INTRODUCTION: THE FIVE ESSENTIALS

They weren’t even talking to each other, much less listening. The relationship had been shattered. A rogue union member was attempting to puncture the tires of fellow employees’ cars as they tried to cross a union picket line. Certain managers were covertly plotting retaliation against union leaders. At the medium-sized California school district,¹ almost twenty-one thousand students were receiving little or no education. Bitterness in the labor-management relationship had brought effective education to a halt. Substitute teachers were little more than babysitters. Community members were distraught at being treated like pawns in a war of conflicting press releases and accusations, while precious education dollars were squandered on litigation. After several weeks, and with the help of a mediator, the labor dispute was eventually settled, but only after a great deal of pain for everyone involved.

Now time-travel ahead two years to the district’s next labor-management contract negotiation. This time the negotiators were not only talking to each other, they were actually listening. They weren’t sitting across from each other pounding their fists on a table. Rather, they were sitting interspersed among each other in comfortable chairs arranged in a semicircle facing a flip chart. If observers didn’t know who the players were, they would not have been able to tell who represented the union and who represented management. Negotiators took turns facilitating the negotiating session. They were all working together to improve the educational system, as well as the quality of life for the educators. They all worked hard to satisfy the interests of everyone involved. They were committed to both telling and hearing the truth. They didn’t get defensive, and when, on occasion, someone ruffled somebody else’s feathers, they took time to talk about their relationship.

Impossible? Not at all; we’ve seen it happen. What made the difference? They learned how to create a successful collaborative relationship. They realized that the only way they could solve their problems was by building an effective relationship.

Today nobody succeeds alone. If you don’t have the skills to build relationships, you’d better win the lotto, because you’ll never thrive in any organization, and you probably won’t even survive in most businesses. These are simple facts of modern life! The inventor or entrepreneur who creates an idea, then single-handedly markets a product successfully, is a thing of the past. The world has become far too complex and interrelated for individuals to succeed without collaborative skills. Even fierce competitors of the past are finding it not only desirable but absolutely essential to form alliances and to collaborate on projects.

Who would have thought that IBM and Apple, or Microsoft and Oracle, would ever collaborate on projects; or that labor unions and management would become keenly collaborative to help a business (or a school district) thrive, or that the United States and Russia would collaborate by sharing intelligence information to track down members of the Taliban in Afghanistan?

COLLABORATIVE CAPITAL

Companies are beginning to recognize that the ability to build and maintain relationships is an essential set of skills. They recognize that the collaborative capital of their employees, which is the collective ability of their employees to build effective collaborative relationships, is as important as their intellectual capital and their financial capital.

Research has shown that IQ and technical expertise do not fully account for the performance difference between exceptional employees and average performers.² One factor that does make a significant difference is the collaborative networks that exceptional employees develop. These collaborative networks enable top employees to tap into the collective wisdom of a much larger brain trust. Consultant Steven Keiner has been doing competency evaluations on the collaborative skills of managers for over fifteen years. He reports a dramatic increase over the past five years in the interest of companies regarding collaborative skills.³

One international company we worked with started teaching relationship-building skills to their key managers when they recognized that from 50 to 75 percent of their future products would come from collaborative alliances with smaller entrepreneurial companies. These smaller companies are more creative and can react faster, but they don’t have resources for testing products extensively nor for bringing them to market. It was a real eye-opener for the larger company to learn that many smaller companies would not consider working with them because of a reputation for being untrustworthy and not at all collaborative. They had already lost opportunities for many potentially profitable products. They recognized that if three-quarters of their future products would arise from alliances, and nobody wanted to do business with them because of poor collaboration skills, their company was not long for the world. Shortly thereafter the company began investing heavily in developing collaborative skills.

By contrast, a defense contractor client was able to resolve a dispute involving hundreds of millions of dollars because the key leaders of the disputing organizations trusted each other, had reputations for telling the truth, and were able to maintain a successful collaborative relationship.

DISCRETIONARY EMOTIONAL ENERGY OR ENTHUSIASM

Collaborative relationships are valuable to an organization not only because they produce better processes and better results, but also because they increase the amount of discretionary emotional energy that employees will devote to the organizational effort. Discretionary emotional energy is a term coined by consultant and author Stan Slap⁴ to describe the passion, excitement, enthusiasm, and dedication that individuals choose to give freely to those causes, projects, relationships, and organizations in which they truly believe. Discretionary emotional energy cannot be mandated, and attempts to do so will inevitably lead to either outright rebellion or passive-aggressive undermining behavior. It is personal buy-in that can’t be bought.

Discretionary emotional energy in a business setting exists when employees are excited about making suggestions for making their jobs more effective and profitable. For example, in San Juan Unified School District in Sacramento, California, the food service department was losing the district so much money the district was considering contracting with outside vendors to run the program. The union, together with employees, tapped into the employees’ enthusiasm, or discretionary emotional energy, and devised a successful plan to run the food service program themselves. This saved enough money to continue providing the same level of service to students.

Don White⁵ was a manager in a Procter & Gamble plant where the company had been working with employees to be more self-accountable, truthful, and self-aware. Don describes what happened:

A practice called “work to rule” provides an example of employees using discretionary energy against a company. Employees use the work-to-rule tactic by following the company work rules exactly and meticulously, which almost always decreases productivity. Then, when confronted about their unproductive behavior, employees innocently reply, “Gee, we were just following the company rules.”

At a General Electric Co. lighting systems plant in Hendersonville, North Carolina, employees on the assembly line were annoyed by an autocratic new supervisor. Company policy was that if employees suspected a mistake or quality flaws in their own work, they could stop the assembly line long enough to either correct the mistake or remove the flawed product from the line. In response to a thoughtless action by the new supervisor, employees all of a sudden became very conscious of potential quality flaws. They stopped the line at the slightest concern (some would say imaginary concerns). The assembly line came to a grinding halt and production was zero for an entire day.

When the new supervisor criticized them for their tactics, telling them not to be so conscientious, they followed his directions precisely. They weren’t nearly as conscientious and let all possible quality flaws pass down the assembly line, creating a nightmare for the quality inspectors at the end of the line.

In both situations the employees said they were just following orders of the new supervisor. Their negative attitude effectively sabotaged the supervisor, destroying productivity for two days. The supervisor’s authority was undermined for months to come, simply because he lacked skills to build an effective working relationship with his employees.

COLLABORATION IS NECESSARY FOR TEAMWORK

Strong collaborative skills increase natural enthusiasm not just among individuals, but also among team members and between departments, customers, suppliers, and partners. Collaborative skills leverage the effectiveness of all relationships. Collaborative relationships support healthy environments in contrast to the toxic effect of conflicted relationships.

Organizations today are advocating more flexibility in people’s roles, acceptance of change at a faster pace, more shared decision making and creative problem solving, and more trust from teams who must constantly be redefining their task. Many organizations also expect this without excessive internal competition and are unwilling to support individuals and teams in positive ways of building effective relationships and managing the inevitable conflict that will arise.

WHERE COLLABORATION BEGINS

Collaborative strategies, however, are not simply another business methodology that can be imposed like a new cost-accounting scheme. Many companies learned this the hard way when they tried to create teams without first teaching employees the skills necessary for effective teamwork.

Many companies had developed all their employees for years by encouraging them to excel at becoming “star” individual contributors. Now, with a change of policy like a flick of a switch, they were supposed to think, feel, and act like a team, where their greatest contribution now might be to support someone else’s success.

True collaboration begins inside the individual, not the organization. It begins with an intentional attitude we describe as being in the Green Zone (as opposed to the Red Zone). Collaboration begins within the individual and then works its way out into the organization. Until individuals operate in the Green Zone, an organization won’t be able to tap into the excitement, aliveness, and power of collaborative relationships. When individuals are operating in the Green Zone, collaboration is a catalyst for innovation and for higher levels of problem solving.

Individuals in the Green Zone convey an authentic, nondefensive presence. The Green Zone gives individuals the attitude and a state of mind that allows them to focus their energy and skills on creative problem solving. In an atmosphere free of intrigue, mistrust, and betrayal, individuals have greater opportunities to realize the full potential of their circumstances.

THE FIVE ESSENTIAL SKILLS

A long-term, successful relationship is unlikely without the five skills presented below:

Essential Skill #1: Collaborative Intention: Individuals stay in the Green Zone, maintain an authentic, nondefensive presence, and make a personal commitment to mutual success in their relationships.

Essential Skill #2: Truthfulness: Individuals commit to both telling the truth and listening to the truth. They also create a climate of openness that allows all people in the relationship to feel safe enough to discuss concerns, solve problems, and deal directly with difficult issues.

Essential Skill #3: Self-Accountability: Individuals take responsibility for the circumstances of their lives, the choices they make either through action or failing to act, and the intended or unforeseen consequences of their actions. They would rather find a solution than find someone to blame.

Essential Skill #4: Self-Awareness and Awareness of Others: Individuals commit to knowing themselves deeply and are willing to explore difficult interpersonal issues. They seek to understand the concerns, intentions, and motivations of others, as well as the culture and context of their circumstances.

Essential Skill #5: Problem-Solving and Negotiating: Individuals use problem-solving methods that promote a cooperative atmosphere. They avoid fostering subtle or unconscious competition.

Some people maintain that it is impossible to be truthful, accountable, aware, and collaborative unless you are in a safe environment. They feel it is too dangerous to always tell the truth and to boldly take responsibility for all of their actions. We argue instead that it is precisely these behaviors that create safe environments. The more individuals stay in the Green Zone, tell the truth, are accountable for the consequences of their choices, strive to increase self-awareness, and communicate their good intentions, the greater the chances for successful collaboration.

Our international colleagues in Japan recognized this in a big way fifteen years ago when they first started working with Dr. Will Schutz, one of the pioneers of the human potential movement. Since then our colleagues have delivered courses in over a thousand Japanese companies focusing on increasing truthfulness, self-accountability, and self-awareness.⁶

Our Japanese partners are not alone in this realization. Our colleagues around the world are reaping the same benefits. In “The People Puzzle,”⁷ Maxi Trope outlines his use of these concepts to improve the performance of the Norwegian Djuice Dragons sailing crew as they competed in the 2001 to 2002 Volvo Round-the-World Ocean Race. The story gives an excellent example of creating strong motivation, commitment, and strength (i.e., high team efficiency) in a competitive environment where members of the team constantly have to live on or beyond the boundaries of their comfort zones. Trope writes:

In “Doing a Freys,”⁸ Marie Larssen and Anna-Karin Neuman describe how collaborative skills were an essential part of a radical change at Freys Hotels in Stockholm, Sweden. All management levels were abolished, and the hotel staff took over complete responsibility for running two hotels. The first year that the staff ran the hotels revenue increased by 28 percent.

The California AfterSchool Partnership is an example of a public sector collaborative venture. It is managed by the Center for Collaborative Solutions, which is funded by federal and state after-school funds and by private foundations. Due to its collaborative efforts with a diverse group of stakeholders, the partnership is at the forefront of ensuring the success of after-school programs in California.

At Eli Lilly, Dave Haase has responsibility for managing alliances with Lilly’s manufacturing partners. Haase reports that when they are training people who work in alliances, they first use difficult case simulations that teams are rarely able to resolve. Then they teach them the Red Zone/Green Zone concepts and attitudes and have them redo the same case. The teams usually do much better. Then they teach the teams the Interest-Based Problem Solving method and ask the teams to work through the same case a third time using a Green Zone mindset and the Interest-Based methodology. According to Dave, most teams are then able to reach a successful solution to the original case study which seemed unsolvable at the beginning.

Radical Collaboration does not attempt to convey a lot of information about when to collaborate. Many good books already offer that information. Instead Radical Collaboration teaches methods to significantly improve your own collaborative skills, so that if and when you choose to build a collaborative relationship, you know how to.

As you read through the rest of this book we invite you to reflect on how the presence of these five essential skills supports collaboration in your life, or how the lack of these skills may undermine your potential for successful collaborative relationships. Remember, successful collaborative relationships work from the inside out. Collaboration starts inside of you first, then moves out into individual relationships, teams, and organizations. To the extent you fail to integrate the personal mastery skills of chapters 1-9, the collaborative strategies in chapters 10-17 will be undermined in the long run. If your heart and your head are not in alignment, or if you are inauthentic or defensive, collaborative strategies will become just another flavor of the day.