I am in the second year of leading a 5-year project. At the end of last year, my boss communicated disappointment that the project was not moving faster. She should have instead given me credit for the massive amount of collaboration I did last year. Collaboration and teamwork are, after all, the prized attributes of good employees and good leaders. Or are they? Maybe we just like to say those words but not put our collective corporate money where our mouths are. Collaboration takes time.
For important decisions (and a 5-year multi-million dollar technology that will be with the company a long time seems like one) it can take months to consult with all key stakeholders and gain alignment. If there are 400 key stakeholders, you can be sure there are at least 200 opinions. So a team is formed at the outset and I take on the role of cheerleader to inspire team members about our journey. Since it is a global team of people already busy with their own projects, the first challenge is getting them to come to MY meetings…so I cheerlead about the benefits of team participation to each of them. With great emotional intelligence I engage people with limited enthusiasm for the project (it got assigned to them) and schedule meetings to keep the work moving. I hired a consultant to do the biggest lift on identifying stakeholder needs. First, it takes time to ID a consultant who is adept and knowledgeable in this unique space. It took them two months to develop materials, schedule and hold focus groups and one-to-one interviews, and report-out, first to the design team, and then to the leadership team. I thought that was pretty good.
One of the team recommendations was to hire a full-time Director to lead the work because me doing it part-time would never deliver desired improvements fast enough. The leadership team agreed to that and the job was posted almost immediately in August. The hire was not completed till November because promising first-round candidates fizzled out in second round interviews. Sometimes hiring is like that.
Well, here is my point. Collaboration is grand. I truly believe that our products are better when they are not created in a vacuum. But the reality is that collaboration – done well, and not just lip service -- is also terribly slow!! All the collaboration last year didn’t really tell ME anything I didn’t know in July. I could have written down the same path forward without the formal collaboration process. Collaboration is only sometimes about establishing design needs and more of the time about just having conversations with people and getting them aligned to a future state. It’s disingenuous for a company to constantly talk about collaboration and engagement as prized values and then not allow the time for them to occur. And in a very lean workforce, that time is hard to come by. The time-suck related to collaborative projects is considerable and the people you are trying to collaborate with have their own heavy workloads. I’m afraid it’s a paradox that isn’t going to improve anytime soon.
For important decisions (and a 5-year multi-million dollar technology that will be with the company a long time seems like one) it can take months to consult with all key stakeholders and gain alignment. If there are 400 key stakeholders, you can be sure there are at least 200 opinions. So a team is formed at the outset and I take on the role of cheerleader to inspire team members about our journey. Since it is a global team of people already busy with their own projects, the first challenge is getting them to come to MY meetings…so I cheerlead about the benefits of team participation to each of them. With great emotional intelligence I engage people with limited enthusiasm for the project (it got assigned to them) and schedule meetings to keep the work moving. I hired a consultant to do the biggest lift on identifying stakeholder needs. First, it takes time to ID a consultant who is adept and knowledgeable in this unique space. It took them two months to develop materials, schedule and hold focus groups and one-to-one interviews, and report-out, first to the design team, and then to the leadership team. I thought that was pretty good.
One of the team recommendations was to hire a full-time Director to lead the work because me doing it part-time would never deliver desired improvements fast enough. The leadership team agreed to that and the job was posted almost immediately in August. The hire was not completed till November because promising first-round candidates fizzled out in second round interviews. Sometimes hiring is like that.
Well, here is my point. Collaboration is grand. I truly believe that our products are better when they are not created in a vacuum. But the reality is that collaboration – done well, and not just lip service -- is also terribly slow!! All the collaboration last year didn’t really tell ME anything I didn’t know in July. I could have written down the same path forward without the formal collaboration process. Collaboration is only sometimes about establishing design needs and more of the time about just having conversations with people and getting them aligned to a future state. It’s disingenuous for a company to constantly talk about collaboration and engagement as prized values and then not allow the time for them to occur. And in a very lean workforce, that time is hard to come by. The time-suck related to collaborative projects is considerable and the people you are trying to collaborate with have their own heavy workloads. I’m afraid it’s a paradox that isn’t going to improve anytime soon.