I recently finished reading a great book on building a company that leverages collaboration, Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results by Morten Hansen and wanted to write about a few ideas that are relevant to social game companies (as well as almost every other company).
Disciplined Collaboration
Hansen’s book provided several key concepts. First is the idea of disciplined collaboration. The key take away from this concept is that not all collaboration is good; it must generate results greater than people or teams working individually. Just collaborating for collaboration’s sake (as shown by regular useless meetings, conference calls with many participants who do not add or derive value or travel between locations just to meet but not advance a plan) is as bad as or worse than not collaborating at all. Collaboration should be used to generate value for the company, not as a checkbox. As Hansen points out, good collaborators know when to collaborate, when not to, and are willing and able to execute the selected project.
Analytics can also be applied to deciding when to collaborate. People should launch a collaboration project only if the net value of collaboration is more than the return minus both opportunity costs and collaboration costs. Hansen calls this the net value of collaboration premium. Mathematically, it is written as: Collaboration premium = return on project – opportunity costs (what the person could have done individually) – collaboration cost (travel, conferencing, etc.).
Hiring for Collaboration
Hansen’s book also provides some great principles for leaders to implement collaboration throughout their organization. The first and most important is hiring the right people. As discussed above, effective collaboration is disciplined collaboration, and you must hire the right people for this strategy. No matter how effective, you do not want lone stars. It is impossible to create a culture of collaboration when you allow some contributors to work individually. Even if they do a great job, it undermines the concept of evaluating all opportunities as to whether or not collaboration is beneficial. Moreover, it sends the message to others that collaboration is not necessary for career success.
Conversely, you also do not want to hire “butterflies.” Butterflies are those who flutter from person to person spending all of their time collaborating. This type of employees ends up wasting hours and days of their co-workers time, time that may be better spent on individual projects or other collaborations. When building your team, what you want is neither lone stars nor butterflies, but disciplined collaborators who collaborate effectively when it is needed.
Leading for Collaboration
The book also provides some great guidance for leading collaboratively. It is the leader who sets the tone for the organization. If you do not lead for collaboration, expecting collaboration from your team is wishful thinking. To lead for collaboration, you need to
• Set a unifying mission. If everyone knows their mission, it is much easier for them to see the benefits of collaboration
• Provoke a common value for teamwork. You, and the organization as a whole, should reward disciplined collaboration (and punish lone stars and butterflies). Hansen provides a lot of detail on how to coordinate compensation with collaboration and I will not over-simplify it here. I recommend you read the book to see what techniques you can use to create this value throughout the company
• Speak the language of collaboration. As anyone who has been in a leadership position knows, there is nothing more important to your employees than your actions. If you evangelize collaboration and do it yourself, that will have a stronger effect on your organization than anything else could
Although my blog is focused on the social gaming space, the above lessons and practices are valuable to any company. In social gaming, however, the market evolves so quickly that collaboration is a huge tool for maintaining a competitive advantage.
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