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Improving global collaboration

What’s missing, says Cerreto, is the “bigger picture” of the broader collaborative network. In addition to tracking whether or not deliverables are met and schedules are adhered to, managers also need to put processes in place to monitor how the group as a whole is making decisions, resolving conflicts and sharing information, among other things.

Part of the difficulty is simply human nature. “People are tribal by nature, so we’re comfortable operating as members of smaller groups or teams,” he notes. “Our familiarity is around team building versus collaborative stakeholder building so we don’t always fully understand our role in the context of a larger, more complex collaboration.”

A structured approach

To provide organizations with a structured approach for improving global relationships, whether across enterprises, regions or countries, HP has partnered with Aperian Global to help Aperian develop the Global Collaboration Toolkit. The formal methodology and service enables organizations to assess the level of program collaboration among stakeholders, and puts all participants on record as members of one large network whose association is critical to the program’s success.

The resulting data forms the basis for making improvements and, according to Leri, the next steps can be anything from developing protocols for communicating by e-mail and teleconference, to creating standard processes for raising issues and concerns, to clarifying the rewards and metrics that will be used to measure the collaboration’s progress.

While some gaps are obvious—like those related to work function or culture—others are more subtle. For example, one large global IT organization uncovered strong gaps in perception between employees who had been with the company over a long period versus those who were recently hired. A global healthcare business that relies on partners in the U.S., China and Europe discovered that the partners in China were receiving conflicting messages and were therefore finding it difficult to prioritize work.

“What we find is that collaborative networks need to come up with some shared understanding of how they will communicate,” says Leri. “We often bring some assumptions into our work life about what appropriate behavior is, and when you’re working cross-organizationally or cross-functionally or with external partners, those assumptions may not be shared.”

Ideally the Toolkit should be applied at the start of a collaborative network and then used to track ongoing progress. In Leri’s experience, most companies don’t realize they have a collaboration problem until they’re already feeling pain.

“Many of the people we work with feel as if they’ve been drop kicked from unconscious incompetence to conscience incompetence,” she notes, alluding to one company that had its “Aha!” moment when it realized information that shouldn’t have been shared outside the collaborative network was actually getting out. “For others, it’s about time. It’s taking too much time for groups to work together smoothly, so they start to look for a tool to facilitate the process,” she says.

In huge organizations with multiple collaborative partnerships, taking the time to apply the Toolkit and gather stakeholder input is often all that’s required to move relationships forward, she adds. “One of our clients went from having a reputation as being one of the most difficult companies to work with to being told that they’re now the easiest,” says Leri. “And using the Global Collaboration Toolkit, they have the metrics to prove it.”

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