Network Roundtable: Building Collaborative Teams

The current presentation at the Network Roundtable conference is from Tamara Erickson, who has an article out in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review on Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Her organization, The Concours Institute, has recently completed an extensive study on collaboration in over 50 teams in 15 multi-nationals. She defines innovation as the combination of two previously unrelated ideas. Team complexity, including group dversity, size, and geographic dispersion, all led to lower levels of performance. In addition, the more educated the group, the less collaborative they tended to be. For complex teams, you have to invest specifically if you want them to perform well.

In the study Erickson identified eight factors that demonstrably improve team performance:

* Choose employees carefully

* Invest in signature relationship practices

* Model collaborative behaviors

* Train leaders in both tasks and relationships

* Understand role clarity and task ambiguity

* Ensure requisite skills

* Create a strong sense of community

* Build from heritage relationships

She used a variety of interesting examples from organizations such as Goldman Sachs, Nokia, BP, and Royal Bank of Scotland on specific practices that support collaborative behavior. Interestingly, they found no correlation between incentive schemes to support collboration and actual collaborative behaviors. However there was real return on investing in bringing people together to get to know each other. Team leaders required both task skills and relationship skills – neither alone was sufficient. Interestingly, they found that in teams, clear tasks and ambiguous roles did not lead to good results, whereas ambiguous tasks and clear roles supported effective outcomes.

This seems like a useful study in getting more detail on what organizations can do to enhance collaboration, in a world where collaboation drives organizational performance more than just about any other factor.