If you’ve ever worked in a public or private organization of any size you know that cooperation and coordination are critical for effective execution and organizational success. It’s almost impossible to get anything important done without the assistance and joint efforts of others. Yet, despite the fact that there is little argument about the critical role coordination and cooperation play in the execution of plans and initiatives, it appears that they are elusive and difficult to attain.
In a matrix organization—where people rely on getting work done through others over whom they have no direct authority—maintaining high levels of cooperation and coordination can be even more challenging. The findings of OnPoint’s 2011 Execution Gap study helps clarify the extent to which organizations struggle with this:
- Only 47% responded favorably to the item, “decisions and actions are well coordinated across departments/functions.”
- Only 49% responded favorably to the item, “decisions and actions are well coordinated across levels of management.”
- 40% do not believe that people cooperate across functions and departments to achieve their organization’s strategic objectives.
- 44% do not believe that people in different divisions readily share information, ideas, and best practices.
Given these challenges and complexities what can leaders do to encourage and sustain cooperation? Our research suggests that there are three key elements and two core skills required to build a culture of collaboration in a global matrix structure.
The Three Cooperation Builders
Three conditions predict when cooperation is more likely to trump competition: when communication is clear and there is transparency about intent, when people understand what they can expect from others and how they will work together, and when the interests of individuals or groups are aligned. We refer to these elements as the Cooperation Builders, as they are critical for encouraging high levels of coordination.
Cooperation Builder #1: Improve Communication and Transparency
When we communicate our intent to cooperate, we can increase the likelihood the other person will respond in kind. This, of course, assumes that our communication is clear and our intentions are understood. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Although people often act with good intent and do what they think is right, they are often unable to coordinate their actions because of a breakdown in communication.
The most common mistake is assuming the other person understands what we want or intended. It’s helpful to develop the habit of being explicit about why you are doing something or making a request. Another mistake is not taking the time to do a “comprehension check” by paraphrasing to ensure understanding and, when appropriate, asking questions to confirm the other person’s understanding of actions and next steps.
Cooperation Builder #2: Agree On When Cooperation Is Needed and What It Looks Like
Lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities is another cooperation-crusher. It results in conflicts among team members or groups. It also allows key responsibilities to “fall through the cracks” because each party believes that someone else is responsible for them. It seems our level of cooperation is generally higher when everyone involved agrees on when it is needed and what it looks like in these situations. When we know what to expect from other people we are more willing to trust them and take the risk of cooperation.
One tool commonly used to clarify roles is referred to as the RACIN model. The tool, whose acronym stands for five levels of authority and involvement—Responsible, Approve, Consult, Inform, and Not Involved—enables individuals and teams to describe what cooperation and collaboration looks like for the most important decisions and activities for which they are responsible.
Although the process of discussing roles and reaching agreement takes time, it is well worth the investment. On their own, some teams may eventually come to an understanding about when and how to work together. That journey, however, takes much longer than a RACIN meeting and relationships and trust can be damaged along the way. Formally and explicitly working out roles at the early stage of a team’s formation, or whenever you notice a lack of cooperation, helps accelerate the process and preserve trust.
Cooperation Builder #3: Align Interests and Establish Common Ground
When the objectives of one person or group are at odds with the objectives of another, cooperation and collaboration suffer. Picture the potential conflicts and inefficiencies that would result if one group in your department was working toward reducing costs, while another group was focused on bringing state-of-the-art products and services to market. These objectives can coexist, but most likely won’t happen on their own. To facilitate alignment between the two groups, leaders must develop compatible and mutually supportive objectives in a thoughtful and explicit manner.
One approach is to develop a set of broader, collective objectives for a team or work unit, then review the task objectives for specific individuals or groups and ensure that they are consistent with and mutually supportive of the collective objectives. For example: to set the stage at the beginning of the year, the Chief Technology Officer of a large brokerage firm and his boss identify the ten critical objectives for the organization. These are goals that reflect its mission and are necessary for the overall success of the business enterprise. After the extended management team briefly reviews the goals, in-depth work is done to ensure that each will be accomplished.
Cross-functional teams discuss the goals in concurrent sessions to clarify, fine-tune, and determine what it will take to accomplish them, including key deliverables, help required, mileposts, key stakeholders, etc. Following these discussions, the individual with primary accountability for a particular goal reports on the overall plan, identifies areas that require problem solving, and explains how progress and success will be monitored and communicated throughout the year. After all the goals have been discussed, possible overlaps, synergies, trade-offs and barriers are highlighted and resolved. The process results in clarity among members of the extended team on priorities, resource allocation, and role expectations.
Disagreements Happen: How to Sustain Cooperation
Although the cooperation builders provide a foundation to encourage cooperation, they won’t eliminate disagreements about what and how to do things—and they won’t change the fact that people have different priorities, make mistakes, and sometimes fail to meet others’ expectations. In order to sustain cooperation and collaboration, leaders must use influence to gain the support of others for their ideas and effective conflict management skills to constructively resolve differences across organizational boundaries.
Influence with Impact
A leader’s success often depends on his or her ability to gain the support and cooperation of people who have competing priorities and/or conflicting goals. The effective use of influence is the most powerful tool a leader has to create alignment and build commitment in these situations.
The ability to influence is not only based on organizational hierarchy. OnPoint’s research has identified the four core tactics that are most closely associated with gaining commitment from others. They are rational persuasion, inspirational appeals, consultation, and collaboration.
Rational Persuasion involves the use of explanations, logical arguments, and factual evidence to explain why a request or proposal will benefit the organization or help to achieve an important task objective. The key to using rational persuasion is the ability to convert features into benefits as seen by the person you are influencing.
Example: Jim manages a team that generates reports that field personnel depend on to provide effective client service. The system his staff currently uses is old, inefficient, and often malfunctions. Since Charlotte recently left the department, Jim’s team has had to put in extra time to keep things running smoothly. Citing budget constraints, management has postponed replacing Charlotte. Jim recently met a programmer who has extensive knowledge of a new system that would require significantly less manual labor. Jim would like to hire this person and needs to convince his boss to approve the hiring decision. Jim says to his boss: “I’d like to talk with you about hiring a programmer to implement a new system in our department. Compared to our existing system, this new system has greater accuracy and requires significantly less manual labor. I recently ran some numbers that I’d like to share with you that indicate the new system would boost our productivity by at least 10%. In addition, the new system would enhance morale and help us retain top performers.”
Inspirational Appeals involves an emotional or value-based appeal, in contrast to the logical arguments used in rational persuasion. While rational persuasion appeals to the “head”, inspirational appeals focuses on “the heart”. A common misconception is that inspirational appeals requires a leader to be “rah rah” and highly charismatic. This is not the case—in fact, if a leader is effective at using rational persuasion, he or she can be just as effective at using inspirational appeals. The difference is that—with inspirational appeals—benefits are positioned in a more value-oriented manner.
Example: Linda is a member of a cross-functional task force charged with developing recommendations to enhance existing project management processes. Recently, Linda was asked by the leader of the task force to head up a new project. One of the key people she will need support from is Joe, a peer of Linda’s who is also part of the task force. Linda knows that Joe is very busy with other work for the task force as well as his daily job responsibilities. Linda has worked with Joe for a number of years and knows that he is particularly motivated by achievement and excellence. In her first meeting with Joe she says, “I know it will be a challenge and the goals we’ve set out are a stretch—but I believe we have what it takes to be successful. The new approach we develop will be much better than anything done in the past and we have the opportunity to build it. When we successfully complete this project there is no question in my mind that we will have a significant and lasting impact on organizational performance.”
Consultation involves asking a person to suggest improvements or help plan a proposed activity or change for which his/her support is desired. With this tactic the other person is invited to participate in planning how to carry out a request or implement a proposed change.
Example: Susan is the manager in charge of developing a new system to process financial transactions that will provide a significant cost savings to the company. She is new to the position and her experience has been in other areas of technical development. John built the current system and is the manager in charge of running and maintaining the system. His expertise will be essential in designing the new system. Susan knows John is very busy with other priorities, yet without his direct involvement, she can’t be sure she is making the best decisions. In her meeting with John she says, “I’d like to get your thoughts on the best approach to developing the new system. Based on conversations with users and my team, I have a beginning idea about how to get started. But I wanted to get your input to help refine the idea and increase the likelihood of success. What are your thoughts on the next steps and from your experience what are some of the pitfalls we need to avoid?”
Collaboration involves offering to provide relevant resources or assistance if the person will carry out a request or approve a proposed change. Like consultation, collaboration is participative, but the focus of collaboration is on reducing difficulty or costs of carrying out a request. This tactic is most effective with peers.
Example: Bill is struggling to meet a critical deadline for an important project he is working on for his boss. The deadline is two days away, and Bill knows he won’t be able to hit the deadline without help from Andy, one of his colleagues, who is more familiar with the system required to analyze the data Bill needs. Bill approaches Andy and says, “I’m concerned about being able to meet my deadline and I was hoping to get your help.” Andy says that he has been working long hours to respond to a request from one of the organization’s key clients and taking this on would be difficult. In response, Bill suggests, “What if I identify and organize the relevant data files, which is the most time consuming part of the work. That way you would just have to run the analyses and I can take that and finish the report.”
Manage Differences and Reach Agreement
The word “conflict” often conjures up images of confrontation and anger, but this is frequently not the case. Disagreements occur in even the most positive and productive work relationships—at least, they should. Conflict itself is neither inherently good nor bad—what is positive or negative is how the differences are managed and the outcome that results. It may not be surprising to learn that OnPoint’s 2011 Execution Gap Survey found that nearly half of respondents do not believe that leaders effectively manage or resolve conflict in their organizations.
What does it take to manage conflict effectively? For one, conflict needs to be acknowledged. When conflict is brought to the surface, problems can be addressed and people can take action to resolve issues. Many people avoid or minimize conflicts in an attempt to maintain harmonious relationships. This is a mistake because the problem may never be resolved. Many a solid long-term relationship is born from the difficult but constructive resolution of a conflict.
Another key to managing conflict is clarifying the source of the conflict. Differences of opinion concerning one or more of the following four issues will cause conflict to occur: facts, methods, goals, and values. Differences of fact are the most straightforward conflicts to resolve. Facts are concrete. They can be checked, compared, and tested, and this provides a basis for discussion and the exchange of information. Conflicts over facts can be resolved through dialogue more often than conflicts involving the other basic issues.
Methods are the second issue over which a conflict may arise. People may have similar goals and agree on the facts, but may be unable to agree on ways to achieve their goals. However, the presence of similar goals means that a logical, rational way of choosing among alternative approaches is possible. It’s just a matter of convincing everyone that a particular method will achieve the goals at hand.
When the issue is related to goals, people have different objectives and may be supporting different courses of action. Information sharing is the key to resolving conflicts over either methods or goals. It helps each person understand what is important to the other person. Occasionally, when differing goals exist, a third person may be needed to determine which goal (or combination of goals) is most appropriate.
Conflicts arising from different values are most difficult to resolve. In fact, they are often not able to be resolved. People’s beliefs tend to become inflexible over long periods of time, and are often based on emotion rather than reason. Finding common ground and separating those that are not solvable from those that are, frequently moves such conflicts toward productive action.
In general, to manage differences effectively, your mindset should be that people have the right to think or feel differently than you do and that you will benefit from developing solutions that will be acceptable and beneficial to everyone concerned.
Conclusion
Organizations are complex structures with many interdependencies. We rely on others to help get things done and meet our objectives, and that means cooperation and collaboration are often the key to our success. The challenge leaders face in the workplace is to ensure the conditions that create and sustain cooperation and collaboration are in place. This is even more challenging in a matrix structure.
Cooperation and collaboration are facilitated by clear communication, shared goals, and clearly defined roles. These conditions help encourage and motivate people to focus on the group’s best interest without feeling that they are minimizing or trading off their own interests in the process. Once in place, however, cooperation is a delicate state. People will still have disagreements and different points of view about how and when things should happen. Leaders’ ability to effectively and constructively influence others and gain their support is critical to maintaining cooperation.
Leaders who focus on these key areas will have much greater success in creating a culture of cooperation and achieving their business objectives in today’s matrix organizations.