Working together
Peruse just about any company’s careers page or company values and you’ll see one word proudly emboldened, collaboration. As we’ve moved from work-as-subsistence to work-as-identity (and maybe back again?), companies have attempted to make our time on the clock feel like less like a grind, and more like a college work group. Remote work has accelerated the rise of collaboration tools, and endless list of SaaS apps with goofy names that atomize the company’s macro tasks into teams’ micro tasks.
Collaboration (Latin for “working with”) is a noble goal, the harmonious result of people of different skills levels and fields coming together toward a bigger, shared goal. Juxtaposed against solo work, it assumes that the final product needs varied perspectives and jazz-like alchemy to be truly great. However, too often, a lesser version is taken as acceptable. It’s the more literal interpretation of the Latin roots, working alongside other people rather than making things together; an assembly line rather than a back-and-forth co-creation.
There’s a good reason for this. Working with other people is often the most consistently challenging (yet also rewarding) part of a job. Big organizations have dizzying overlaps of incentives that can reward conflicting behavior and make collaboration feel futile.
One of my favorite Twitter follows, John Cutler, posts a lot about organizational design.
A few days ago he posted this POV (to which he later said he was half joking): RACI is a great signal you need to reorg. In that sense it is incredible. My experience with RACIs is that they’re an attempt to use process to solve cultural problems. If teams don’t understand and value each other’s expertise as a starting point, approval tiers aren’t going to make their outputs more creative.
Cutler also recently shared this graphic that illustrated to be how varied approaches to collaboration can be.
If a creative agency workflow, I’ve seen strategy-creative process look like almost all of these. (The second on column one is similar to what I wrote about here; the first one on column three reminds me of working on bad pitches; the fourth one on column two reminds me of good pitches.)
All of them can work in the right cultural environment.
If there’s not one model, how can we get more specific about what we want? Or what we do? I look to Adam Grant’s seminar article on Givers and Takers for a start. He describes the difference between the two styles of working in groups:
Every day, employees make decisions about whether to act like givers or like takers. When they act like givers, they contribute to others without seeking anything in return. They might offer assistance, share knowledge, or make valuable introductions. When they act like takers, they try to get other people to serve their ends while carefully guarding their own expertise and time.
His research has found that both the most and least successful employees were givers. The behaviors and attributes that separated those two groups were assertiveness, setting boundaries, and understanding others’ interests. Givers who could do that were more valuable to their organizations.
Givers aren’t unselfish — they just know they’re there to help in a specific way. In addition to offering up “collaboration” as an attempt to create a more harmonious and productive work environment, I hope more companies will begin to articulate the behaviors they expect to get their employees there.
