The Performance Improvement Blog

Wanted: Collaboration; Communication; and Teamwork

The ability to collaborate, communicate, and work effectively in teams are some of the competencies most in demand by employers today. However, companies are not preparing people adequately for these
mutually cooperative functions. Susan Adams writes this in Forbes:

Can you work well on a team, make decisions and solve problems? Those are the skills employers most want when they are deciding which new college graduates to hire. The next-most-important skill: ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization. Employers also want new hires to have technical knowledge related to the job, but that’s not nearly as important as good teamwork, decision-making and communication skills, and the ability to plan and prioritize work.

Sodexo’s 2017 Global Workplace Trends Report summarizes research that points to collaboration and teamwork as critical to the workplace today. The report explains the critical importance of organizations having agility and that the key to agility is having common goals and working in teams to achieve those goals. The authors write:

An agile mindset embraced by management fosters adoption throughout an organization; once adopted, agility yields benefits both inside and outside. To get there, businesses can set their sights on three principal characteristics:

1. A common orientation toward organizational goals
2. An emphasis on teamwork
3. A principle of adaptive performance

The Sodexo report points out that teamwork has been important for a long time but that now employees across organizations and across generations must be committed to collaborating for the purpose of flexibility, adaptability, and speed, characteristics of any successful, 21rst Century organization.

In the Knowledge Economy, cross-functional teamwork is how work gets done. It's no longer about managing hands, as was the case in the Industrial Economy; today it's about managing minds. That means helping people become more competent, capable, and engaged in contributing to the success of the organization. It’s about maximizing the collective intelligence of people which is why work is done in teams more now than ever.

Workplaces are being designed to facilitate collaboration and teamwork. Open spaces, flexible work areas, and smart offices are all contributing to a culture that supports work in teams as needed. This is quite a change from the Industrial Economy standard of private offices for executives and cubicles for everyone else.

However, even with this awareness that much of the work that needs to be done today needs to be done in teams, we don’t do a very good job of preparing people for this role. Pulling people out of the workplace for training in teamwork, is not the best way to learn about collaboration and teamwork in our fast-paced world. Part of the problem is the way leaders think about learning in organizations. As Elizabeth Doty writes in strategy+business:

"...leaders tend to think of learning too narrowly — equating it with training, mentoring, or “constructive feedback” during performance reviews. But all of these are inputs that may or may not correlate with the results we want to create...If you want to accelerate learning on your team, first engage them in a meaningful challenge, then design a feedback system that enables them to learn naturally, every day."

The Economist warns us about the downside to collaboration. When it is not done well, attempts at collaboration can eat up precious time trying to connect with others and meetings can be a waste of time. True! But this is why people need help developing their collaboration and communication skills, so that they minimize unproductive communication and maximize productive collaboration and teamwork.

Training departments can explain the need and lay the groundwork for good communication, collaboration, and teamwork skills, but it is up to managers to help employees hone these abilities in the context of the workplace. Managers need to create ways (with the help of learning professionals) of developing good collaboration and teamwork in their work groups. These are learnable abilities that require a continuous process of feedback and reflection.

Being Human in an Automated Workplace

Agility, adaptiveness, flexibility, creativity, innovation, critical thinking, collaboration, cooperation, communication, teamwork, risk-taking, networking, compassion, empathy, inclusiveness, knowing how to learn…these are the abilities needed by people in the automated workplace. The operational abilities sought after in the previous economy are no longer high on the list.

According to McKinsey, “…as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be
automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.” This portends a future where people must take on a different role than they had in the Industrial Economy. No longer will people be needed to make things, operate things, fix things, or move things.

A McKinsey Global Institute Report says:

Recent developments in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have put us on the cusp of a new automation age. Robots and computers can not only perform a range of routine physical work activities better and more cheaply than humans, but they are also increasingly capable of accomplishing activities that include cognitive capabilities once considered too difficult to automate successfully, such as making tacit judgments, sensing emotion, or even driving. Automation will change the daily work activities of everyone, from miners and landscapers to commercial bankers, fashion designers, welders, and CEOs.

However, that doesn’t mean that humans are out of a job. It’s what David Grebow and I have called the shift from “hands” to “minds”. The emphasis is on being smart rather than how well you do a specific job. Workers in the digital workplace need to continuously learn, helping their organizations adjust to the dramatic changes brought on by technology, globalization, multi-generational workforce, and, according to Tom Friedman, climate change and population growth. Workers need to use their collective intelligence to design innovative solutions to the challenges of the day and the future.

The kind of work people need to do requires much more human to human interaction. Success depends on strong interpersonal relationships. Claire Cain Miller, in an article for The New York Times, writes:

The problem, at least for now, is not that there isn’t enough work — there is, but it is very different from the kind of work technology is displacing. Manufacturing and warehousing jobs are shrinking, while jobs that provide services (health care, child care, elder care, education, food) are growing. 

Being creative and innovative, which can’t be automated (so far), are essential to stave off competition. Competition can come from anywhere on the globe and at any time. Nobody is safe. From manufacturing to health care to education, every organization has competitors that can do better at speed and cost. Companies will have to compete on creativity and the customer experience. Take Tesla, for example. Although competing with historic brands, this rapidly growing auto company has found a niche among people who want an electric vehicle and high status.

Also needed is the human-robot interaction to ensure that we are doing the right things for the right reasons and in the right way. It will be easy to make everything faster, cheaper, and higher quality. But is that what we should be doing? What is the environmental and social impact of the business? Just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should. We need humans to ask these questions. We can’t rely on robots for the questions or the answers.