The Psychology of Collaborative Teams

Collaboration or Collaborative Teams: - People working with different expertise and perspectives to accomplish goals that benefit the wider organization.

People are ‘invited’ who have different job functions such as marketing, technology, or customer service. Invitations extend to contractors, clients, and people from other organizations and countries. The purpose of the ‘collaborative invitation’ is to generate ideas or to solve a problem, enabling access to a diverse spectrum of opinions, expertise, different experiences, knowledge, and skills.

Collaborative Teams work best when tackling a major initiative like an acquisition or an overhaul of IT systems, where companies usually rely on large, diverse teams of highly educated specialists to get the job done. These teams are often convened quickly to meet an urgent need and may work together in person and virtually.

Assembling such a team is frequently the only way to obtain the knowledge and breadth required to pull off many of the complex tasks businesses face today. Take, for example, Marriott Hotels, which develops sophisticated systems to enhance guest experiences; they collaborate closely with independent hotel owners, customer-experience experts, global brand managers, and regional heads, each with their own agenda and needs.

Collaborative Teams see increased levels of trust, a more engaged workforce, and improved performance. One study has shown that collaborative teams are five times higher performing because they feel motivated towards a common goal. Running a collaborative team is no simple feat.

Although similar to ordinary teamwork, a collaborative team is a partnership (the same as a High-Performance Team) that is not hierarchical – everyone has equal status, no matter their seniority.

Usual reasons to form a Collaborative Team:

1.    Address a short-term or one-off problem such as a merger or acquisition.

2.    Share knowledge and resources.

3.    Pool negotiating power.

4.    Strategize.

5.    Create new products.

6.    Be more cost-effective, creative, and competitive.

7.    Increase employee engagement options and opportunities for cross-skilling and networking

There can be two types of Collaborative Teams:

1.    Open: - which involves inviting responses from people across the business to solve big, wide-ranging problems.

2.    Closed: - where a smaller group of people with specialist expertise collaborate to achieve a defined objective. Closed works best when you have a specific problem requiring specialist skills or knowledge. As a result, closed collaborative teams tend to be much smaller than Open ones. Closed limits the number of collaborators to only those with specialist knowledge of the topic.

Collaborative Teams do not rely upon the use of any specific type of App; rather, they are underpinned by Information Sharing Apps they use virtual file-sharing such as Trello, MS-Teams, Slack, Pumble, Confluence, Dapulse, Miro, Google Docs and Drive, Microsoft SharePoint and ProofHub.

High-Performance Teams are natural Collaborative Teams; therefore, if you have or have experience with a High-Performance Team, you need only specify a collaborative project.

How to do it

1.  Establish Purpose

First, you need to have a strong shared purpose. Before setting up a Collaborative Team (which is managed as a project) take some time to identify what you want the team to achieve by setting goals, expected results (milestones) and business outcomes (growth, profitability.)

2.  Specify Tools, Plan, Roles, and Goals

1.    Tool: - Use an existing Information Sharing tool, preferably one that everyone will know (you do not want to waste time with people having to learn a new tool. Excel or Google Docs are good choices here.) Only introduce a new tool if the project has a long lifespan. (49% of the millennials back social tools for collaborative information sharing, with 31% of baby boomers and 40% of Generation X agreeing.)

2.    Plan: - Create a high-level Schedule (Gantt Chart) with the known Phases, Activities, and any Tasks. Do only enough for what is known but leave room for the team to work on the plan.

3.    Roles: - Define team member roles which should include details about what each role is expected to carry out collaboratively. By differentiating these, clear boundaries are set between what they should take personal responsibility for and what needs to work on collectively.

4.    Goals: - A team that knows their individual as well as collective goals, helps to reduce silos and keep everyone productive. Make goals equal milestones with deliverables.

3.  Establish if Open or Closed

Your choice will depend on the problem that you need to solve. If you want to get ideas for a new product, for instance, you might want to invite responses from people across the business, as well as your customers. If this is the case, Open collaboration will be the best.

4.  Establish a Team

Assign a Team Leader who owns the Collaborative Project. Assign team roles as research shows this encourages people to take responsibility and avoids time being wasted on negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. The project will likely have a fixed or short-term lifespan.

Aim for a High-Performance Team

High-Performance Collaborative Teams do not face the issues that ordinary teams face (ordinary teams are less likely to share knowledge freely, learn from one another, shift workloads flexibly, break up unexpected bottlenecks, help one another complete job and meet deadlines, and share resources - in other words, collaborate) as the members of High-Performance teams already inherently share knowledge, teach each other and plan together. High-Performance Teams want one another to succeed and view their goals as mutual and compatible.

5.  Get the Right People

Once you've set your goals, you need to identify the people who are best placed to achieve them. This is particularly important when you use closed collaboration. Think about people who have relevant expertise, who are good at challenging assumptions and can contribute different perspectives.

Reasons for the Invitation

Think about how involvement can benefit each person being invited. Describe the wider strategic goal, like fine-tuning a process to increase income, which can be persuasive. Outline the personal benefits such as the opportunity to teach others, personal recognition, the opportunity to learn new skills, career progression, or the chance of a bonus.

6.  Issue the Invitations

Issue invitations to participate, describing the project type (collaborative), the names of the invitees (specializations), reasons for their invitation and the chance to collaborate. Identify the invitation as either voluntary or mandated as some people might see it as an imposition on their time and be worried about the extra work.

7.  Launch the Project

Get the team together, and recognise that collaboration can demand a lot from people. Stress that it means being open-minded, listening to other people's opinions and putting personal agendas aside. Assign people's roles, announce everyone’s specializations, and provide the opening Project Plan.

1.  Open the Project

Define and communicate the team's goals. Link the goals to the company's mission over and over again. Highlight individuals' strengths and the reasons for their invitation.

2.  Work the Plan

Present the Project Schedule as it is so far, have the team explode the schedule and create Version 1.

3.  Communicate your expectations for collaboration

Sharing knowledge, insight, resources and solving problems. Knowledge, as they say, is power. And if knowledge is shared amongst your team, they will feel more empowered to contribute on an even playing field. Create spaces physical and virtual where your team can share their insights, discuss successes and failures, and give each other constructive feedback.

4.  Foster honest and open communication

Good team collaboration relies on open and truthful communication. The more people feel they can contribute, the more ideas can be shared, and the more productive the team will become. For introverted team members, this part of the process might not come naturally. If you create a Psychologically Safe working environment where team members feel safe from judgment, they are more likely to speak openly and contribute their ideas freely. The safer the environment for communication, the more collaborative that space will become.

5.  Encourage creativity

A collaborative team is an innovative one. Likewise, creating the space for creativity will help foster collaboration. It's a virtuous circle. Brainstorming sessions can be a great way of opening up your team to creative thinking. An environment where they can put forward and challenge ideas will help employees feel like they have a stake in the company's mission.

6.  Start each day with a morning Huddle

A daily morning huddle is a good starting point. At the same time each day, invite your team to get together and discuss their goals, tasks for the day, and opportunities where teamwork would be beneficial. These environments can help teams to align themselves and avoid duplication or oversight and remember that when people feel that their opinion matters, they are more likely to apply themselves more.

Collaborative Team Characteristics

Collaborative teams are often large, diverse, composed of highly educated specialists and can be virtual. But these four characteristics can make it hard for teams to get anything done, requiring each to be carefully managed.

1.  Team Size

Team sizes have grown over the last ten years, with new technologies helping companies extend participation in a project to an ever-greater number of people, allowing companies to tap into a wide body of knowledge and expertise. A decade or so ago, teams rarely had more than 20 members. Today many complex tasks involve teams of 100 or more. However, as the size of a team increases beyond 20 members, the tendency to collaborate decreases. Creating the right conditions and achieving high levels of cooperation requires thoughtful and sometimes significant investments in collaborative processes.

2.  Diversity

The challenging tasks facing businesses today almost always require the input and expertise of people with disparate views and backgrounds to create cross-fertilization that sparks insight and innovation. But diversity also creates problems. Research shows that team members collaborate more easily and naturally if they perceive themselves as being alike. The differences that inhibit collaboration include not only nationality but also age, educational level, and even tenure. Greater diversity also often means that team members are working with people they know only superficially or have never met before - colleagues drawn from other company divisions or from outside it. The higher the proportion of strangers on the team and the greater the diversity of background and experience, the less likely the team members are to share knowledge or exhibit other collaborative behaviours.

3.  Expertise

The higher the educational level of the team members is, the more challenging collaboration is. The greater the proportion of experts a team has, the more likely it is to disintegrate into non-productive conflict or stalemate. So how do you strengthen the team’s ability to perform complex collaborative tasks—to maximize the effectiveness of large, diverse teams while minimizing the disadvantages posed by their structure and composition?

Success depends upon

Collaborative teams can succeed by emphasizing things such as the design of tasks and company culture, both of which contribute to a willingness to share knowledge and workloads. To help teams overcome the difficulties posed by size, long-distance communication, diversity, and specialization, five things are needed: - A Strong Team Leader, Team Formation, Role Clarity and Task Ambiguity, Socialization and Executive Support.

1.  A Strong Team Leader

Assign a team leader who is skilled in the practice of collaboration or has a strong project management background and is both task- and relationship-oriented. The relationship orientation, especially in complex teams, means people are more likely to share knowledge in an environment of trust and goodwill. A team leader that naturally encourages cooperation, appreciates others, can engage in purposeful conversations, can resolve conflicts, and understands the basics of program management. The task orientation, the ability to make objectives clear, create a shared awareness of the dimensions of the task, and provide monitoring and feedback is also important.

The right Team Leader will change their style during the project. At the outset, they need to exhibit task-oriented leadership by clarifying goals, engaging in debates about commitments, and clarifying the responsibilities of individual team members. However, at a certain point in the project's development, they need to switch to a relationship orientation. This shift must occur once team members have nailed down the goals and their accountabilities and when the initial tensions around sharing knowledge have begun to emerge.

2.  Team Formation

Developing and managing Collaborative Teams has to do with the makeup and structure of the teams themselves. Given how important trust is to successful collaboration, forming teams that capitalize on pre-existing or “heritage” relationships increases the chances of a project’s success. New teams, particularly those with a high proportion of members who are strangers at the time of formation, find it more difficult to collaborate than those with established relationships.

Newly formed teams must invest significant time and effort in building trusting relationships. However, when some team members already know and trust one another, they can become nodes, evolving over time into networks. When 20% to 40% of the team members are already connected to one another, the team has stronger collaboration right from the start.

3.  Role Clarity and Task Ambiguity

Collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood—when individuals feel they can do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members will likely waste too much energy negotiating roles or protecting turf rather than focusing on the task. In addition, team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team’s goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as requiring creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest time and energy in collaboration.

4.  Socialization

Teams do well when there is an investment in supporting social relationships, that is, social events like team lunches, after-work drinks and physical spaces where the team members. can congregate.

5.  Executive Support

The team needs to witness the collaborative behaviour of the Executive team; this is crucial to supporting a culture of collaboration. To do this requires executives’ collaborative behaviour to be visible, which is best done at the Project launch with the invitee's Executives being present. The senior team’s collaborative nature trickles down throughout the organization and into collaborative teams. This helps employees to quickly learn that the best way to get things done is through informal networks.

Yesterday’s teams, however, didn’t require the same number of members, diversity, long-distance cooperation, or expertise that teams now need to solve global business challenges.

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