Everyone wants to go to heaven
When I was in grad school I read a study about executive team contribution to revenue. The researchers asked team leads within each company to estimate what percentage of revenue could be attributes to their team. When they summed the percentages up, they averaged about 150% (I couldn’t find the original study to confirm exact numbers). Rather than cutting the pie, they demanded for a 50% bigger one.
Most organizations have some unobjectionable value around collaboration. What teams like the ones above are experiencing is the less fluffy end of collaboration: the credit for its fruits. Am I wasting my time by helping this person? Does this project have a personal opportunity cost?
When teams say they want more collaboration (“We need to be more collaborative!”), they’re really saying they want other teams to do more to support their mission. Rare is the player who demands others take greater advantage of their talents.
There’s a folk saying that “Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.” Every company wants profits. Every worker wants to grow (in the many ways that could look). When I worked on cars, dealers loved to tell us they “just want to move metal.”
How (approach and process) is hard.
I wrote earlier this year about some ways teams can better collaborate; there’s not one model that’s best for all teams, but, as Adam Grant has found, the behaviors and attributes that separated those better and worse performers were assertiveness, setting boundaries, and understanding others’ interests.
Understanding others’ interests can run counter to how most companies operate, with KPIs that cascade vertically and only intersect near the top, where the execs like the ones above arm-wrestle to cut the biggest slice of the pie. Even in an agency setting, where the shared incentive (i.e., keep a client’s business) is relatively clear, team goals can quickly diverge. Account wants to keep clients happy. Creative wants to win awards. Strategy wants to impress each other with our smarts.
My therapist talks about having two modes in relationships: loving and calling for love.
I’m drawn to the power of Giving (the corporate version of loving), when combined with the Big 5 trait of Openness, because of the uncertainty involved in any ambitious venture. If you want to make something great, you’re going to be hit with surprises and strict adherence to formulas, models, dogma, and best practices will have them wash you into indecision and infighting.
If working together is important, how is even more important because it pushes us toward either shared or personal goals. Approach and process are the API that make goals collaborative, forming a design fit for a specific purpose. As Rummelt writes in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, “Many effective strategies are more designs than decisions — are more constructed than chosen.” The same goes for teams who make strategy into things, and into (sliceable) revenue.
