Mastering Collaboration

by Gretchen Anderson

  Delay the “work” in favor of “workarounds”

  While it might not be the most efficient way to get work done, if there really is a critical deadline, it may be better to develop a Band-Aid solution first. You will need to buy time later to create a real solution, but that will be easier to argue for when you’ve already met key requirements.

  Teams Resist Planning

  There are times when teams will resist making and committing to a plan, especially if there are many unanswered questions. There can be a fear that by creating a plan they will be held to it no matter what happens. Things almost never go according to a plan, but the process of thinking through how you will all work together is still useful. If you can’t all agree on how to approach the work, and set up points in time that others can expect to see progress, you will likely not get very far together.

  Plans are also useful to keep stakeholders informed of progress and where you are in the cycle. They need to know if they are making decisions, exploring ideas, or defining problems to be able to contribute effectively.

  So what can I do?

  You Are Here

  It isn’t enough to have a timeline of the effort listing past meetings and future milestones to remind people of where the team is. You need to be clear about whether the group is open to exploring alternatives and gathering substantial input, or whether you’re showing the output of a process simply to keep people updated. Don’t try to mix those two modalities, no matter how tempting it may be. Telling people you want their input on possibilities, only to show them proposed solutions to be critiqued, is guaranteed to frustrate everyone. If you have a critical stakeholder who missed the “offer solutions” timeframe, consider making a special “traveling salesman” stop beforehand to get their input, and be clear that it isn’t likely to be reflected immediately when they attend a session to update stakeholders on progress.

  Frame it as a guess

  I often coach teams to think about planning as fortune-telling, not a commitment. You can help alleviate fear of overpromising by asking the team to guess what could happen, and framing your plans with the right level of uncertainty when sharing with stakeholders. It is useful to consistently explain and show that plans are updated and changed as situations change so that people understand that the plan isn’t a contract.

  Conclusion

  Structure is needed to keep teams from devolving or losing focus, especially when facing complex challenges. By understanding how ideas develop and setting up cycles of effort that are timeboxed and iterative, you can help teams de-risk situations and learn to reduce or avoid negative consequences that come from their solutions. The structure you create isn’t meant to govern exactly what teams do or function as a monolithic order, but rather to help the core team and their stakeholders be explicit about where they are in their efforts and manage expectations. Plans should be made visible and revisited periodically to see what’s changed and whether the effort needs a different approach.

  Key Takeaways

  Collaborations can’t succeed if they are free-for-all discussions without structure. People’s personalities will lead to some dominating the work, or to teams getting lost between defining problems, solving them, and learning how well their solutions work.

  Creating a plan to help teams move through the cycle of exploration and learning helps mitigate risk.

  Plans don’t have to be monolithic Gantt charts, but can be structured timeboxes that repeat as the team learns more and progresses.

  It’s better to “guesstimate” how long the team needs and share those guesses to set expectations both within the team and with interested stakeholders.

  Chapter 6. Set Clear and Urgent Objectives

  Almost all of the experts I spoke with brought up how crucial it is to understand the problem space and define the desired outcomes of a collaborative effort (see Figure 6-1); failure to do this well means your collaboration faces challenges right from the very start. With many people in the mix, it becomes very easy to get the group pulled in many directions. If you don’t identify a clear objective, egos and competition are likely to take over, rather than enabling the group to pull together. In this chapter, we will look at what makes objectives useful, and how to create clear goals that unify efforts.

  Figure 6-1. Setting (or resetting) objectives should happen at the start of every cycle the team goes through

  “Shared context and goals are the most important thing that makes a team successful,” says Michael Sippey, Head of Product at Medium. “I keep learning this truth. If the team isn’t on the same page, they can’t work well together.” He believes his role as a leader is to create and maintain this focus for the group, and it’s a task he takes seriously. “In the past, maybe I was clear on the objective, the context, but I didn’t spend enough time and energy making sure everyone else was. When that happens the team feels whipsawed,” and decisions start being made to protect individual interests instead of serving the desired outcomes.

  It’s not enough to simply state objectives. To be useful, objectives need to have a sense of urgency to them, and they need to be derived from a compelling vision.

  Developing Good Objectives

  There are many books and resources that describe the process of setting objectives and key results, or OKRs. This approach, which John Doerr brought to Google in 1999, has received a lot of positive attention as a method to create a shared mission and measurable results. Christina Wodtke’s best-selling book, Radical Focus (Cucina Media), does a good job describing how OKRs work and how to use them. Like any framework, OKRs can yield good or bad results. What I find missing from much of the OKR discussion is guidance about what makes a good objective and how to create objectives well.

  Good objectives need three things: to be descriptive, not prescriptive; to have a sense of urgency; and to be grounded in solving a problem or delivering a vision of the future that’s compelling. When your objectives are well constructed, practices like OKRs can help make use of them. Leading a team through developing good objectives, rather than handing them down, is one way to get a shared understanding of what the group should focus on.

  Be Descriptive, Not Prescriptive

  Developing direction that is descriptive of an end goal or outcome, rather than overly prescriptive of a solution, can be challenging. Military culture includes a concept known as the commander’s intent, a succinct description of what constitutes success for a given mission. It contains the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and (most importantly) why the mission is being executed. Notice that the commander’s intent does not specify how the mission will unfold. The reason for this is simple: a commander is situated far from the action on the ground, ignorant of the realities of terrain, weather, logistics, and more. Central command is responsible for driving large objectives that may be made up of interlocking missions, such as controlling a specific bit of territory by one group to defend another. Units on the ground often lack the larger context of other units, and so the chain of command leaves them a certain amount of freedom to act to achieve their objective, but not to invent their objective themselves.

  I find this metaphor helpful when crafting direction for collaborative teams. It speaks to lines of authority that are useful, rather than micromanaging, while allowing teams to act with a degree of autonomy in a loosely coordinated fashion. Especially in large organizations, this interdependence is critical to being efficient with resources and allowing for the interchange of data and information, whether literally in terms of APIs and subsystems, or figuratively in terms of what’s true across the organization. Establishing a commander’s intent–like objective gives teams the freedom to decide how they will achieve the goal, but also allows for cross-coordination about the what, why, and when involved.

  When working with leaders who tend to be overly prescriptive in their objective setting, invoking the five Ws of the commander’s intent can help bring clarity, and has the advantage of making th
e team look like they’re trying to make use of the chain of command rather than undermine it. If you think about some of the less helpful directives you’ve been given, they often consist almost entirely of overly detailed “hows” while being quite light in the other dimensions. Help leaders and teams alike to describe the objective better and get everyone off on the right foot.

  Have a Sense of Urgency

  Good objectives will help teams understand what’s at stake in the effort and provide a sense of urgency to keep it from devolving under pressure. One example of how a sense of urgency is helpful comes from John Rosenberg, an ER doctor serving patients in Oakland and Richmond, California. He supports a lower-income population that faces tough challenges daily, many of them life-threatening. Not only does he treat patients who are suffering the effects of a trauma or major illness, but he also sees those grappling with mental health issues, domestic violence, and more.

  In this setting a doctor like Rosenberg is expected—and required—to work with many different kinds of people, from technicians to nurses to administrators, to handle a case. In some cases, say a problematic pregnancy that requires immediate intervention, he may have upward of 20 people directly involved in the care of the patient: NICU specialists, OB specialists, nurses, family members, and more.

  When asked how collaboration happens in an environment with that many stakeholders, many of them experts in their field, with the clock ticking and someone’s life on the line, he said, “It comes down to having clear roles and clear guidelines for what we choose to do.” He describes his mental model of emergency medicine as a type of “algorithm,” where the team looks at evidence and then considers a small number of possible actions in response. Rosenberg says what enables the team to work this way is the clear focus on the life of the patient above all else. The ER can be an intense setting with a lot of moving parts: “It’s really chaos in there, when everything is happening. There so many people and things move so quickly, but we know that the patient is our main focus. When I am the primary doctor on the case, I need to make sure that no one loses sight of them,” he says.

  Most collaborations in business aren’t literally a matter of life and death, but almost every objective in business seems urgent. Certainly pressure to “deliver” is omnipresent in business. But the drive to complete things quickly often masks the actual reasons why solving the problem is critical. Looking deeper at collaborations that struggled to engage a wider group, I often found that there were real things at stake, but the “brief” given to the team focused less on those critical outcomes and more on outputs. Teams must know what happens if they fail, or if they make poor decisions, to be properly motivated to overcome interpersonal dynamics and keep up their stamina for the duration. Consider that “failure” for many collaborations may mean that a siloed Band-Aid solution is created, or that the group loses steam or is consumed by conflict until it dissolves and people retreat back into their silos. It’s helpful to think about what would happen if you did nothing as another way to understand what’s at stake.

  Ground Objectives in Solving Real-World Problems

  We may often think we have a sense of urgency in our efforts because of that dreaded workplace reality: deadlines. While timeboxing and deadlines have their place, they alone aren’t enough to create the radical clarity and alignment that Rosenberg sees in the ER. Sara Ortloff Khoury, head of UX for Google Hire, found herself facing great pressure when she joined a startup that, like many, had a general sense of the domain they wanted to serve but hadn’t yet developed a clear focus on the product offering. The team had done enough investigation to know that the current tools used by recruiters, HR professionals, and hiring managers were overly complicated and disliked by many—a market ripe for disruption. Their competitive analysis was thorough and clearly pinpointed places for improvement. But, as Khoury began to realize, while knowing what you aren’t doing might be helpful, it’s hardly a rallying cry.

  Khoury knew that the team needed a better objective, and her experience in the industry taught her a sure-fire way to find one: focus on the users who will be served by the collaboration, rather than on the competition. She knew that understanding people who do hiring would help the startup focus on alleviating those users’ frustrations, and that her team needed to feel that frustration firsthand to have a sense of urgency about something other than “ship fast and frequently.”

  Defining objectives as the solving of specific problems for specific users is one of the best ways to create alignment and purpose in a team. User-centered design and “talking to users” are a core part of many teams, especially those that include experienced design- and UX-focused members. But in many of the collaborations I have seen and studied, that work can happen off to the side or be done by specialists, and isn’t always taken to heart by the team. Khoury decided to change that and enlist her team to identify more deeply with their users.

  At the same time, the startup was being acquired by Google, which brought in a whole new set of stakeholders and opinions that needed alignment. Clearly, Khoury wasn’t going to bring dozens of people into primary research with potential customers, but as it turned out, she didn’t need to. When the team came back together to look at what they had learned, they found they had a clear, focused objective that had been there all along: people didn’t want more features or a better version of the tools they had; users were frustrated by systems that had very rigid flows and business process rules to support work that was often personal and highly varied. The team saw how tools meant to help a process had in fact slowed things down as users added head count and workarounds to support the tools, instead of being supported by them. The problem wasn’t with the tools themselves, but rather the gaps and walls between them.

  Getting a team to understand what’s at stake can be challenging when specific problems or opportunity costs aren’t clear or haven’t been quantified. Grounding your work in solving problems for people and understanding the stakes (as exhibited by the “pain” users experience) is a better way to make objectives real than meeting specific metrics or leading indicators.

  Approaches and Techniques for Creating Objectives

  Derive Objectives from a Problem

  While the commander’s intent is a useful construct to think about setting direction, we can be more specific about what exactly an objective that isn’t overly prescriptive looks like. Figure 6-2 shows a framework I use to create objectives. You can use this to create your own objectives and set a vision from scratch, or to back people up from solutions to divine more helpful objectives.

  Figure 6-2. Deriving objectives from the problems you are looking to solve and the vision you want to bring about

  First, ground your team in a problem (see the sidebar “Defining the Problem” for tips). That’s a good way to ensure that the work holds value. In the previous section you saw how understanding the customer you’re serving helps you create a compelling vision of the future to aim for. (That said, there are times when you’re not so much facing a clear problem as trying to avoid opportunity costs.)

  Tools to Create Clear Goals and Objectives: Defining the Problem

  Even if you’ve been handed a problem that seems clear and is widely understood, it’s worth taking the team through an exercise to dig into why the problem is occurring and how you know that.

  Start with what you’ve been given. Likely, there’s already an articulation of what’s wrong. Capture the given situation and then refine it by asking yourselves a few key questions:

  Who is being affected? How are they experiencing negative consequences?

  What is the impact of the problem? What is it “costing” the company and those affected? This doesn’t necessarily have to be described as financial impact, but it needs to imply the value of actually fixing the problem.

  When/how often is the problem happening?

  Identify the causes.

  Why is the problem occurring? You may
not know, but you can investigate or make some guesses that you can test.

  What trends or changes are occurring that might cause a problem in the future?

  The framework shown in Figure 6-3 can help you create objectives in a structured way. You can capture your problem(s) in a crisp statement using the statement template.

  Figure 6-3. Frame problems by looking at the factors that surround them

  Turn Problem Statements into Objectives

  Once you have a clear understanding of what problem you’re solving, you can flip it around to create a vision statement. What would it look like if that problem were solved? What would be enabled? What would be avoided?

  These two pieces are helpful to express clearly because the team can turn back to them when they’re stuck or if something they tried doesn’t work. The problem and vision statement don’t say what the solution is, but they describe the outcomes that are needed.

  Next, frame useful objectives by having a clear sense of who benefits from the objective, what that benefit is, and what root causes have been addressed. If possible, set a goal for when the problem will be solved.