Speaker 1: Teams are how work gets done, which means collaboration is how work gets done. Or at least that's what it should mean. Hey leader, David Berkus here, organizational psychologist, author of four best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever, including their best work ever in an ever changing environment. With that rapid growth, that constant change, new and bigger challenges have faced just about every organization. And when new and bigger challenges arise, that means we need to tap into more and more diverse sets of brains more often. That means teams get larger, teams get more diverse, and collaboration gets even more important. And that's not hypothetical. That's according to several studies, one in particular in the Harvard Business Review, that showed that teams really are getting larger and they really are getting more diverse. And that's not necessarily a good thing because unless that size and diversity is accompanied by increases in collaboration skills, those new and larger diverse teams just fall apart faster. So in this episode, we're going to cover five ways to foster collaboration on a team, no matter how large it is, but in particular, if they're getting more and more complex. Five ways to foster collaboration on complex teams. So the first way to foster collaboration on teams is to make priorities clear. Make it clear what our key tasks and objectives are. You know, lots of people work in matrix organizations and matrix teams where they actually feel like they're members of lots of different teams. What they need from the leader of every individual one is some clarity, some clarity about what specifically I should be focusing on first, second, third, tertiary, etc. What is something that just looks important and what's something that's legitimately important? And so make priorities clear and make them clear on a regular basis. When new tasks come in, when high performers are rewarded for their great performance with more things to perform on, make it clear where those things rank against our existing list of priorities. This fosters collaboration as well because we know where we need to call for help more because this is a more critical task. And if we know what other people's priorities are, we know where to volunteer help as well. So make priorities clear and keep them clear as things change. And then encourage your team to do the same which is actually the second way to foster collaboration on a team is to hold huddles. Huddles is sort of my term for where people share out their specific priorities based on the team's priorities. So on a regular basis is your team meeting like maybe weekly, maybe it's not a meeting, maybe it's an email report or something in the Slack channel, but on a regular basis are your people getting together and sharing out what they've completed and what they've worked on. My favorite form of a huddle happens for most teams on a weekly basis but the frequency isn't important, but it's a quick meeting where people report out their answers to three specific questions. What did I just complete? What am I focused on next? And what's blocking my progress? In other words, what did I just complete? So did I actually complete the things I said in the prior meeting were priorities? What am I focused on next which is the priorities question. What are my priorities for the next week or whatever the next interval of time is? And then what's blocking my progress? Where do I need help on these new priorities? Doing that not only helps keep the team accountable to each other for their performance, but it helps make sure that you have the team-wide priorities, you have the individual priorities, and there's nobody dropping the ball. There's nothing missed and overlooked. And then as I said earlier around number one, when people know each other's priorities, they know how to help. That last question, what's blocking my progress, is almost like permission to help in certain areas because people are admitting that this is a vulnerability for me. Either an internal block or a progress like a knowledge gap or an external one like I need help finding this information. Now regardless of what type of block it is, it's permission for someone else on the team to help them, in other words, to better collaborate with them. A third way to foster collaboration on teams is to set if-then plans. When you're planning out your tasks and you're planning out your work, this could be towards the end of the huddle if you wanted to do it that way, set if-then plans. In other words, if this happens, then we will do this. What this looks like on an individual basis is that what are your triggers for certain tasks? When you get this report, what do you need to do to it before you pass on? So if you get it, you'll do this, then you'll do that, right? If-then plans. But it also works really, really well for helping the team understand potential pivots. As you're saying, here's what I'm focused on next, or as a team, here's what we're focused on next, think about what potential changes in the environment could happen between now and the next meeting, and then set a plan for if that happens, then we will do this. If we find out we don't have the budget for marketing we thought, then we'll reduce costs in this area. Or if we find out this piece of information, then that will mean we immediately need to meet to discuss how we're going to pivot for it. Whatever it is, if-then planning, meaning here are the potential scenarios we're going to run into as we're trying to attack our goals, and then here's how we're going to respond to them. The reason these help foster collaboration is they keep people informed on what potential pivots are going to look like, and pivots are going to happen. You know, ideally, you don't have your people working alongside each other all the time. That would be an interruption factory. You have them syncing up to talk about what we're going to work on, and then going and doing that work on an individual basis, so that they can get that focus time that they need. But often, in that focus time, that's when new information arises, that's when they make certain decisions, and that's when pivots happen. And you may not get a chance to correct that pivot until the next huddle. Now, this is happening often. You need to shorten the timelines on your huddle, so go back to the second way and shorten that timeline. But if you can't, then these if-then plans help the team understand that if certain parameters happen, then this person's going to pivot, so they expect the pivot. So the next time we come together for a huddle, nobody is surprised, and everybody's work sort of fits together into the target deliverable that we were trying to create. Now, the first three ways to foster collaboration on teams were very clear. They were very what we might call hard, although I hate the term hard skills versus soft skills. The next two are much more empathetic, much more geared towards understanding, much more soft if you want to use the term soft skills. The truth is, all of these are hard skills, because sometimes getting along with people is a hard skill to learn. The fourth way to foster collaboration on teams is to write teammate manuals. I sometimes call these manuals of me, but essentially it's a team-building exercise where teammates first reflect on themselves. They first reflect on their work preferences, their strengths, the projects that they prefer, the ways they prefer to ask for help, etc., and then report out to the team. My favorite version, quick and dirty version of a manual of me is to ask team members ahead of a meeting to answer four simple questions. Fill in the blank four times. I'm at my best when blank. I'm at my worst when blank. I need you to blank. You can count on me to blank. You get what we're doing there. We're having people fill in what are essentially their strengths and weaknesses, what are the things, the situations that reveal those weaknesses, and what are the opportunities they have to really help someone else. You do that for every person on your team, and then you have people report out, and you better understand who you should go to for help, who's going to need you because your strengths and their weaknesses match, and as a result you'll be better able to collaborate down the road because you're better able to understand everyone else on your team. And the fifth way to foster collaboration on teams is to find free time. That's right. Find time to do nothing at all. Find time to do literally nothing, to have conversations that are outside of just a work environment. That doesn't mean you need to hang out with the team all of the time outside of work, although I do know some teams who have a regular ritual of going out to a dinner once a month, or we're going out together to lunch, or having lunch even on site. But what I mean is that when people have unstructured time, when they have time to have discussions about their life outside of work, they find what we call uncommon commonalities, something if you're a regular part of this community you've probably heard before. And what we know from the research is that when people find things outside of work in common, when they find uncommon commonalities that are common to two people on the team, uncommon to the rest of the team, they start to feel closer together. They feel more like friends. And when you start to build friends on a team, information flows faster, requests for help are more likely to get accepted, there's more resilience there, and no surprise there's greater performance because there's greater collaboration. Because wouldn't you rather work with people that you think of as friends than people you think of as talented or even untalented strangers? But the beginning of friendships and bonds on a team start with those uncommon commonalities, and those uncommon commonalities don't grow when we're so focused on execution, when we're so focused on the task. They happen when we step back from that, when we have some free time, and when we can talk about and disclose things about ourselves that are outside of work and find things that other people are disclosing about themselves that we might have in common. That's how it all starts. And so in the end, time spent doing nothing can actually be some of your most productive time. Now what you'll find is that even though those last two are more about empathy and understanding, and the first two are about clarity and execution, what you'll find is that you may need to start on the understanding side. You may need to find some uncommon commonalities through free time or through manuals of me in order to better execute a huddle or to better execute an if-then plan. It's actually really hard to make an if-then plan if you don't understand a lot about someone else and what they might if you or how they might then you. And if that doesn't make sense, go back and watch the third way to foster collaboration on teams. So start on the understanding side and you'll find you actually get gains on the clarity side as well. But don't neglect either side. One of the things we know about teams that collaborate on a regular basis is they have both. They have clarity of tasks, they know what's expected of them, but they have clarity of people. They know who they're doing this work alongside and they know what to expect of those people as well. And that creates an environment where collaboration can really thrive and that collaboration creates an environment where everyone on the team can do their best work ever. Oh and one more thing, it's almost impossible to build collaboration without trust and some of what we were trying to do here also builds trust. But if you feel like that's a big problem on your team, you're going to want to watch this video here on how to build trusting teams.