Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
Gretchen Andersonamazon.com
Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
To help teams crack problems with unknown unknowns, we need to focus on framing the problem, stating objectives that describe outcomes (not outputs), and watching for leading indicators of longer-term success.
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
In reality, open-ended brainstorms and free-ranging explorations are not very productive, and without any structure, people can fall into conflict, or conflict avoidance, very easily.
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
Rather than just following metrics, teams need clear objectives to steer their efforts.
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
He says that “trying to prove the contribution that healthy collaboration makes to an outcome is impossible, because we have no control group to compare it to. We don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t worked together.”
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
Open office plans, originally designed to promote collaboration, turn out to have the opposite effect
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
Try designing an office space that has pods of individuals but then each is surrounding a center space where people talk loudly not bother others but they can easily get too quickly to have a jam session
Teams are often assembled by outside management, with little attention paid to helping them overcome the interpersonal dynamics that come with bringing diverse perspectives together.
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
We are evaluated and rewarded individually.
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
Maybe we should start evaluating teams for performance reviews not individuals
Collaboration theatre and expert-driven guess-a-thons set teams up to fail for all the right reasons. And the stronger the leader, the worse the effect, since they are trusted to use their talents and power to guarantee greatness for the team.
Gretchen Anderson • Mastering Collaboration: Make Working Together Less Painful and More Productive
Blitzscaling (HarperCollins), spells out this relationship in case studies across industries and differently sized organizations, where a key part of the answer is enabling engagement.