We’re used to thinking of collaboration as a universally good thing. Leaders rightly strive to promote a culture of cooperation, contribution and knowledge sharing in the organisation (full disclosure: I’ve consulted and run workshops on this very thing). Employees get assessed on how collaborative they are. Endless tools are created to support it.
And yet there are occasions when we can have too much collaboration. A common example of this is having a consensus-driven culture that seeks to make progress through a desire to include every vaguely relevant person in every decision. Which is surprisingly common. Inclusivity in decision-making can be good of course, but it can easily get out of whack as a result of even the best of intentions. This way lies meetings with too many people in them (one of the rules of meetings should be ‘no spectators’), overly committee-driven governance, and meetings about meetings about meetings.
Everything slows down. People spend all of their days in meetings and internally focused. Decision-making is protracted and painful.
A culture like this can creep up over time and eventually strangle the business.
To avoid these kinds of bad habits from calcifying the organisation it’s worth considering the level of clarity that there is on how decisions are made. What’s the type of decision, for a start. Is this a one way door decision where time, lots of information, inputs and consideration are needed? Or a two-way door decision where it can be made quickly and then course corrected if necessary. Who’s the actual decision-maker or the person that commits the business to the course of action? What inputs are required and can these be gathered in another, more asynchronous way?
Improved collaboration is rightly something to be aspired to. If it’s the wrong kind of collaboration though it can be the quickest way to slow your business down.
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Photo by Nicole Baster on Unsplash
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