Most of us assume that if we want to change people’s behavior, we
need to change their incentives.
For example, after I published
research and advice on collaboration in professional service firms, I heard from a surprising number of people
who wrote to ask questions like, “Maybe it’ll work in a partnership,
like a law or consulting firm, but what about in my company, where employees
aren’t owners and can’t change the rules?” People in industries as
different as commercial real estate, pharma, biotech startups, hedge funds, and
public school districts worried about how to transform a competitive,
star-driven culture into a collaborative one when they had no power
to juggle financial rewards and no influence over promotion decisions.
To pursue this issue, I picked a new
research setting where the reward system is highly constrained — and so is
the career ladder. By investigating how a leader can boost cross-silo
collaboration without changing either the compensation or the promotion system,
maybe we could find lessons that translate to companies where people also face
limits on their ability to change organizational structures.
Tackling Collaboration in a Constrained
Setting
The Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer
Institute is one of the world’s leading institutions for adult and pediatric
patients. Collaboration is as necessary as it is tricky in this setting. Just
as with business knowledge, scientific knowledge is changing so rapidly
that Dana-Farber’s doctor-researchers must evolve quickly from generalists to
specialists who focus on a highly specialized niche within cancer detection and
treatment. Yet tackling cancer requires a multidisciplinary effort, ranging
from disease biology to population monitoring. Research efforts can’t focus on
applying the findings of deep, narrow studies; they must add up to a much
broader, more integrated program.
The difficult angle for the Dana-Farber
— the challenge shared by many companies — is that collaboration doesn’t come
naturally to many of the highest performers and the system seems almost geared
against teamwork. The organizational stars have tremendous autonomy over key
work decisions. And just like software engineers who hold code in their head or
a law firm partner who controls critical client relationships, the Dana-Farber
scientists hold a credible threat of walking out the door with their IP and
grant-winning prowess. The parallels with business are clear: Stars are a
crucial but perhaps fragile source of innovation and competitive advantage.
Here was the paradox for leaders: While
fostering smart collaboration, they had to maintain Dana-Farber’s
entrepreneurial approach to research. And they faced big constraints. Because
the researchers in question were members of the Harvard faculty, the
Dana-Farber leaders couldn’t influence promotion criteria, nor could they
reward people differentially through compensation.
So how do you jumpstart collaboration
without transforming the pay or promotion system? The problem is that
collaboration requires an investment.
My analyses show that “smart
collaboration” — that is, collaboration targeted at the right
opportunities — nearly always pays out, but only after people spend time
developing the underlying relationships and processes. Many people and
companies start the investment, but quit before seeing the returns. Only if you
stick with the effort through a long enough time frame can you expect the
returns to become positive. This is how collaboration gets embedded as a normal
way of working. But how to get through the pain barrier?
Jumpstarting collaboration
To foster collaboration, your initial
hurdle is to capture people’s attention and give them the confidence to take
some risks in order to make the initial investment. Costs naturally drop as
people gain experience collaborating and develop the trusted relationships that
smooth the process, but you should take steps to lower those costs more
quickly. Likewise, your actions can make the benefits start to flow sooner.
Both these efforts help the payback period arrive sooner, making
collaboration a smarter investment for the next wave of people. Here are steps
to keep in mind:
Pick your battles carefully. Make sure you’re focusing efforts to foster
collaboration where it’s most needed: tackling complex problems that require
the inputs of multiple specialized experts who couldn’t confront the issue
without integrating their knowledge. If you’re operating in a highly
individualistic culture, select a “coalition of the willing,” people who are
favorably inclined to collaborate and won’t gripe to colleagues about a few
hiccups while you build momentum.
Convince with quantitative evidence. Harness your internal sales data to show people that
smart collaboration is not just a nice-to-have — it’s a strategic advantage for
capturing market share. The bars in the chart below, for example, show how much
your sales force increases revenue per client when people work across
boundaries to sell multiple services. But the circles, which indicate how few
clients are actually served by the full range, show how much upside potential
still exists.
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