How to get your team to collaborate as one

No leadership team, no leadership cohort and no enterprise can fully achieve their potential without working as one. Every leader knows this to be true but how do they do it? The starting point is the recognition that working as one is about sharing because without sharing, there is inevitably waste, missed opportunities, disengagement and the risks that come from silos and poorly executed strategies.

To work as one, a team needs five core characteristics demonstrated through behaviours and practices described as the ‘Five Shares’ in the best seller Think One Team.

Getting to know the five shares

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your team against each of the five shares is a powerful step in creating the optimal environment to foster collaboration.

One Team

• Share the big picture
• Share the reality
• Share the air
• Share the load
• Share the wins and losses

Disunity

• Pursue other agendas
• Avoid and deny
• Stifle communication
• Look after your own turf
• Play I win, you lose

The five shares describe the most important practices you can use to build team collaboration, as well as those that are most likely to hold you back.

Brett Wickham highlights the value of this thinking at ACCIONA Energía Australia: ‘We’ve transformed from working very much in silos; business development developed all the projects, power marketing contracted all the power, engineering construction built them and operations operated them. Now we’re looking across projects and connecting up to share the big picture and share the load.’

Building trust-based relationships 

Trust can be a slippery term to work with because it not only means different things to different people, but it also takes different forms.

Striking the ‘right’ level of vulnerability and openness is aways a judgement call; however, these questions moved us to explore and find a better definition or model for trust.

The model we settled on is adapted from the 1990s work of Larry Reynolds described in The Trust Effect and captured in the acronym I-CORE:

• Integrity – the gateway to the other four items because without integrity, it is difficult and potentially unwise to consider openness within a relationship where problems and vulnerabilities are exposed.
• Competence – a prerequisite to trust in high-demand environments, because others need to be able to rely upon your ability to complete the task at hand successfully.
• Openness – speaks to vulnerability and has two fundamental dimensions: (1) being open to others’ feelings, perspectives and ideas, and (2) being transparent about yours.
• Reliability – describes whether someone is dependable and delivers on expectations.
• Equity – ‘equal respect’ is the bedrock of great team work.

I-CORE provides a shared and highly practical definition of trust and is a handy tool to:

• assess current and desired levels of trust among your team and partners
• identify strengths and areas of concern with relationships
• guide the plans and actions to strengthen partnering relationships.

As a leader, you must be willing to commit time and effort to building relationships, irrespective of the reluctance of others to spend time on activities that don’t ‘shift the dial’ on their perceived current priorities.

Teams that fail to prioritise building relationships run the risk that members get to know each other only ‘in role’ and know little about each other outside of that identity. When the pressure cooker heats up and they don’t have a strong I-CORE frame, it’s highly likely they underachieve due to conflict, fragmentation, avoidance or poor decision making.

Make partnerships as important as teams 

Teams remain essential to aggregate capability, make effective decisions and provide a sense of belonging; however, the reality is most things don’t get done between teams, they get done between people. People are based in teams, but it’s their own ability to connect and partner with others inside or outside the organisation that unlocks (or blocks) potential.

Linear challenges can often be met without effective relationships; however, the opposite is true for nonlinear challenges where connection and partnering are essential.

Functions, hierarchy and location can and do create barriers to collaboration, as do local work cultures and differences in values and personalities. You need to develop a way to engage colleagues, teams and stakeholders across conventional boundaries and differences.

A mindset for partnering 

One of the critical requirements of leading and navigating in nonlinear environments is the ability to establish and sustain partnering relationships. The reasons are clear: partners are better at aligning their values and goals, better at resolving challenging problems, and more likely to learn and adapt when things get tough.

Partnering in business is both a mindset and a relationship. The starting mindset is commitment to a shared big picture, which may be a goal, a vision or values. The relationship is built on trust and sustained by being open and caring, tackling problems together and taking the longer-term view.

It is fanciful to think that it is desirable or even possible for every person or team in an enterprise to work in a strong partnering relationship with every other. However, it is both possible and desirable to:

• be clear on the most important partnering relationships for you and your team.
• have practical partnering tools to align and deliver on expectations.
• commit to act as a partner when significant enterprise problems or opportunities arise.

This means you need to be clear who to partner with and how to partner effectively.

The power of one 

Working as one requires connection and synergy. Connection means healthy interpersonal trust among team members and strong partnering relationships, which are important to working in the churn of complexity. Synergy means the team leverages all its resources, collaborates effectively and makes good decisions.

By embracing the simplicity of the five shares and being deliberate about building trust based partnering relationships you can break through the frustration of siloed mindsets and leverage the power of working as one united team.

Written by Martin Bean CBE. The above is an edited extract from Toolkit For Turbulence: the mindset and methods that leaders need to turn adversity to advantage (Wiley $34.95), by Graham Winter & Martin Bean. Now available at leading retailers and https://toolkitforturbulence.com/  

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