The conditions for good collaboration won’t create themselves

Every good collaboration starts for a reason.

There’s something worth doing together that would be harder, slower, more expensive or perhaps impossible to achieve alone. Regional growth, widening access, better research, reducing costs, greater impact. At its best, collaboration does more than add together what each partner already has, it creates something new. That can seem like magic.

In the beginning, the value can feel obvious. Everyone agrees with the headline. There’s energy, goodwill and a genuine sense of possibility. But the people expected to deliver it are caught in systems that have been designed around organisational priorities. Budgets, targets, and performance reviews are still local. The local workload remains the same. So when collaboration starts competing with the real world on a wet Tuesday morning in February, the day job tends to come out on top.

If leaders want collaboration, they need to create conditions that don’t exist naturally. We need to change our conditions and our systems so that collaborations are not fighting with them to be successful.

Often, we plant a seed of collaboration in a car park and wonder why it isn’t growing. We need to provide fertile ground and the resources it needs to thrive at each stage.

Here are 3 top level questions we can ask ourselves to see if we are really committed to the value that the collaboration is there to create.

Assumptions

What assumptions sit below the headline? Have we actually agreed what this particular collaboration is for?

The risk is that we can agree on an attractive headline, but mistake that for a shared understanding of the problem(s) we are trying to solve and why we need each other to do that.

At the beginning, that purpose can feel obvious, but different people can interpret the words differently. Leadership changes. People discover that they are not using the same definition of success. What looked like a shared goal at launch turns out to contain several different expectations about value, contribution, pace and risk.

It’s tempting to move quickly into the “doing” of collaboration, the committees, the structures, the communications.

But to set collaboration up for success we need to stay a bit longer in the frustrating place of really understanding: what are we for, what value are we creating, and on what timeframe? What would we have to believe, change and commit to for that to be true?

Collaboration becomes brittle when hidden assumptions are mistaken for agreed expectations.

Prepare to change

What are we prepared to change inside our own organisation to make this work? Do we know what the collaboration will cost us, and what are we prepared to stop doing to make room for it?

There is a world of difference between “we want you to collaborate” and “we want this collaboration to succeed, and we recognise that this might require us to change some of the ways we do things here”. The first is encouragement. The second is leadership.

There is an elephant trap for senior university leaders: assuming that because they have agreed collaboration is strategically important, people will make it happen. Delivery teams will want to see evidence in the form of commitment, resources, and incentives that the time they will need to invest in a collaboration has been recognised, and that the barriers and conflicts that would get in the way have been removed.

In other words, leaders need to create an internal reality that matches the compelling external narrative of the headline.

Helping top-down meet bottom-up within large organisations means leaders being clear with teams tasked with collaboration about what takes precedence when priorities collide, what time and resource is available for “the work” of collaboration, delegated authorities, and decision rights, what success looks like.

Disappear like magic

What tensions and contradictions are we hoping collaboration will make disappear?

Sometimes the barrier to collaboration isn’t a lack of goodwill or skill but the fact that we ask collaboration to bridge tensions built into the system. Collaborative leaders often find themselves wrangling demands that pull in opposite directions. For example: move quickly while making sure everyone agrees, deliver more while relying on goodwill, share ownership while retaining full organisational control, work collectively while rewarding individual performance.

Collaboration cannot remove genuine conflicts of interest or make incompatible incentives compatible merely because everyone agrees to use the word “partnership”.

The answer isn’t to collaborate less. It’s to stop asking collaboration to perform magic.

When we are clear about the value we are trying to create, honest about the assumptions and tensions sitting underneath it, and prepared to change our own organisations to make the work possible, collaboration becomes much less fragile.

That’s good news. It means success doesn’t depend on luck, or on committed people endlessly going the extra mile. We can create the conditions for good collaboration – and give people a much better chance of making something valuable happen together.