There Are Only Three Ways to Get People to Work Together
By definition, an entrepreneurial venture is one that requires more experts than only you for it to succeed. There are only three ways to get people to work together: coercion, compromise and collaboration. No one likes being coerced and the best outcome compromise offers is all parties feeling equally inauthentic and taken advantage of. Neither are great strategies for building high performance teams.
That leaves collaboration. Believing in the values and virtues of collaboration will only take you so far. In a world that mainly teaches people to cope with coercion and cater to compromise, only the rarest entrepreneur has sufficient Collaboration Intelligence to create a Collaboration Culture among those who help build her or his venture.
The same thing goes for those you bring onto your team. Even if your people believe in collaboration, it would be a big mistake to assume this means they have mastered the mindset and skills that High Performance Collaboration requires. No harm, no fault. In a coercion- and compromise-based society, that’s just the way it is. (And if you’re a CEO Space member, even though its members and faculty passionately believe in the importance of replacing Competitive Capitalism with Cooperative Capitalism, this doesn’t guarantee that they know the nitty-gritty of how to productively collaborate.)
Collaboration Culture Architecture™
Collaboration is a specific set of actions, not merely a good idea whose time has come. If you are committed to maximizing productivity and profitability without sacrificing enjoyment or integrity, you need a Collaboration Culture Architect™ as one of your advisors at least, perhaps as one of your core team members, or possibly as your MacroMentor™).
What does a Collaboration Culture Architect™ provide? The three basic building blocks of High Performance Collaboration: mindset, co-creation skills and facilitation skills…
- The uses and costs of coercion, compromise and collaboration
- How collaboration is based on a distinctly different set of ground rules than either coercion or compromise
- The motivation people need in order to become willing to invest their time and energy in upgrading their Collaboration IQ
- The Three Ts of Collaboration: Truthfulness (saying what you see), Teachability (seeing what they see), and Transcendence (rising above your preconceptions, position and paradigm to co-discover the pieces of the larger picture that each person has, so a sound course of action based on this can emerge)
- Structuring accountability-capable agreements
- Knowing how to authentically and effectively participate in synergy creation
- Self-responsibility and boundaries intelligence
- Knowing how to recognize when you’re temporarily incapable of collaboration (when you’re triggered or overly agitated), and how to get back into a collaborative state
- Developing wordsmithing skills that make honest self-disclosure and/or feedback useful and collaboration-promoting
- Knowing how to hold yourself and others accountable in ways that build collaboration instead of sabotage it
- Guiding: Using subtle strategies that keep meetings, brainstorming sessions, and work groups maximally collaborative and productive
- Intervening: Knowing when and how to bring the group dynamic back to collaboration when it shifts toward compromise or coercion, and when and how to assist certain individuals off-line rather than in front of the entire group
- Training: Providing you and your people with the “collaboration education we never got but always needed”™
- Embedding: Ensuring that these collaboration mindset and co-creation skills become fully integrated into your culture
- Facilitating: Assisting you, your leadership team and/or your work teams in resolving specific conflicts that they don’t have sufficient Collaboration IQ to handle on their own
- Licensing: Training Collaboration IQ trainers who are licensed to provide overviews, training, embedding and facilitation to your people