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.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
