The Human Aspect of Collaboration

After working for the same entertainment company for 17 years, Fernanda was crying tears of joy for the first time.

The reason she was so happy? A huge in‐person event celebrating a global brand relaunch had been canceled. The 17‐year‐veteran in Brazil had worked hard on the roll‐out with her whole team. The entire global organization the team worked for had as well.

So why did the derailment of this massive effort lead to her feeling like she belonged and was connected to a team more than ever?

In the past, they'd done these types of large‐scale roll‐outs in person. At enormous expense, they'd fly many people in from around the world with the idea that they'd be more productive and connect better when face to face. It seemed like a logical assumption, but it left out a large cohort of people. Those who didn't get flown in still attended, but only over a conference call and from a range of different time zones. Because of the size of the company, privileging in‐person meetings meant excluding some team members.

For over a decade, Fernanda had seen this first‐hand: time differences meant that it was often late at night in Singapore when she and her team joined these calls, and her typically vocal team tended to become mere observers of the “interactions.”

Then the COVID‐19 pandemic changed how teams worked together. Because of travel and gathering restrictions, for the first time, the brand relaunch wasn't held in‐person. Instead it was held completely remotely and asynchronously. Really, the organization felt lucky it was able to put an event together at all during those challenging times.

Something unexpected happened during their collaboration: Participation from locations that had been distant from previous events increased dramatically. A wider variety of people in different types of teams and places felt more connected, both with each other and with the problems they were trying to solve. Even better, the group of people was more diverse in terms of perspective, background, and geographic location. As a result of the increased number of voices included, ideas and concepts were more robust. The content was more globally relevant. And by better connecting teams—even distributed around the world—the speed and quality of their output increased.

Fernanda found that she was able to better leverage her expertise during the event. And as a result, her team became more and more engaged with the global effort and ultimately performed better. The improvement wasn't just due to better videoconferencing technology. The fact that all of the teams were collaborating in the same way—none more distant than others—gave Fernanda, at last, a sense of belonging.

“For the first time in my career, I felt I had a seat at the table,” she said.

This wasn't just luck. The team leads stepped up to design an intentional collaboration experience that created the conditions for Fernanda's voice to be included, regardless of her location. It turns out that there is an upward spiral of positive effects when teams get connected and feel included. Being distributed and connected with digital technology is an incredible opportunity. But it's only a benefit if you take the time to connect in a deliberate way and pay attention to relationships between team members.

Intrinsic Motivation

Together, these three factors determine a team member's readiness for collaboration. Patrick Lencioni sums it up well in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002): “Great teams ensure that everyone's ideas are genuinely considered, which then creates a willingness to rally around whatever decision is ultimately made by the group.”

These qualities add up to something more than the sum of their parts, too: an intrinsic motivation for collaboration, a passion within you or something you believe in. This differs from extrinsic motivation, which is doing something to win an award or avoid a punishment, or the desire to achieve something based on external pressure. If you consistently cultivate your own curiosity, respect, and willingness for meeting others where they are, being a productive member of a team is its own reward.

Meeting of the Minds

It might be obvious, but from a collaboration standpoint, it's also wonderful: People don't all think alike.

If collaboration is ultimately an alliance of many minds, diversity adds to its effectiveness. In fact, we've noticed a pattern: When teams are “stuck” it's usually due to a lack of diverse perspectives. Bring in an outside opinion or point of view, and things tend to get unstuck. Real innovation happens when a heterogenous alliance of minds forms.

To support—or be part of—teams working together, it's critical to have a basic sense of the ways in which people think can fundamentally differ.

Team Safety

Psychological safety describes an overall team climate staked on mutual respect in which people are comfortable speaking their minds, taking risks, and trying out new things without fear of repercussions. High‐performing teams have a great deal of psychological safety built into their standard mode of operation.

Psychological safety isn't just about consensus and harmony within the team. On the contrary, it's psychological safety that enables team members to challenge each other. Teams have to be able to disagree for imagination to flourish. It's possible to be provocative and empathetic at the same time.

The phrase “psychological safety” was popularized by Harvard Business School professor Amy C. Edmondson in her book Teaming (2012). Her definition of psychological safety is straightforward: “A shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk‐taking.” When there is no psychological safety, people check out, and imagination shuts down.

Psychological safety isn't absolute nor is it something leaders can simply “set and forget.” A lack of safety will exist in any team at any time to different degrees because psychological safety is situational, varying from interaction to interaction among team members. Concerns about psychological safety are an ongoing aspect of teams collaborating.

So the real question is how its presence affects contributions from the team. Collaborative intelligence strives to address psychological safety in crafting team experiences and creating an environment that fosters participation, session by session, interaction by interaction.

Generating psychological safety for your teams doesn't have to be a mystery. Alla Weinberg, author of A Culture of Safety (2020), recommends taking some simple steps to get started:

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  Shift from YOU to I. Demonstrate good collaboration behaviors by avoiding the blame game. Instead, frame your discussion from the “I” perspective. Keep your point of view and language focused on your own experience, and encourage others to do so as well.
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  Get vulnerable. Don't be afraid to share what's happening for you in the moment and how collaborating together affects you, both practically and emotionally. Show others on your team that it's OK to talk about the experiences together, even if they feel exposed and vulnerable in doing so.
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  Reflect. Invite others on the team to share what's going on for them in the moment, as well as what past experiences have shaped their behavior and decision‐making. Take time to think about how things are going and what you can do as a group to make it better.

Just consider how teams at Atlassian build trust and psychological safety. For a lot of people, the sudden shift to remote work in early 2020 was a shock to the system. The boundary between work and home was not just blurred, but decimated, and it was harder for team members to feel connected. Eugene Chung, R&D team coach at Atlassian, set about designing a workshop to solve this problem. The result was the Work Life Impact Play, a method you can use to build psychological safety and identify the right support for your team.

Eugene told us that “focusing on skills of true empathy, of being able to understand each other, being able to adapt with each other, and really get you to this point having this deeper sense of trust and connection with your teams, this resilience on teams … [these] are the skills we're trying to build up now.”

One key way to build a sense of belonging is to acknowledge individual contributions. Take time to recognize achievements. The strongest teams we've observed also celebrate wins together. This need not be elaborate award ceremonies with prizes or bonuses. Just a simple “good job” or “thanks for your help” now and then goes a long way toward belonging.

Group Belonging

Sure, skill and talent matter: Each person needs to bring their best self to the table. But talent alone doesn't make a high‐performing team.

In sports, we see time and time again: A roster of top athletes that everyone assumes will dominate the competition ends up losing to teams without superstars who play better together.

A virtuoso musician has to be proficient at their own instrument. But playing in a band requires a different type of facility—listening, adjusting, and reacting in real time—abilities that go beyond individual technical ability.

The “War on Talent” that broke out in the 1990s proved to be counterproductive. Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer, for one, has shown in study after study that a fixation on talent only undermines existing teams inside an organization, often leading to a corrosive culture.²

Malcolm Gladwell showed how that kind of competitive dynamic contributed to Enron's downfall.³

Having the right talent is a good thing. But the truth is that talent will be ineffective within dysfunctional teams. Fostering a culture of collaboration requires a sense of belonging: The people on your team need to not just be affiliated with one another, but to also know that they share commonalities. Belonging requires that a bond be somehow made manifest. In collaboration, that often takes the form of alignment.

Alignment is a key factor in creating cohesive teams. Simply agreeing on your purpose isn't enough. In fact, being aligned doesn't always mean being in complete agreement. Teams and companies need to coordinate on how they will act to fulfill their purpose. Not just on a tactical, day‐to‐day level but on a strategic level.

Ryan McKeever, writer and CX leader, puts it like this: “Alignment means everyone can support a decision as if it were their own, even if they might have done something different if they ruled the world....⁴ Agreement, on the other hand, requires a higher degree of commitment from each person on the team. Agreement means there is unanimity of opinion.”

Group Actualization

Mission statements like “to be the best in our industry” or “to reach half a billion dollars in revenue” are hollow and self‐serving. And they aren't motivating.

Once purpose goes beyond the organization, engagement and motivation increase. That might explain why we're seeing a shift in how organizations approach purpose, expanding the concept beyond just profit and business success. For instance, the concept of “shared value” as developed by Michael E. Porter anchors purpose as a competitive advantage. It's a win‐win approach: You'll not only engage employees and customers in a new way, you'll also outperform your competitors.

In order for work to be meaningful, wrote Malcolm Gladwell,⁵ it needs to have three characteristics:

• Autonomy. No one wants to be micromanaged—another reason trust is so important in the workplace.

  

• Complexity. It's hard to stay engaged at work when we're not being challenged. In fact, boredom is the number one reason people consider leaving their jobs, a survey by Korn Ferry suggests.⁶
• Connection between effort and reward. It's gratifying to see the impact of our work. It's even more satisfying to be rewarded for it. This one's all about extrinsic motivation: getting fairly compensated for the work we do.

Whether at the company or team level, when purpose is meaningful, alignment is easier too. Aligning each team with an overarching purpose and then giving it the autonomy to act gives rise to group actualization, the ultimate state of team fulfillment.

Unleashing Your Collective Imagination

There's another way to characterize the ultimate in group actualization: collective imagination. But the kind of imagination we're talking about here isn't about fairy tales and magic dragons; it's about finding ways to solve the world's toughest problems.

Does everyone understand their team's purpose, and their own? Can they see the impact their work is having? If they can—if purposeful alignment is coupled with the kind of psychological safety that encourages risk‐taking—then imagination can flourish in an organization.

But the converse is true, too: regardless of how well the team gets along, and no matter how much they trust each other, it's nearly impossible to activate a collective imagination if your purpose is murky.

Business growth isn't just about number crunching to maximize profit: Increasingly, companies that prosper will distinguish themselves from competitors by first out‐imagining them. Sure, experimentation and delivery are part of the equation, but true differentiation begins with imagination. It's core to innovation. Growth starts with imagination.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies won't get you there: They might take the “thinking” off your shoulders, but not the ability to imagine a better future. Now more than ever, businesses need to tap into the power of team imagination.

Imagination doesn't only fuel growth, it also drives a team's ability to change themselves. Imagination is key in finding new ways of working together. With imagination, teamwork becomes engaging, productive, and fun.

We believe that innovation and change can happen anywhere, as long as great minds can be connected, collaborating toward a common goal. No longer are only decision‐makers responsible for innovation: Everyone can contribute. It starts with relationships—each other—and leads to imagination, an endless resource that your team can tap into right now.

This is why we implore you to move to make collaboration more deliberate. Because you can do so in a way that harnesses the potential of collective imagination as teams come together to solve problems and innovate. Imagination is one of the incredible functions of the human brain: the ability to see things differently, to conceive of a future that doesn't yet exist. Homo sapiens are the only species able to think counterfactually, and from this perspective, human imagination underlies progress in the world.