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What Leaders Need to Know About Collaboration
Morten Hansen, professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and author of “Collaboration.”
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Featured Guest: Morten Hansen, professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green. Today we’re talking about collaboration. It’s something that is so hard to do well and so hard to do without wasting time. So we’re talking to the master of efficient collaboration, Morten Hansen, a professor at UC Berkeley and INSEAD. He’s the author of the article Are You a Collaborative Leader? in our July/August double issue. Morten, thanks so much for talking with us today.
MORTEN HANSEN: Great to be here, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: Morten, let’s start with that dark side of collaboration, where it’s all endless meetings and everyone adding their two cents and no one can seem to make a decision. How can we prevent ourselves from putting our companies in that situation?
MORTEN HANSEN: Yeah, I think what’s happening in a lot of companies is that they try to collaborate and then they run into problems. they run into the problem of over-collaborating. They do too much of it. And then when they do collaborate, they find it difficult to make decisions and to move ahead. In other words, execute well. So collaboration is a very difficult thing to get right. It requires you to really step back and put in place a system, a set of processes, where you have a real execution focus and focus on the results of collaboration.
So in this article, we talk about a new leadership style that is required in this world that we live in now, with so many connections across companies and across the globe. And one of the things we talk about is the balance between engaging people in collaboration on one hand, and on the other, implementing good collaborative practices. For example, we talk about something called show a strong hand as a leader, that you really need to allocate decision rights to people. And that means that when you have a meeting, you sit together and you debate. That’s what you want. That’s what collaboration is about. But at one point, you need to call the decision. And if you haven’t been able to do that in the meeting, then the leader needs to step up and say, I’m calling the decision, or I’m closing the decision. And we will make a decision and we’ll move on. And without that, collaboration is just an impediment to execution. So that’s one of the skills required in effective collaboration.
SARAH GREEN: So let’s talk a little bit more in detail about showing that strong hand. Is it just making the decision? Does more go into it? What does it really look like in detail and in practice?
MORTEN HANSEN: Yes, let me take an example. A great company, I think, that does this really well is Reckitt Benckiser, which is the consumer goods company out of the UK, and in our prior research, is one of the top performing companies in the world, with the CEO Bart Becht ranking as one of the best-performing CEOs in the world. So they do things well. They have good results, excellent results.
So how do they do this? So on one hand, they really engage talent at the periphery. That’s another component of collaboration. They want to have diverse teams. They want to have different experiences into the room. Because the idea is that the more different experiences you have, the better ideas you produce. They actively promote constructive conflict. They debate vigorously around ideas. And that’s great because then you’re allowing the best solutions to surface.
Now if you do that, you can debate endlessly. So they have a second practice. And that is that you debate in the meeting, and if that group of people cannot come to a conclusion by themselves, in other words, consensus, that at one point, the leader, the most senior person in the room, has the right, so to speak, to stand up and make the best decision. And then the rule is we unite behind that decision. So it’s “diversity in counsel, unity of command,” as far as the Great one said. That’s the principle. And that’s how they run their meetings and their processes. And they create a lot of new ideas as a result, and execute really well and really fast.
SARAH GREEN: I think it sounds to me, I’m speculating a little bit, that part of the challenge people have with that kind of collaboration is they worry if they have a really vigorous debate, that when it comes time to take a different direction, that people won’t all be able to fall in line. I think that a lot of leaders would have some anxiety about that. So how do they have the confidence to go ahead and say, yeah, we’re going to have a no-holds barred debate. And then we’re confident that our people will unify behind the final decision?
MORTEN HANSEN: Yeah, Sarah it’s just pointing out this is difficult to create. There is a culture that’s been created here in Reckitt Benckiser over 10 years. So this is not something that came overnight, obviously. People need to feel comfortable being debating and having minority views heard and not being penalized for that. So that’s one thing. The other is a culture of transparency and accountability. So when you make a decision, then expect everybody to fall in line, then it means people are accountable for their part of execution. And are you going to deliver? And that part is what they emphasize.
The other thing they do is that they go out of their way to minimize politics. As Bart Becht says, politics is poison. So the more politics you have, the more difficult this is to do. Because politics means that you make a decision in the room, but then you go outside and you might question the decision. You might change the decisions, back-room deals. There is no transparency. There’s no openness. And people might start changing the decision after you made it. Well, obviously, that’s not going to work. You have to make it and get rid of politics and then execute and hold people accountable.
SARAH GREEN: I want to talk a little bit more about this politics issue, because I know that one of the key parts of the article is that leaders need to model collaboration at the top. And I think a lot of listeners will be familiar with the idea that senior teams are infected by politics. And I thought it was interesting. In the piece you point out that a lot of times those executive teams aren’t really real teams. They don’t really have shared goals. They have unit goals. How does an organization overcome that structural problem in order to have a senior team that can function without politics?
MORTEN HANSEN: Yeah, we make the point in the article that if you want to instill great collaborative leadership practices, you need to collaborate at the top first. You know there is that saying that the fish rots from the head down. So if you have a team that is dysfunctional, that doesn’t collaborate, in fact they fight each other, then, of course, that sets a tone for the rest of the organization. So the challenge, then, is to make it a real team.
Now, a team in name only is that you have a CEO who perhaps has 10 direct reports, and each one is just reporting into the CEO. And they meet a checklist on how things are going, but they’re not really working together. So one thing is to have a common goal. What are the common goals? What are we doing together, as opposed to just individual goals? That’s one way you can combat this.
The second is to build a team. People who know each other at a broader level, who work together, who can learn from each other, who can help each other achieve each of the goals– so sales will help marketing, and product development would help sales in a much more integrated fashion than before, or different business units would look for synergies. Those kinds of things. And in the article we give an example of Natura, which is a highly successful natural cosmetics company Brazil. And in 2004, they had this problem. They had competing agendas at the top team level threatening the prospect of the company. So the CEO, Alessandro Carlucci, he set in place an executive development process where each person went through a personal growth learning process and trying to learn more about each other. And from that, they forged a real team. So the CEO, or the team leader, really needs to take an active step forward to make this become a real team.
SARAH GREEN: It’s interesting to hear you talk about these executives taking this personal journey to help them with something at work. I think there’s no tactful way to ask this, so I’m just going to ask it. Doesn’t that sound a little bit sort of wishy-washy, touchy-feely? I mean, how do you convince people, I guess, that this is something that really will have bottom-line results?
MORTEN HANSEN: No, that’s a good point. I think that collaboration has a soft side to it and it has a hard side to it. And the soft side is that you have to step up and be willing to open up and you have to be willing to get to know your counterpart in the team at a bit more personal level and not just in a meeting. So it has a personal growth aspect to it, the willingness to learn. That’s the soft side, if you will.
But there is a very hard side to collaboration. And that is that collaboration is about achieving better results. The goal of collaboration is not collaboration. It is far better results. It is business driven, it is around innovation, it’s around better sales efforts, it’s about efficiency drive. So it has that hard side to it. It’s all about achieving those goals. But it requires some personal changes to be able to do so.
SARAH GREEN: So we’ve been talking most of this time about what leaders can do, which is really what the article is about. And earlier you mentioned that a fish rots from the head down, which I think is a great point to make. But what if you’re listening to this and you are the tail of the fish, or a scale somewhere on the body of the fish? And you are stuck in a culture of collaboration that’s not producing results. Is there anything you can do within your own team or managing up to help produce better results?
MORTEN HANSEN: Yeah, I think there are. I think every manager that is leading a team, or even a small organization, it could be a small office, they can first of all start with these collaborative activities within that organization, that every team leader has this responsibility to build a real team and to make collaboration go on in their unit. It doesn’t matter how big or small is is. So that’s one thing.
The second thing is to manage up. Yes, I think it is to create some expectations on the top team that we cannot get the work done if you cannot unify better. That’s a difficult message to send upwards, but people get that message. I’ll give you an example. I was leading an executive development program for a company that had some of these problems. And the CEO came to this gathering of mid-level managers, and they had talked about this problem. And they just let him have it. They said, we’ve got these problems. We cannot work. This product is delayed by so many months because of this collaboration problem. We’re not getting the sales that we need and across these divisions. So the team was real heartfelt, and they sent the message to the CEO. So it’s possible. And I think it’s important to do so. And the CEO went back and made some changes.
SARAH GREEN: Do you think it is possible to achieve results in today’s networked, global world without getting better at collaboration? I mean, is this something that you can just say I’d rather not, thanks?
MORTEN HANSEN: So the really key argument in this article is that we live in a very connected business world today. There are a lot more connections across companies, across countries, across the globe. And they are mainly around people and they are informal and highly fluid. And the question then is how do you navigate that new world successfully as a leader? And our answer is you need this collaborative leadership style based upon these four skills that we articulate in this article.
And we believe, and that’s the key argument in this article, that you need this leadership style to be successful in today’s hyper-connected business world, that it is very, very difficult to succeed if you don’t embrace this leadership style. And the reason is that business value is increasingly created by connecting these dots all over the world. It is not so much created by working within one silo. Now, there might be certain pockets of the business world today where this is not yet true, like for example, if you run a really local business somewhere. You run, say, a hotel in a vacation resort place. But most places, most companies are now feeling this global presence, or the presence of these connections. So it’s very, very difficult. I mean, take one particular example, innovation. Innovation used to be done within companies, by and large. Now, it is much more open innovation. You have to work with others to innovate today. And that requires a collaborative leadership style.
SARAH GREEN: Well, Morten, thanks so much for talking with us today.
MORTEN HANSEN: Thank you. It was a pleasure, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: That was Morten Hansen. The article is Are You a Collaborative Leader? And Morten is also the author of a book called Collaboration. For more, go to hbr.org.