Increase Your Collaboration

Collaboration is critical to innovating successfully. Working within any sector no two employees are the same, each has a unique set of skills and knowledge.  Whether it be skill with understanding physical mechanisms and designing complex experiments or in-depth knowledge about a supply chains.  A company’s greatest asset is the knowledge lying within its employees.  Monetizing this growing and diverse knowledge base can occur faster and more complete by connecting all of this knowledge. 

poster session

Connecting the knowledge that lies within the heads of our employees can occur easiest through collaboration.

According to Miriam Webster the definition of collaboration is:

: to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavors
 
I think that ’employees helping employees’ summarizes well the concept of collaboration any business related topic should be considered ‘intellectual endeavors’.
 
This is all well and good but we can not ignore the fact that collaboration does not always come easily. I have worked for almost 20 years and with dozens of R&D scientists, engineers and technicians through the years and have never met one that always enjoys collaborating. There are good reasons that we do not want to collaborate, however I think the biggest reason is the need to get credit  for our work, we need credit for our work if we are to enjoy career growth.
 
Why should I share my latest ideas, insights and learnings with people who will then pitch them to management and take credit?
 
This is the number one obstacle to collaboration and I believe is the number one hindrance to speeding up R&D and innovation.
 
This credit issue is not always easy to talk about, it is like the elephant in the room, it is not related to technical skill or intelligence but is a behavioral management issue, it is an organizational health issue, we feel selfish to admit that we want credit, we feel selfish to say ” why should I work with him or help him, when I wont get any credit?”  But the truth is most of us feel that way, most of us realize we need credit, we need managers to recognize and give us credit if we are to go anywhere in our career. Those heavily promoted are almost always skilled at getting credit for their own and/ or other people’s work.
 
Imagine what we could do together if it did not matter who got the credit.
 
Below are three ways I think that we can increase collaboration within large innovation centered organizations:
  1. Design and enforce a corporate-wide fair distribution of credit, being mindful and cautions of the type of people who you are promoting, don’t allow credit stealing, don’t allow champions at politicking to dominate the culture, remember we get more of what we promote, for the good or for the bad. Promote collaborators, promote teachers, promote maturity in your workforce not extreme loyalty.
  2. Employ social collaboration tools, software for social collaboration is growing rapidly, these tools will only become more widespread and I believe should be adopted as soon as possible.
  3. Build an indexed storehouse of corporate knowledge of summarized reports and IP.  Knowledge management and access is critical to minimize re-learning, parallel learning and total loss of learnings to email and overworked managers.

 What else hinders collaboration within organizations?

Teaching – One Pillar of Healthy Innovation

I think there are three pillars to healthy innovation within a company or university.

  1. Teaching
  2. Collaboration
  3. Organizational Health

Leave-Me-Alone

In this post I’d like to discuss teaching, I’ll touch on the others in later posts.

Have you ever encountered scientists or engineers who refuse to change their innovation habits?  They seem to know everything, they ridicule most efforts at managing innovation and are almost impossible to influence.

I’ve acted this way myself, scoffing at attempts to manage innovation, telling managers and the like to just leave me alone, I’ll figure it out and send you a report. There is value in just leaving a good innovator alone but that is just one tool of many in innovation management.

The accumulation of knowledge tends to increase ego, if you’ve spent a lot of time around certain University professors it is not hard to see this:

1 Corinthians 8:1 … knowledge puffs up …

Valuable R&D professionals discover, accumulate and manage knowledge very efficiently.

We need to lead our innovative teams in a way that will both cause our most innovative R&D pros to collaborate together and in a way that does not trigger anger and resistance.

I am convinced that there is a win-win if we can encourage our scientists to teach.  If we can get our R&D professionals to teach one another, teach leadership, and document learning’s with a motive of teaching this will trigger collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and a feeling of being engaged, (which will speed up innovation long-term).  The great thing about teaching is that it appeals to intellectual ego that can cause us to be uncooperative at times.

What are  other tips at getting R&D professionals to collaborate?

Are We Too ‘Career Selfish’ ?

I once devised the term ‘career selfish” in response to how I felt I was being treated in an organization.  I had gotten to the point that I could look at unfair situations within my organizations and instead of anger I began to look with empathy, I was able to put myself in the shoes of leadership and analyze the situation.

I started my career a little too early as a technician, a 20 year old associates degree technician in a sea of PhD’s, of MBA’s, and of professional engineers, I had only an associates degree at the time so the hierarchical obstacles seemed insurmountable.   I never gave up the ambition of trying to move up, of trying to get recognition and credit for my work and get promoted. I don’t know how many times I told my supervisors “hey, I have a career too… I care about my future here also, please care about my development, please care about my career..”.   What I came to realize is how common career selfishness is, myself included.  Whether it be credit stealing, kingdom building or simply not caring about the people around us.  Career selfishness is toxic when found in any organization, career selfish leaders create unhealthy cultures and career selfish employees.

A career selfish leader does not develop people that they do not like personally, any prejudice, any difference in political or ideological or worldview is a set back to the career of those under them.  They often have tight circles of like-minded allies and buddies.  The career selfish person can be great if you are in their circle but horrible for your career if you can’t seem to get into or don’t want to be in their circle.

me-me-me

There needs to be a space in a leaders life that develops people not because they like them, because they agree with them about politics, because they are the optimal gender or race that fits their biases well but simply because they are leading them on behalf of the company or organization. Leadership requires selflessness in this regard. An employee should be led well, developed to their fullest potential simply because they are a part of the organization, because they are a paid employee.  The thoughtful leader is smart enough to realize how important it is to have a healthy organization and is able to professionally develop and foster a healthy culture.

Career selfish people often begat other career selfish people, they promote career selfish, they encourage that behavior because they believe that behavior got them to where they are and will bring success in the future.  They call it “dog eat dog” or say “I am a shrewd businessman”

So what can we do if we find ourselves in the midst of an organization, or even our own career that has been career selfish.

A few suggestions:

  1. Let your supervisor/manager and surrounding team members know that you are trying to make them successful both in the professional goals of the team but also in their career and development, let them see your new selflessness.  This might be awkward at first, but it takes an effort to change culture.
  2. Tell your boss that you want to grow, that you care about your career, ask for help in your personal development and if they wont then work to leave that organization.
  3. If you’ve been selfish, simply apologize and start helping people under and around you.

I think leaders often have absolutely no idea how their behavior affects culture and the behavior of their direct reports. I love this quote from organizational development consultant Patrick Lencioni, speaking to leaders.

This is bigger than you think, you are part of people’s lives, and as  managers and leaders the way you manage and lead your people impacts this world in ways you just can not imagine…they treat their spouses and kids and neighbors and friends differently based on how you manage and lead them. – Patrick Lencioni

What are some other ways that can we overcome career selfishness in our organizations?

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