“Unsheltering” The Organization: Collaboration vs. Coordination

I had a conversation the other day with a client who is the CEO of a 60-person company engaged in the wholesale financial services industry. The company does not have any retail offices and all customer-facing activity is done through the internet or phone.

He commented that since the shelter-in-place orders were implemented in mid-March, their office has been closed and all of the employees have worked from home, interacting with phone calls and various internet tools like email, ZOOM, and Microsoft Teams.

Ironically, he noted, “the productivity of the workforce has actually increased.” Moreover, he thinks that behaviors among the team members have also improved. “Everyone is more upfront with each other about issues and there’s less behind-the-scenes chatter … actually, there are no scenes to be behind since interactions are largely defined by scheduled phone calls and videoconferences.”

I asked, “does that mean the team is more collaborative?” He paused for a long moment before saying, “You know, Al, I’m not sure that’s important as long as we’re well coordinated.”

My client is about to reopen following the lifting of the shelter-in-place orders, and he is worried that the newly found productivity will decline.

His comment about being “well coordinated” was like a lightning bolt for me. We tend to bunch collaboration and coordination together when thinking about effective teams. But what if the nature of the work in an organization only requires coordination, or collaboration, but not both?

Does this affect the suitability of employees working in virtual teams versus being co-located in a common space? Stated alternatively, is the productivity that my client is seeing in his company a function of having a work environment (virtual) that best suits the highly coordinated nature of his operation?

Let’s think this through.

Collaboration

In Shared Minds, Michael Schrage states, “…collaboration is the process of shared creation: two or more individuals with complementary skills and motivations interact to create a shared understanding that none had previously possessed or could have come to on their own. Collaboration creates a shared meaning about a process, a product, or an event. In this sense, there is nothing routine about it. It is more empirically situated, live, and unstructured.”

Outcomes in collaborative situations emerge from group interactions that are beyond the individual capabilities of the members. These outcomes are more than additive – which is one of the critical indicators of a collaborative effort. It requires “going beyond” which is, in some sense, outside of normal human expectations. It is triggered by a calling to a purpose when the conditions are conducive, e.g., a crisis, threat, challenge, etc.

Collaboration is difficult to enlist compulsorily from people, but it can follow processes that build relationships that encourage spontaneity to achieve common goals. Within these processes, activities are done together or separately, but usually, the boundaries between activities are fluid and dynamic. It is most effective when the work activities require out-of-the-box thinking, engagement, adaptability, a learning orientation, and good listening skills among trusting team members.

Collaboration is particularly important when working in situations that are volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous. Human-driven systems whose parts intersect each other or have linked relationships require a more collaborative approach because integration cannot wait until problems or opportunities are discovered – these need to be anticipated as possibilities, even if unknowable at a particular moment in time.

Typically, collaboration creates transparency and engenders trust among team members, while creating early insights into shifting external environments where opportunities, problems, or constraints are found. As a result, it is uniquely suitable to situations that require long-term viability and duration for success to be achieved and measured.

Coordination

Coordination is designed and engineered into structures, processes, and procedures. It is the means by which disparate groups execute to achieve tactical milestones according to an already-agreed-upon plan of action. It is most effective when the work activities inherently require clear role description, specific and shared goals, respect, and specialized skill sets within each group. In addition, stable plans and environments are essential as is an absence of conflict.

Activities are siloed either into small distinct groups or to individuals. These activities can occur concurrently in a workflow (e.g., assembly line) or in a series of pieces that are matured to a “ready state” and then brought together into a whole.

Coordination creates opaqueness among team members. Fear of “toe stepping” becomes a point of vigilance and this can become a distraction and engender some level of distrust – a consequence that is counterintuitive.

Further, the sheer weight of coordination creates a mindset where opportunities, problems, or constraints are difficult to anticipate or even observe. As a result, coordination is most applicable to activities that mature in short-term durations or occur in environments where stability is assured in the foreseeable future.

Thoughts and Conclusions

As shelter-in-place orders are relaxed and companies consider reopening options, there are situations where co-location of employees is essential. Manufacturing operations, assembling lines, and processing facilities are obvious examples. There are other situations where the degree of collaboration or coordination inherent in a company’s success could be the determining factor of which activities should continue as virtual teams and those that should be co-located in a common space.

When coordination is a dominant key success factor for an activity – that is mostly tactical – virtual teams seem viable as a permanent way of doing business, especially if the relevant environments (internal and external) are stable. These activities have highly engineered processes and procedures and clear role descriptions for specific goals. Virtual teams have the added benefit of dampening the distrust that can occur when members of highly coordinated teams are co-located.

The big risk is from unknown influences that create either instability or the illusion of stability, and the need to adapt to shifting forces goes unseen. For example, my client’s observed productivity increase may be short-lived and reflect the fact that nothing has changed in his world in the last few months because large parts of otherwise dynamic environments have been shut down.

When workflow occurs in perennially unstable or dynamic, co-located teams may be the better option. In these situations, successful outcomes may not fit predictable patterns as each requires some level of an adaption or even a unique creation.

Socialize trust among team members enables the confidence to weather uncertainty and variability. The spontaneity spawned from group dynamics may be essential to identify opportunities, problems, or constraints. These outcomes emerge from group interactions that generate shared energy and insights that exceed the sum of what is expected from individual capabilities of the members – the essence of collaboration.

Two final thoughts:

1. Regardless of the justification for the co-location of employees, revised safety protocols must be considered to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 transmission, at least until a vaccine is widely available.

2. We at Applied Leadership have advocated for years that leaders should view their environments as anything but static. What appears as stable in the near term is often unveiled as dynamic in the long term. This means that some level of collaboration is required even in highly coordinated virtual teams, else the pitfalls of complacency will set in. Many technologies exist that offer differing levels of collaboration for virtual teams, or it might be as simple as having teams get together from time to time. As noted by my client, “I couldn’t imagine a world where I was not in a room with my team every now and then.”

Sources include Sudhir Desai, Cliff Gilley, Adrian Chan, Ann Howard Holt, and Shalini Singh. Retrieved from https://www.quora.com/ on May 12, 2020