collaboration

Have you ever worked in a setting where teams were cut off from communicating and sharing information, or what is known as a siloed work environment? Organizational silos are most commonly brought on by a lack of collaboration in a company, and they are almost always a detriment to the business. Collaboration means sharing knowledge, combining skills among individuals or groups, and learning from others. It is a key component of effective leadership, but not many leaders prioritize building the skills to support a truly collaborative environment. What can you start doing today to build collaboration for yourself and your team?

Collaboration is a method of teamwork involving cooperating with other teams and partnering across teams. Effective collaboration builds more effective teams to overcome obstacles, create professional alliances, and transfer great ideas across the company. 

Poor collaboration becomes an urgent issue when information is siloed, progress is hindered, and work is redundant and inefficient. Aside from the time lost, this could also cause serious financial issues for a company when work is wasted or repeated. 

In the past, I worked with a leader who would have claimed that she was committed to creating collaboration channels. In reality, this person was the one responsible for inventing silos across the company and cutting off collaboration. She might have thought she was focused on building skills to create collaboration for her teams, but her controlling actions and decisions were suppressing it. 

If you start taking action to create collaboration, your leadership skills will be built and the results of effective collaboration will follow. Ask yourself these questions to understand the current state of your leadership approach to collaboration, and what you can do to increase collaboration on your team:

Do you personally collaborate well?

• As a team lead, do you provide feedback, input, or direct work contribution to your team and those you lead? Or are you more of a status-reporting figure for your team?
• Do you have relationships across your organization or company? Do people from other parts of the company come to you, or do you go to them to share ideas? Or do you exclusively communicate and socialize with the team you lead or the person you report to?
• Do you consider yourself informed about what other teams are working on in your company? Or do you find yourself surprised when you learn about other teams’ projects, especially those that could have used your or your team’s expertise?

Does your team collaborate well?

• Do the people on your team have formal or informal channels for sharing information with others across the company? Or do they exclusively communicate and socialize within the team?
• Do other teams come to your team, or does your team go to other teams for questions or information sharing? Do they have formal or informal opportunities to share information? Or does your team exclusively work within their own group with no communication to outside teams?

How do you foster collaboration? 

Isolation and silos created by a lack of collaboration can cost you, your team, and your company time, money, and quality work output. It can benefit your work environment to share information with individuals or groups outside of your projects even if your work does not require this kind of interaction in your day-to-day responsibilities. Anyone in a company can create opportunities for sharing information and working together, you do not have to be a formal team lead to do so. If the company culture is the problem, small goals can help you begin to introduce collaboration.

Team collaboration

As a team leader, you should recognize your role in information sharing in managing your team’s work. The leader I formerly worked with and mentioned above cut off teams internally from speaking to each other and sharing information. She had about four individual team leaders reporting to her, with teams under them. All project updates from the individual team leaders had to go through her, and she was in control of sharing the information with the other team leads, or not. Unfortunately, this meant different teams were working on the same or related projects, and they didn’t know. This leader instituted a strong top-down leadership hierarchy where teams internally were not given any forum for sharing project updates with each other. Besides being ineffective for the day-to-day work, it was also embarrassing when the team leads found out what the other team leads were working on, the overlap to their own work, and how they could have helped each other. This leader created the silos within her group by being the information bottleneck.

In this case, this leader should have created a forum where her direct reports could share information with each other, especially when there was an overlap in project scope, requirements, or stakeholders. It would have been easiest to allow the individual team leaders to share information directly with each other in a regular meeting, or have a virtual forum (chat group, dashboard, etc.) where these leaders could collaborate. A leader should recognize how their teams can better collaborate internally, and create channels of collaboration within the teams they lead.

Cross-company collaboration

Networking with people (teams, leaders, or contributors at any level) in the company that you don’t formally report to or work with is a great way to build professional relationships for yourself and your team. You should also make sure that your direct reports are in touch with the right people needed to accomplish their work. This can be accomplished formally (through structured team meetings) or informally (through social events, or informal conversations).

The leader in this example forbade people on her team from informally talking to people on other teams. Only formal meetings were allowed when speaking to someone on another team, and this leader insisted that she had to be invited to those meetings. This went as far as not allowing lunches or coffee breaks with someone else in the company if they were not within the department. (You can guess that such social outings were simply hidden from this leader.) While this leader thought they were creating collaboration by creating formal channels she could control, she was also prohibiting the informal channels where a lot of collaboration is fostered. These informal channels did not need her control or oversight, they should have just been allowed to grow.

Informal connections are a key piece of successful collaboration in a workplace environment for you and the members of your team, especially across to other parts of the compay. When working in person, informal meetings could be coffee breaks or stopping by someone’s office to simply introduce yourself. In a remote workplace, a little more effort is needed to make the connection over chat or email, but the collaboration can be just as successful in the form of a short, reoccurring meeting invite where the conversation can be about work or casual topics. The key to informal collaboration is maintaining the connection over time.

Conclusion

Although workplace silos are common, an environment that encourages collaboration can be built. You can create channels for sharing information and making connections for yourself and the people who work for you. If you understand the landscape of your work, your team’s work, and the company, you can identify how to foster collaboration formally or informally. The result will be a more connected workplace.