make great decisions, ship quickly, and enjoy work.
While there are so many facets of this one… here’s what you’re looking for:
People have enough time/peace to focus on the hardest parts of their jobs
Generally, people complete projects they start
No one except for senior leaders is taking 20+ hours of meetings per week
When people make decisions, it’s clear what info they need and how to get it
If you ask anyone on your team what their priorities are, no one says more than 5 things
People are comfortable saying “no” to asks from others, and they do so frequently
Leaders regularly cascade at least a version of the information they’re spending the most time thinking about to the whole company
Of course, you can be doing all of these things right and still feel like you’re miles away from healthy, productive team collaboration. But if your team is clear on their goal, each member knows what their unique role is in achieving that goal, and people generally can focus on their part without losing sight of the greater whole… you’re probably doing better than you think. Go take your team to lunch. Take a moment to reflect on how cool the messiness and joy of working with others is. Then come back and let me know what you wish your team could do better.
Thanks — always — for reading. Talk soon.