Leaders have a lot on their plates, but nothing is more important than clarity. What’s important to your organization? Why? How are we getting the work done? When do we start? At each stage in the chain of decision making, ambiguity looms as the enemy of clarity; as leaders we’ve all experienced dis-engagement when things simply aren’t clear to our team. What can a leader do – especially in a world where hyper-connected employees can question and second-guess decisions instantly?
Leaders have to understand that decisions are like best-selling novels; the greater the ambiguity around a decision, the faster it moves up the New York Times best-seller list. People’s natural curiosities and ambiguity seem to feed on each other. In worst cases, ambiguity leads to conspiracy theories and people actually work against each other. In most cases, work simply slows down while people seek out answers.
What if you could eliminate ambiguity? A lot is at stake. There’s more than enough evidence to demonstrate that teams produce higher results when they can align their individual work to the greater mission and strategy of the organization. When all goes right, organizations can produce discretionary effort – that amazing, hard-to-bottle effort people give when ambiguity is replaced by a sense of shared purpose.
People laughed when I first said “taxonomy” inside Cisco, but taxonomy is the fundamental building block to any organization looking to speak a common operating language. Taxonomy classifies and defines things; in this case, what success looks like. Focus on defining your operating model metrics like profitability, revenue growth, share gains and productivity; emphasize the specific, written definition of success; and show the outcomes and sources of data used in your organization to gauge success.
Try as hard as you can to tie these metrics to the performance management and accountability system of your organization. Publish this taxonomy on your intranet and push it to your internal communities.
Here’s a simple question: does strategy mean the same thing to everyone in your organization? What if the answer is no? That’s highly likely, because we’ve all gone to different colleges and had diverse work experiences. A common vocabulary provides a single context for decision-making. In Cisco, our common vocabulary is called Vision-Strategy-Execution-Metrics. Each decision element is defined and includes guiding principles to give people guardrails. It’s mandatory for leaders to communicate their priorities – that is, the decisions they have made – to their teams using this vocabulary. You can achieve transparency when you tell people three things about a decision: who made it? Who’s accountable for it? What does the accountability system look like? It’s hard to sacrifice around one vocabulary; imagine, though, the power of a single decision language across a global organization.
Taxonomy and common vocabulary tell your team what’s important; engagement is more driven by the human need to understand why decisions matter and how it is expected to be executed – what I call the “story behind the decision”. When you engage your team on decisions you’ve made (hopefully using a taxonomy and common vocabulary!), you have to answer three questions to satisfy “why” something is important: First, what process was used to make the decision? Second, what facts or data were used to support the decision? Third, what trade-offs were considered? The more your team knows this “story,” the faster teams move to execution.
I’m convinced that most people don’t wake up in the morning trying to second-guess decisions. Ambiguity is your enemy as the leader of a team. You can transform your team’s natural curiosity into a powerful source of discretionary effort – all it takes is a little clarity.
P.S. There is one final thing you can do as a leader to increase clarity on your team – tell your team how you make decisions. We all naturally make decisions differently. By sharing our authentic style of communicating and making decisions, you can diffuse a lot of unnecessary friction and built trust faster.
What is YOUR Company’s Return on its Collaboration Investment?
Operational ROI allows you to assess how collaboration eliminates or avoid costs associated with running your business. You might cut travel, reduce infrastructure needs, lower bandwidth or energy costs, save on office space and so on. Collaboration can replace or reduce the need for many of these costs.
Productivity ROI refers to savings generated from more efficient processes, accelerated decision-making and reduced cycle times. Collaboration can lead to significant productivity gains in a number of ways, such as optimizing lines of business or matching expertise to opportunities early on.
Strategic ROI can be the hardest to measure, but perhaps the most transformative. This kind of ROI occurs when collaboration enables your business to take a giant leap forward in areas like enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, speeding up innovation, introducing new business models or entering new markets. These types of changes can also reshape an industry in fundamental ways.
Financial services. With collaboration, banking customers today can use a virtual mortgage lender, make a deposit on their smart phone, and speak to video service representatives who have access to their banking history and can suggest new products based on your personal needs and history. Collaboration streamlines banking operations, offers customers a multichannel experience and provides on-demand expertise.
Health care. In health care, telemedicine brings experts together with patients to enhance the diagnosis and treatment processes. Nurses and doctors are mobile and have fast access to the information they need. Collaboration can help decrease patient wait times, increase clinical safety and provide better visibility into staffing requirements. All of these improvements, made possible by collaboration solutions, lower the cost of providing care.
Manufacturing. Manufacturing companies leverage collaboration to develop products in one country, manufacture them in another and market them in yet another—without skipping a beat. Everyone has complete visibility into the process, and the work never stops. It’s a transparent, seamless supply chain.
Retail. In retail, collaboration changes the way goods are made and sold. Virtual fitting rooms take time and space out of the equation, as designers review designs and choose fabrics without traveling to Europe and Asia. A process that once took a month can be done in a matter of hours. Meanwhile, at the other end of the retail cycle, new contact center capabilities offer real-time sensing of Twitter feeds from within a store, so retailers can send highly targeted offers to the mobile devices of consumers inside the store. For consumers, the result is a personalized shopping experience from start to finish.
Government. Federal and local governments use collaboration to enhance public safety, drive efficiency in times of budget constraint and improve the citizen experience with 24-hour access to many services. Police are using mobility and presence solutions to improve public safety. Courts are using virtual trials that include video conferencing technology to save on transportation costs and accelerate the trial process. And prisons are taking advantage of telepresence to bring human services to inmates on premise.
Sit down with cross-functional leaders and challenge yourselves to think about how Operational ROI, Productivity ROI and Strategic ROI might look in your industry and in your organization.
WOULD YOU LIKE A FREE COPY OF THE COLLABORATION IMPERATIVE? The first 25 people to email us a book request to info@thecollaborationimperative.com will receive a complimentary copy. Be sure to include your mailing address!
TheStreet.com features The Collaboration Imperative in a video interview that was posted today. Click here to watch it.
I was able to highlight some of the key themes of the book and showcase examples of how both GE and Cisco are using collaboration to their advantage.
Martin Zwilling, who covers the startup and entrepreneurs beat for Forbes, published a great piece based on content from The Collaboration Imperative.
The piece highlights “10 Tips on the Value of Collaboration.” Read it here.
Is Collaboration Worth It? It’s a valid question. But the answer is clear from my frequent conversations with Cisco customers. Every day, customers tell us collaboration is critical to their ability to compete—something top of mind right now. Why does collaboration matter?
Competition comes from anywhere and everywhere. The barriers to entry are lower than ever, and you cannot predict who will enter your market next. It might be a startup in India, China, Africa or Eastern Europe—or competition from another industry. How do you stay ahead when you don’t know which organizations you’ll compete with next month or next year?
Companies have to focus on core competencies and partner to do everything else. Companies once could gain an advantage by owning every aspect of a value chain with the goal of vertically integrating an industry. Today, it makes more sense to focus on the aspect of the value chain that is most critical to your success and partner for the rest.
Open systems change the game. The Internet and networking technologies have connected us in ways once thought impossible, opening the door for innovative business models. Now, businesses must adapt to another wave of networked technology that is shaping the modern working experience into one that is mobile, social, visual and virtual.
Together, these trends are shaping a new business landscape, making speed and flexibility the most important competitive differentiators in just about every industry across the globe. We believe collaboration is the best way to build the real-time enterprise that can adapt to fast-changing market pressures. It helps you achieve operational excellence today and deliver innovation tomorrow.
For example, we’ve seen a Paris suburb credit its economic turnaround to a new collaboration infrastructure and a global nutritional products company increase sales through a social media-based data mining program. We’ve seen engineering companies accelerate their product-design processes by collaborating with video conferencing, while energy companies identify untapped field capacity through a tighter link between global experts and local resources. The list is long and growing all the time.
Have you seen other far-reaching collaboration examples? Share your experiences here.