A deadly serious message to all Executives and CEOs.
Stop your team members collaborating – unless you are certain you have the correct strategy. Otherwise collaboration may well make things far worse and could even bring your organisation to an end.
This is counter-intuitive, and bucks the trend for collaborate, work together, the whole is greater than sum of the parts. Don’t believe all those things, because right now, that will cause you major problems.
In my experience, there are five key reasons why this is true, and here is just one to whet your appetite.
Hard-Wired Brains
The brain is built to find what it is looking for, unless an alternative slaps it in the face. This means each potential option on the table for consideration, the executive leading it must totally believe it has legs. They must believe it so completely that they will stop at nothing to find the way to make it workable.
If you foster collaboration ahead of a clear decision, the ideas will compete at a political rather than rational level. Each executive will progressively work towards advancing their idea by working the informal system, by hook or by crook. Less able ideas will be disturbed while the feasibility study is ongoing, potentially eroding beliefs ahead of the facts.
At the extreme, by the time you as a team are ready to decide, only one idea is left standing, the other all knocked out by politicking.
How many executives could resist the opportunity to do all they can to make sure their idea wins?
Collaboration has its place, and generally that is when the way forward is clear. Before then, creative ideas need to be given a chance to find their feet, free of politics.
So, at the start, do all you can to isolate the ideas, encourage those working on them to give it their all, confident they can find a way to prove their idea is the best. They, when you are ready to choose, because each idea has achieved a similar state of readiness for competition, then tHrash it out and decide as a group and go for it, he’ll for leather!
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Shifting Power Structures
Those who had it want to keep it and will kill off ideas that threaten their power base, and they’ll do this under the guise of collaboration, sharing their wisdom and experience so juniors can learn how flawed their ideas are. Watch them
Conflicting Interests
Collaboration between different entities is fraught with problems. Assuming trust between former competitors and other partners may be unrealistic in chaotic times. A commercial eco system never eradicated vested interests until combined formally to share in profit and loss.
Outsourcing deals are not partnerships and while there is sound theory in the longer-term horizon, will you survive long enough to reap those collective spoils?
Collaboration Requires Parity
Healthy collaboration in uncertainty needs members who feel equal. Otherwise the weak will likely be dominated by the strong. This will damage the best idea from the weakest player, so it may not even stand a chance.
Collective Insanity
A more exciting way to title Groupthink. Team share a paradigm and when working together will socialise conformance. As an idea in a collaborative system threatens to break the boundaries, other will unconsciously try to knock it back into line.
Collectively, groups tend to think as one with a few curved balls. Separate then and those stay thoughts that challenge the group norms will have a greater chance of finding their feet.
Political Rivalry
When the pressure is on, few can escape the legacy of the relationships. Old battles, political skirmishes, will be remembered and the emotional scars will impact each individual’s rational and collective thought.”sure, his idea may have legs, but I’ll be dammed if I’m going to let him beat me again! “
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