Imagine this – you arrive to work on Monday morning and find that your team has won the right to handle the company’s most important client. As a result the team will be expanded to deal with the extra workload.

There is already a huge list of well qualified and high quality applicants for the expansion – your team has the ‘pick of the litter’ because everyone in the company knows your team develops their people to their highest potential.

Mondays are a great day of the week for your high performing team. Members arrive refreshed from the week-end and look forward to meeting up for another challenging but rewarding week. There is a palpable sense of clarity and focus on the team objectives. Balanced with a playful approach to learning something new everyday and towards overcoming the evitable set backs and challenges. By the end of the week you know that team will be a little wiser, a little stronger and the sense of community a little deeper than before.

Then the alarm clock goes off. And you awake to your real world. And it is Monday morning and you have had such a lovely dream you were sad to leave it. Ahead of you is the commute, the pile of ‘stuff’ that will greet you when you get to work. The silent, trudging along, colleagues trying to conceal their quiet desperation about another Monday morning and a week ahead of sporadic at best, team-work.

There will be the evitable ‘crises during the week leaving you feeling physically and emotionally spent by the weeks end (or even earlier). A good portion of your week-end is spent ‘recovering’ form the effects of the week. Rinse and repeat.

What distinguishes these two scenarios? Simple – collaborative team work.

If building a collaborative team (one with high Collaborative Intelligence)was easy everyone would belong to one. That’s the bad news. The good news is that with the right tools people can do to develop their team from the ‘inside out’. Articles on ways to improve teamwork point to the fact that a great team never consists of an assembly of unmotivated and dysfunctional individuals.

‘High Performing Team’ (HPT) rule number one: HPTs are made up of well-developed individuals.

Conclusion: to grow great teams – grow great people

Training that grows people and teams in tandem is the secret of most successful organizations. You are frying two fish in the one pan. Beyond growing the individual the team requires a reason to exist and know its prime function. High perfuming teams are self-aware.

‘High Performing Team’ (HPT) rule number two: HPTs are very aware of what their team ‘does’. The role it plays in the overall success of the business or organization.

Conclusion: to get the best out of your team provide them with a challenging but achievable objective and never let them forget their role in the overall success of the enterprise.

A literature review on employee motivation provides some insights about how employees become motivated and part of a cohesive team.

1. They like to be treated as human beings – not parts of a big machine
2. They want to know that their work is appreciated
3. They like to know how their contribution fits into serving ‘greater good’ of the company
4. They want to have input into how their work is done
5. They want a sense of community – one to which they belong that they provide support for and in turn provides support them, when they need it.

How difficult is it to provide these things in the workplace? Well it doesn’t have to be ‘rocket surgery’. There is a seven point system that paves the way toward that high performing team you visited in your dream at the beginning of this article. It is presented in a series of questions:

A) What are the shared assumptions your team is using to generate the ‘team-effect’ they presently have?

B) What does your team think is possible?

C) What would it take for you and your colleagues to develop a deeper trust of each other?

D) Is leadership concentrated in a small number of the team?

E) What would it take to have that leadership spread throughout the entire team?

F) What changes in the culture of your workplace would have to take place for your team to be able to function more like a network and less like a hierarchy?

These are not easy questions and creating a high performance team is not always an easy process but it must start somewhere. These questions can act as a catalyst to conversations within your team that can have far-reaching implications.

Articles on ways to improve teamwork frequently imply that personal development has no place in the workplace. This is a delusion – you cannot develop an employee in sustainable way professionally, without helping them to grow personally.

A literature review on employee motivation often displays approaches toward employees as troops being sent into battle, rather than people who have personal as well as professional aspirations. A more rounded view of employees enables us to grow high performance teams that are connected and effective at many levels.

Over the last ten years organizational teams have become more distributed and very complex. Despite the number of technologies available to assist teams and groups, it is still exceedingly difficult to manage teams.

I use the term ‘organizational’ very loosely. By “organizational teams,” I mean teams working within organizations that could be solid, vertically integrated corporate entities, government departments, networked business clusters, ‘not for profit’ communities, informal “task forces,” social groupings and special interest groups.

Individual team members may belong to many of these teams on a part-time and ad hoc basis – they may see each other frequently, or never ever meet physically – conducting all communications electronically or via the web.

And contrary to popular belief, the introduction of all real-time conferencing and collaboration technologies can actually make things worse. It may distract team members from their real business objectives and drive them into ongoing loops of technology experimentations. In these situations, the focus on the work mission is often lost in favor of mastering and attempting to extract ever increasing benefits from the technology itself.

So why is it so difficult to successfully manage teams today? I believe there are two main reasons:

• Teams are using the wrong model to organize themselves
• Teams are not keeping pace with the rapid changes in their business environments’

So says Ken Thompson the author of ‘Bioteams‘. Ken’s book provides a convincing argument that to survive and thrive in to-days rapidly changing environment, teams need to mimic the structure of nature’s most successful designs. For example those found in beehives, anthills, and viruses. This book is a fascinating read for anyone curious about what its going to take to move teams and organizations into the hyper-linked, knowledge economy of the mid-21st century.

In their book Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan estimate that 40 percent of an effective leader’s time is spent on people issues. They point out that: “This immense personal commitment is time-consuming and fraught with emotional wear and tear in giving feedback, conducting dialogues, and exposing your judgment to others. But the foundation of a great company is the way it develops people.” There are no shortcuts in developing people, but here are some time stretching suggestions.

• Change the way you hold meetings and take turns to allow everyone to speak. This creates opportunities for people to build relationships and sends the message that you want to hear what others think. Consider rotating the leadership responsibility for the meeting among your employees.
• Instead of hitting the seductive reply button on your email, walk to the person’s desk if possible. Face-to-face interaction builds relationships and may also cue you into subtle signals of concern that are missing in emails.

• Return phone calls in the shortest period of time possible without regard to the perceived status and rank of the caller. Failure to return phone calls in a timely manner (or at all) creates a lot of anger in the corporate world. Remember that all members of your organization have something valuable to offer.

• Host an informal lunch on a regularly scheduled basis. Order pizza or sandwiches if the budget allows and keep it to 30 minutes. Ask everyone to share an idea – about something they learned in the last week as the “price” of lunch. Or just use the time for informal conversation so people can get to know each other – and you – better.

If you are a manager of that 40 % of your time dealing with ‘people issues’ – you would probably agree that it constitutes almost 100% of your stress. So learning to deal more effectively with people you manage, supervise or work with can have big benefits – you’d probably live longer too. And of course the end result is greater collaborative intelligence within your team.

Michael Sampson is an IT industry analyst, corporate trainer and business consultant. His blog is a great resource for anyone interested in creating greater collaboration through technology.

“With the amount of information people are faced with, creating an environment where ideas and collaboration flourish is a challenge. Accumulated information can inadvertently contribute to confusion and overwhelm research teams, if the content isn’t presented intuitively,” said Sandy Ping, CEO of VentureForward.

This challenge has a huge impact on our ability to collaborate – whether we are a part of a small volunteer organization or a large international project team.

David Allen has mentioned on his blog that he is experimenting using it with tracking his Mind Manager maps. Maybe that is a little too much information for you. If you have used Mind Manager for creating mind maps you will realize that ‘Mapping you maps’ could be a very useful thing. Anyone who has Mind Manager loaded up and is interested in how to use it to develop a talk for example, can email me directly and I will send them a copy of a map I did recently on the topic of ‘The Use of Intuition in Business Decisions’ – you do have to have at least the demo version loaded for the file to be any good to you – so bear that in mind before you ask for it.

If you haven’t heard of either of these resources I highly recommend that you check them out. The immediate application to helping teams collaborate more effectively could be the creation of a mind map or personal brain for a project that required lots of peoples input. I’m sure you can think of a multitude of other applications though once you have taken a closer look at these collaboration tools. In fact used in specific ways, both these tools could be rightly described as ‘social software‘. And of course both are great ways to develop collaborative intelligence (or CQ as I call it) at either an individual or group level.

Mentoring and coaching will become more important as a way to effectively transfer all the ’soft’ information and skills between the generations. Other management strategies to assist gen Y in taking over the reins are:

• Providing training in time management
• Offering community involvement opportunities
• Creating a system, for frequent public praise for performance
• Creating many opportunities for team involvement
• Customizing the career paths for employees

Knowledge management is a core issue. Beyond internal mentorship and coaching programs, building communities of practice provides many advantages to businesses struggling to maintain their effectiveness. Coordination of individual strengths and high levels of collaboration have rapidly become building blocks of highly successful teams.

1. They are able to share the stress and strain evenly (notice the word evenly) throughout the team- like a tennis racket taking the impact of the ball and spreading it across the entire racket surface.
2. They have a strong network of connection and support between its members. This accelerates learning and enables the teams reaction time to be faster and more responsive to challenges from the environment.
3. They achieve their objectives more through people and less through politics.
4. They look after its own. Individuals are not left to fend for them selves and staff retention is higher because people feel a stronger sense of community and belonging.
5. They have a ‘team charter’ and have bought into what their team is ‘for’.
6. They are well connected with other teams and know what the corporate objectives are and are able to consistently work towards them.
7. They constantly replenish themselves, growing its members, and are constantly learning to better adapt to their environment.
8. Finally a High CQ Team displays a strong sense of meaningful participation which it’s members are all connected to.

High CQ team are already out there and as the importance of collaborative intelligence becomes more recognized, more will emerge. The retirement of Baby Boomers and growing influence of ‘Gen Y’ will also bring CQ into center stage within organizations. Gen Y value highly many of the characteristics of high CQ teams. Companies that realize this and act on it will be able to take advantage of this very significant demographic shift.

There is also a sense of community within such teams or departments. People from outside sense this very quickly and notice something special is going on. We have all had this experience and most of us can’t put our finger on what it is. Like the difference between listening to a well-rehearsed orchestra and a group of novice musicians that are playing out of key.

A team with high CQ expects challenge and meets it with one eye on results and the other on what it can learn from each encounter with something new. A collaboratively intelligent team realizes that all great teams are a process, not a thing. This is based upon strong bonds between it’s members. There is an awareness that each person in the team is also a process and not static. Personality profiles are perceived as general guides but each person is encouraged to grow and change in positive ways. Team members know that a great deal of behavior is determined by the situation and they consciously create situations where collaboration is easy and fruitful. The assumption is that no matter what the personality of the team member, there will always be opportunities for high levels of collaboration. More about ‘High CQ Teams’ in the next post…..

Collaboration Tools

Individually we humans are the smartest creatures on earth. Or at least we like to think so. You notice I said individually. However, sometimes when working together we produce far-from-perfect results.

Throughout history, we have pulled off amazing feats as a result of our ability to collaborate and build upon our collective efforts. As a species, when we coordinate and play to our higher purpose, we are pretty amazing. The launching of the Hubble telescope is a testament to what we can achieve with our collaborative efforts. Never has our ability to ‘pull together’ been more important or more challenged by the environment we live in. Collaborative Intelligence (or CQ) exists in all groups, and is defined as the process of harnessing the intelligence and energy of networks of people.

The cooperative potential within corporations and teams is huge; tapping into their Collaborative Intelligence becomes a game everyone needs to play. Highly successful organizations are those with the most effective teams – this is no accident. The question is: “How can we tap into and build more collaborative intelligence?”

Here are 10 ways to harness greater quantities of collaborative intelligence:

1. Establish a ‘higher calling’ for the team. This is a common purpose that represents a higher calling and brings context to the significance of the team’s existence. For example: Apple Computer stating that they ‘educate the world’. Providing a service to society is the simplest way that an organization can isolate a higher calling for its existence. This process must be entered into with full sincerity. A ‘true’ higher calling is reflective of the culture and intentions of the organization as a whole and therefore is core to what the organization is ‘for’ and how it plans to achieve that.

2 . Establish a reward system for innovation and creativity. Ensure that rewards are equally available for ideas and innovations that don’t work as for those that do. Rather than the practical results of any particular idea, the focus will be on the level of innovation, even those that don’t result in ’success’ in the conventional sense. History is piled high with examples of ‘mistakes’ that became innovations of great value. When we reward attempts at innovation we are stating that it is the intention that is important.

3. Plan to use all of the experience within the team. Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience. That’s a lot of wisdom to tap into. Great team leaders and managers know how to harness and tap into those years of experience and wisdom.

4. Raise awareness of the importance of shared assumptions. Assumptions cause us to run on ‘autopilot’. Supported by assumptions that go unchecked and unchallenged, teams can continue to run the same old routines for a long time without anyone noticing. If the same old routine is getting you and your team the results you need, then that’s a good thing. If not, maybe it is time to life the hood and have a peep into what’s driving the team’s behavior – at the assumptions.

5. Encourage team members to find out about each others roles. The more they know about others perspectives, the more likely they will be able to empathize with them when the going gets tough. In the past, empathy has been considered a ’soft skill’ that has no place in the business arena. In reality empathy is an important business skill. The ability to put ourselves in another’s shoes helps us understand what others needs and motivations are.

6. Intention is the Keystone. Just as a team’s attention is important – so is intention. Intentions have an eerie way of manifesting into reality. Setting intention causes our attention to notice specific aspects of our environment. Intention directs attention so we must plan that very carefully. Having the team form a positive intention around an objective is one of the best ways of doing this.

7. Celebrate successes along the way. Celebration acts to reinforce the progress a team has made and emphasizes the importance of the team process in reaching desired objectives. The rituals observed in different cultures, such as Ramadan, Christmas, Hanukkah, and graduations are a testament to how important celebration is to us. Making celebration an integral part of the life of a team / organization helps the individual fell more deeply connected to it.

8. Invest resources in learning. Continuous improvement is only possible when individual and the team as a whole are learning new things. By publicly demonstrating support for the learning process, leaders model the importance of building ‘learning organizations’. This serves everyone in the long run. Creating ‘learning teams’ is one of the core strategies for running an organization that is highly adaptive and responsive to change.

9. Provide opportunities for sharing ideas during the project-planning phase. People do not argue with their own material. That is, when everyone has taken an active part in the planning process then creating the ‘buy-in’ for the project is much simpler. Because it belongs to them. they are much more likely to give the project their full support.

10. Balance ‘top-down’ with ‘bottom-up’ processing. This means that directives and guidance from the top must be balanced with feedback and ’street-level’ information. Swarm Intelligence is a very real factor in the functioning of any team / group. One of the reasons baboons are faster learners than chimps is that they congregate in larger numbers and are quicker at sharing large amounts of information. The reward for this distinction is that baboons have the nickname the ‘rats of Africa’ and the chimps last hope of survival is a wild life trust. Most organizations would benefit by facilitating more bottom-up processing.

Managers and leaders are realizing that more efficient collaboration is the key to their teams being more effective. Because human beings are involved, the solution is not going to be solely technological. Many companies have realized that everyone having a Blackberry has not solved more problems. With the high levels of employee stress reported, it appears that the human portion of the equation has not benefited much – we just have to run a little faster it seems. Helping teams tap into greater levels of collaborative intelligence @ work promises many things – lease of all making it possible for us to enjoy our work more, which has to be a good thing.

Peter Block

Peter’s quote brings us to an important question: When is ‘weak’ leadership a good thing? When we hear someone described as a ’strong leader’ what does it mean? Does is suggest that no harm is going to come to us on their watch? That’s a pretty good feeling, but it lets us off the hook in many ways. If something ‘bad’ happens it won’t be our fault. If there are legal difficulties, well we were only following orders (we’d never use that excuse – would we?). Then there is the excuse that we were too low in the chain of command, we didn’t know what was going on, or we had no say. In a few brief sentences I have shown how quickly ’strong leadership’ has become a convenient villain. Once started, the finger pointing has no end.

One of the interesting things about colonies of bees, ants and termites, is that there is little evidence of ’strong leaders’. Instead here you find a great deal of individual ownership and responsibility. In a way these unassuming little creatures have discovered some important things about running successful, adaptive and resilient communities. Deborah Gordan has written a book entitled ‘How an Insect Society is Organized‘ which explores this topic in greater depth.

For me the most fascinating aspect of ant colonies is the COLLABORATIVE INTELLIGENCE (CQ) they display. In other words their ability to harness the intelligence and energy of the entire group (or team?). If collaborative intelligence is the main distinguishing feature, can we develop more collaborative intelligence in human teams and organizations? Yes we can. A close examination of collaborative intelligence (CQ) has turned up some basic principles that every team and business can use to become more effective.

I have isolated seven factors that build the collaborative intelligence of teams and businesses. The first two are: ASSUMPTIONS and PERCEPTIONS. When we consider assumptions the most important question is: what assumptions are running through your team or organization? Because the assumptions we make about the business we’re in, our clients, our colleagues, determine how we form the second factor: perceptions.

In subsequent posts I’m going to explore the effect assumptions and perceptions play in how your team operates. More importantly I will show you how to adjust them in ways that will enable you and your team to become more effective together. After all that is the name of this blog ‘Getting Clever Together’. Meet you here tomorrow.