6 tips for effective strategic collaboration

Collaboration appears to be the organizational skillset of the moment. Moving from a “command and control” to “communicate and collaborate” management style has become the de facto leadership mandate of our times.

Everyone has learned that to not espouse collaboration is to risk getting pigeonholed as old school. The challenge is that there are two very different collaboration models, one that we’re fast becoming relatively adept at and the other representing new territory that we enter at our own risk, and rarely productively.

has to do with tactical and executional collaboration, specifically the assembling of subject matter experts to work together to create something (hopefully) great. The rapid growth of technology driven innovation has made it nearly impossible for any individual or team to possess all the skills required to create value within one group or organization. As a result, collaboration among like-minded subject matter experts is simply how things get done in an increasingly information and technology driven world.

We’re all fast becoming practiced in this form of collaboration, and while some of us are unquestionably better at it than others, we can all trot out a list of best practices we’ve learned and honed over the years to get along, share ideas and create great things together.

has to do with collaborating to arrive at an over-arching strategy to guide subsequent executionally and tactically focused efforts. Strategic leadership has traditionally been the job of the CEO, the Board and the executive leadership team. The challenge is that as the pace of change accelerates and the complexity of the strategic issues to be solved multiply, the ability of any leadership team to arrive at actionable strategies is increasingly being challenged.

Confronted with strategies that are less-and-less actionable by teams expected to carry them out, more people have been brought into the high-level strategic conversations. The problem is that bringing more people into these conversations without an appropriate collaboration model is simply exacerbating the core issue of ineffectual strategies that we see holding organizations back. When a lot of people are expected to contribute to a high-level strategy, what tends to happen is group think. The result? Being poorly focused, all things to all people declarations of strategic intent that end up sorely lacking either “strategy” or “intent.”

We’ve found a max of 4–6 cross-functional leaders is the ideal composition. You need the true leaders of their respective disciplines and/or lines of business. There should be at least 3+ different functions represented, as a true strategy by definition touches at least 3 functions. And once you get more than 6 people in a room, without an outside facilitator and some serious process, group think takes over with behind the scenes conversations being the only way to move the ball forward.

On the other hand, when you have fresh data, it leads to fresh conversations and interpretation as a team. These group conversations concerning previously untrod ground are what feed true insight driven collaboration. And it’s only through collaboration around insights that true strategic breakthroughs can occur.

3. Prepare options in advance. It’s an artful balance between having done too much prep work and thus having a “dog in the hunt” and not having done any preparation with the result being everyone is driving blind. The trick is to develop out a few potential strategic options worthy of consideration in advance, ideally 3–5, for the group to kick around, modify, prioritize and ultimately choose one to make their own. When no prep work is done, too much of the heavy thinking falls on the group’s time together, and heavy thinking is never best done by committee. At the same time, if the list of options is too short, it ends up turning into a sales pitch by the poor bastards tasked with creating the options for consideration in the first place. And sales pitches are never good things.

What are those 3–5 immoveable posts that will force focused conversation, strategic consensus and action? I’d hazard a bet that not a single effective strategy has been arrived at without a forcing function. Be it D-Day, the iPhone or Facebook not accepting advertising for its first growth phase. Sometimes the enabling constraints are obvious, like four quarters in a row of no growth. Other times they’re less so, such as a growing disconnect between IT investments and product quality, to the point where soon nobody will be buying the product. Usually there is more than one such constraint, and it’s incredibly useful to list them out for the group from the get-go. And then assess where you arrived at against its ability to solve those constraints.

A successful strategy begs for action. And there’s no time like the present. Odds are that if a carefully honed strategy doesn’t lend itself to doing things differently next Tuesday, then it’s probably not well honed nor is it worthy of being called a strategy. Assembling teams of people for further conversations is not a strategy. Nor is hiring a consulting firm to provide a second opinion.

It’s the key to any effective strategy as well as a critical enabling constraint to turning group thinking into single-minded, actionable outcomes. What is that one singular idea underlying the strategy intent? Write “The art of sacrifice” up on the wall at the beginning of any strategic collaboration session. Discuss what it means. Commit yourselves to arriving at some place singular together. Executional collaboration is all about multiple goals, objectives and activities. On the polar opposite of the spectrum is strategic collaboration, where a successful outcome absolutely must be singular in intent. If there were ever a place for simplifying, this is it.

Odds are that you’ll be well served if you manage to employ at least 3–4 of these guidelines for strategic collaboration in your next strategic offsite. Even if you’re a seasoned strategic collaborator or facilitator, just reviewing this list in advance, and sharing it with the collaboration team, can create a level of group self-awareness that will result in getting you to a sharper strategy, faster.

Finally, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the critical differences between executional and strategic collaboration. The latter is absolutely critical to achieving the former. But the models and mindsets required to achieve each of those stages for creating actionable value couldn’t be more different.

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