How many times in your business career have you been in an organization where real energy was expended to building collaboration skills? How successful were these efforts? Building collaboration in the workplace is not an easy job, is it? But we’d all agree that the payoffs certainly outweigh the efforts, wouldn’t we?
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
Over the years in my career, I’ve had the good fortune of being exposed to many smart people and worked as part of many teams trying to build collaboration and sharing. It never ceases to amaze me how just a few moments of discussion, or sitting and listening to well-thought-out debates, can open your mind to ideas you can’t believe you didn’t think of on your own.
In General Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to transform the Special Forces in Iraq, he ran into challenges trying to get diverse teams to work together. Yet he saw that by building connections between units he could build a “team of teams” that was able to effectively coordinate action. In One Mission, his aide-de-camp, Chris Fussell, describes two strategies used to achieve this effect.
The first was to leverage high-performing liaison officers to build personal connections among disparate units. The second, called the “O&I” forum, was a daily video conference that was designed to create informal connections between officers at an “operational cadence.” Since leaving the military, McChrystal and Fussell have had similar success implementing these strategies in civilian organizations at their consulting group.
Creative convergence depends on group collaboration … how well do you work in groups?
I have always found the wisdom of others to be something of a gift: free of charge, no limit to its value. No limits to its value because these pearls of wisdom can be connected to some of your ideas to produce something greater than what you might have created on your own.
For example, consider this example. It takes a great entrepreneur with the vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and the collaboration of many people to make it a success.
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is more than the intersection of common goals, but a collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.
Collaboration is an attribute that cuts across many businesses and business processes. We need to make it an intentional process and cultivate it into the team’s culture.
In an atmosphere where your value is defined by your ability to share your expertise rather than safeguard it, collaboration is crucial. In this Center for Applied Insights study, Charting the Social Universe, respondents were asked how they defined the term “social business.”
Their response? It’s all about collaboration: 74 percent defined a social business as one that uses social technology to foster collaboration among customers, employees, and partners.
Collaboration doesn’t happen overnight. To better understand organizations’ approaches to adopting social, they were asked which social capabilities they had deployed, and for what business purposes. From these questions, four important ideas were derived:
Drive both internal and external collaboration
Build and educate employees
Gain customer insights and engage them
Use what you learned to improve business processes
Examples of collaboration in the workplace.
Let’s examine driving internal and external collaboration, which was the most common entry point for organizations. This idea includes social capabilities such as collaborative apps, enterprise social networks, and social media marketing. The study outlines some additional key findings, but here are the insights from organizations focused on driving internal and external collaboration:
Because this ambition is often a company’s entry point into society, many are still in a relatively immature phase:
43 percent of respondents say they’re in the early stages of adopting these types of capabilities. But that will soon change as 53 percent say they’ll have an enterprise-wide strategy for these capabilities in the next two to three years.
69 percent have no formal qualitative metrics to assess the effectiveness of these social capabilities. Instead, they have a general, informal sense of their performance. But, interestingly, their #1 concern when deploying these capabilities is uncertainty in the return on investment.
It’s all about encouragement:
What was their #1 catalyst for deploying these capabilities? 39 percent say employee evangelists championed the use of these social capabilities.
52 percent say the best way to drive the adoption of these capabilities internally is regular encouragement.
And two wildcards jumped out to the study team:
54 percent have a published set of guidelines for these capabilities.
For social media marketing, Facebook is most commonly used, followed by Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
Are you looking to drive internal and external collaboration within your organization? Want your employees to share their unique knowledge and expertise instead of keeping it to themselves?
Here are a few tips you need to consider:
Develop formal metrics to prove the value of your social efforts.
Successful collaboration in the workplace.
Pursue an enterprise social strategy.
Identify employee evangelists to spread the word about social capabilities.
Focus on employee adoption – keep encouraging them to use social, and remind them why.
The bottom line
Creative ideas on how to build collaborative teams must include exploring, imagining, experimenting, and learning with others. Most of all, it requires reaching out to others to collaborate. The sum of group collaboration is always greater than the work of each individual.
The notion of a lone genius has always been a myth. As W. Brian Arthur observed in The Nature of Technology, innovations are combinations, so it is unlikely that anyone ever has all the pieces to the puzzle. Even Steve Jobs depended on a small circle of loyalists. Today, however, the ability to collaborate is becoming a key competitive advantage.
So how do you focus and motivate a group of individuals to share their knowledge and collaborate as a team?
What do you believe is a fundamental requirement to support innovation in a team environment? We believe collaboration and teamwork are fundamental to good innovation sessions and we work hard in our workshops to build these qualities.
Change is not death, fear of change is death. Have you often thought about making changes to your business to improve growth? Where do collaboration skills and partnerships fall on your list? Probably pretty low is our guess. That is the surprising response we get from many of our clients.
Successful businesses grow. Through better products and processes, they win the favor of customers, increasing their volume and margins. That success often translates into further advantages as they invest in new and better equipment, develop expertise and gain bargaining power with suppliers.
As Warren Buffet has so famously said, “When the tide goes out, you see who’s not wearing a bathing suit.” Well, the tide has certainly gone out and there are a lot of naked companies around. Many of the failed companies will insist that they had been the victims of a “perfect storm.”
However, in the years to come, it will become apparent that some companies have actually used the crises to gain market share, increase employee loyalty and enhance profitability while their competitors were crumbling.
So it’s curious that so many successful businesses fail. Today, in fact, only 13% of the original Fortune 500 companies from 1955 are still around. Once great firms like Bethlehem Steel and RCA no longer exist and others, such as General Motors and IBM have had near-death experiences.
The typical story for why good firms fail is that they somehow lost their way, but as Clayton Christensen explained in The Innovator’s Dilemma, that’s not really true. Yet while he attributes the problem to disruptive innovation, the broader truth is that the likely cause of your business’s future failure is a factor in its success today.
We are always on the lookout for good examples of collaboration skills and partnerships for successful growth. Here is an awesome example found in our local region of the Finger Lakes.
One that will probably surprise you, as it involves some dairy farmers in Cayuga County. Let’s start the discussion with a little background.
Background
In 1986, eight dairy farmers in the Finger Lakes region started meeting to discuss the current milk market. They eventually joined together to form Cayuga Marketing, LLC, to collectively bargain for higher milk prices while making it their mission to offer the best milk products possible.
With their great success, they grew to include 29 member farms, all located in the Finger Lakes region. Cayuga Marketing continued to explore ways to increase their responsibility and traceability throughout the milk market.
Here are a few facts about the Dairy Industry in Cayuga County:
The average size of farms: 270 acres Average total farm production expenses per farm: $125,325 the percentage of farms operated by a family or individual: 88.65% The average age of principal farm operators: 54 years Average number of cattle and calves per 100 acres of all land in farms: 24.68 Milk cows as a percentage of all cattle and calves: 49.25%
In the beginning, some of the more progressive dairymen formed Cayuga Marketing, LLC. They launched this collaborative effort well over twenty years ago when a group of eight visionary dairymen began working together to bargain for higher milk prices.
Along the way, they found additional ways to collaborate, such as group buying of dairy supplies. From its humble beginnings, Cayuga Marketing has grown to 26 members with over 32,000 cows who produce 830+ million pounds of milk annually. The members of Cayuga Marketing are the stewards of over 50,000 acres of fertile farmland and employ approximately 600 people.
Looking for ways to reduce nutrient losses, odors, and other negative effects the dairy industry has on communities and the environment, Cayuga Marketing hired a national organic residual management company in 2002, and began implementing proposed plans a year later. Several member farms still utilize this system.
Effective collaboration skills … the genesis of a milk processing plant
In 2008, member farmers began exploring ways to reduce milk-hauling costs. For the next few years, they researched the most effective ways to accomplish their goals, and it was determined that it would be in their best interests to construct a local processing plant.
On April 24, 2012, Cayuga Milk Ingredients (CMI) was created by 21 of the Cayuga Marketing member farmers who were passionate about continuing to increase traceability and adding family-owned farm value to every product.
The board decided to begin construction was approved on October 10, 2012, and a ceremonial groundbreaking occurred soon thereafter.
The plant
Unlike most dairy companies, CMI’s proximity to our milk supply reduces the economic and environmental costs associated with hauling. All of the farmer owners are within 40 miles of the plant, and 70% are within 12 miles. This allows fast processing to ensure the freshest ingredients possible.
These 26 farms ship about 36 trailer loads of milk per day. The plant will take 26 of them under this phase of operation and is being built with expansion in mind. As the export market continues to grow, the need for products from this plant will grow also.
The decision to partner for a milk processing plant was not hard. It helped reduce transport costs and provide more control over milk pricing and their product base through vertical integration. So making the investment to have some control–or at least some return to the farm–as an owner of the plant was a key factor in this increased scale of collaboration.
The location of the plant is ideal as it is only 12 miles from 70 % for most of the 26 farms. The closest plant that farms ship to now is over 100 miles, so the new plant will have a great impact reducing hauling costs.
Collaboration skills in the workplace … international partnership
What started out as an idea to save transportation costs turned out to be something much larger and much more strategic. In this case, it was the means to address a much larger market with a wider variety of milk products.
First, though, they needed a partner or two to add technology, expertise, and ability to market to the international market. They found both in Ingredia, a demonstrated industry leader with a proven record of successful innovation and customer experience.
They are a dairy company which develops and produces milk powders, milk proteins, functional systems and innovative bioactive for the food and nutrition & health industries throughout the world.
Ingredia is part of the cooperative group La Prospérité Fermière which collects milk from 1200 members based throughout the Nord/ Pas-de Calais region in France. Ingredia’s principal mission is to effectively promote the entire milk production from its members, essentially through its fractionation process and technology.
They are thusa major player in the global industry of dairy ingredientsby developing and producing products emanating from milk cracking. Thanks to soft and non-denaturing technologies (chemicals not used), Ingredia offers its clients native and non-denaturing ingredients,presenting a structure close to that naturally present in milk.
Ingredia was a perfect choice of partner, not only for the expertise in the technology and product line but also for their ability to act as a marketing agent for their products worldwide.
Quite an example of collaboration and partnership for 26 farmers in upstate New York isn’t it? None of the growth and success would exist without it. And I’ll bet they are far from the end of their collaboration and partnerships. We’ll have to check in on their progress in another year or two.
Now, what about you and your business? What are some of your ideas for collaboration and potential partnerships?
And what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.
It’s up to you to keep improving the growth hacking of your business. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. Or maybe offering to collaborate. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your growth hacking for your team?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find him on Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
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