Identifying Collaboration Barriers
Identifying what’s preventing your teams from collaborating at their natural potential
Does this sound familiar? Decisions taking too long? Strategic initiatives stalling despite everyone working hard? Multiple top priority initiatives causing gridlock? Too many meetings and not enough time to get everything done? A sense that certain teams aren’t as connected as they should be? Good people burning out?
Cross-functional work typically layers multiple collaborations simultaneously. Colleagues are working on multiple projects and each team has their own ways of working. The challenge is that collaborative demands on individuals tend to be personal and invisible. We know work is happening but we’re not distinguishing efficient from inefficient collaboration.
Collaboration that creates value.
The benefit of collaboration is being able to achieve more than we can alone. Solving hard problems together, finding creative solutions, driving innovation and building a business together.
But colleagues are typically spending too much time on coordination activities; status updates, alignment meetings, endless check-ins.
How can we limit the time spent on coordination and create the space for high value collaboration? When collaboration itself isn’t visible or quantifiable, it can’t be improved. To know what that ‘good’ looks like for your culture, we start with a collaboration audit.
Audit focus areas include:
1. Teamwork Bright Spots
The practices and behaviours of teams who are working most effectively with other teams.
2. Dependency surfacing
Identifying critical handoffs between teams and their current effectiveness. Uncovering resource, timing and feedback bottlenecks that are causing work to stall. Where critical knowledge is trapped in silos or with individuals.
3. Crowded Processes
Finding cumbersome processes that can be simplified and made fit for purpose by reducing approval layers or removing tasks.
4. Prioritisation faultlines
That are making resource allocation trade-offs more complicated than they should be.
5. Time Tax
Visualising how alignment overhead, coordination costs and communication patterns are all impacting the company’s capacity to get work done.
6. Technology proliferation
How tool and channel use is supporting communication and where it is creating confusion and friction.
7. Trust credit
Healthy collaboration requires vulnerability; sharing incomplete work, admitting you don’t know something, letting others influence your thinking and managing disagreement. Identifying where there may be insufficient trust between teams or individuals, resulting in surface-level collaboration.
How does your team perform?
Better collaboration across your company is an incredibly effective way to drive revenue, deliver stronger project success, anticipate customer needs, adapt to challenges and to innovate. It also strengthens engagement. If you want to boost these outcomes, then let’s start a conversation.
