There is a work myth so toxic, so pervasive that it goes unchallenged by everyone except the world’s elite teams—the top 15% of teams the rest of us look at and wonder, why are they the disruptors? Why are they so great at innovation? It’s the myth that the more people you get involved in collaboration, the slower and less bold the outcomes. It’s false belief that inclusion leads to mushy consensus and delay. It’s a hangover from the age when information could only travel as fast as humans could write things down with pen and paper. It’s not the operating system for world-class teams in the digital era when we have the means to communicate ideas effectively at speed and scale. The Ferrazzi Greenlight Research Institute has studied teams for more than two decades and found that 85% of team members believe the myth that you need to lock people—and ideas—out of collaboration. We need to reject it. We need to shift to a more inclusive approach to collaboration that leads to a greater diversity of thinking and even bolder ideas from a broader network of stakeholders, inside and outside the organization.
Who is Your Team?
Most of us think of our teams as the people that report to us. But the reality is that is an old way of thinking about work. The awakening is who your team is has nothing to do with the org structure in the org design. It’s just the answer to the simple question: who do we need to get the job done? It doesn’t matter if people are inside or outside the organization. One idea that has been at the center of my work since my first book, Never Eat Alone, is formal relationship action planning. You can talk about what you have to do and where you’re going, but you need to start introducing who makes up your team and who are the people you need to build relationships with to achieve your goals. And that’s the relationship action plan (RAP). The RAP requires you to:
- Identify the most critical relationships to your success, your team’s success.
- Take a disciplined, proactive approach to deepening and building relationships with those individuals.
- Measure it. Use a scale of negative one to five. If it’s a negative one, it’s a strained relationship. If it’s a zero, they don’t even know who we are and they don’t care about our work, all the way to five, which is under the tent. Then you might put a priority A, B or C with this individual. So now you’ve got two metrics associated with this relationship quality.
You can allocate individuals on the team targets to build relationships with. These could be contractors. They could be clients. Why not have clients in your RAP that you want to bring in to create the future of the product that you’re working on with them? Expand the list over time and monitor progress regularly, at least at the end of every month.
Shattering another myth
There’s another toxic myth we must reject: the myth that all collaboration starts with a meeting. You can learn how to significantly shorten to cycle time of collaboration using a high-return practice called Meeting Shifting I described in a previous Forbes article. Through our research with high-impact teams, we have seen Meeting Shifting reduce the need for meetings by up to 30%. Ultimately, world-class teams think of collaboration not as a meeting but as a stack—a series of different modes of collaboration, each of which must be purposefully engineered for. At the top of this Collaboration Stack—the prerequisite for the rest, and in direst need of adoption—is asynchronous collaboration. Asynchronous promotes more productive workflows, but not with peers in the same meeting simultaneously. It allows for bolder innovation and richer inclusion by permitting more people to engage on the topic with a level of freedom most can’t feel in a meeting, without slowing the process down.
Collaboration is not a meeting
But it’s not synchronous versus asynchronous. It is the strategic use of asynchronous and synchronous to create the optimal experience of both. Asynchronous is essential and it must be a priority. But it is part of a larger vision and strategy for work and collaboration. With the advantage of all this input, we can construct better, more focused meetings with just the right people in them, or avoid a meeting altogether. We also need high-quality synchronous work with great in-person, hybrid, and all-remote meetings. There are times when co-located work is important. When we’re physical, we should be engineering toward the emotional side of work: tough collaborations, wrestling things to a conclusion among a tight group, celebration, play, bonding, connectedness, and gritty issues that are frustrating people and need to be wrestled to the ground with empathy. All of these make up the Collaboration Stack. Each stage of the Stack has unique attributes: each demands that you adopt and adapt High Return Practices. Collaboration is not a meeting—it’s a complex set of relational dynamics that, if you’ve cracked the code as our years of applied research have done, can ignite performance and accelerate growth.
Unlocking the genius of introverts
So much of how teamwork has traditionally been designed is for people who are good at real-time conversation and in-the-moment brainstorming. But there is a French term, l’esprit de l’escalier. It means you’ve thought of the perfect witty reply to someone you’ve passed on the stairs when you’ve reached the bottom of the staircase. That’s sometimes how our minds work. It’s like when you have a great idea in a shower or while you’re walking round the block. But One of the great things about asynchronous and remote working is unlocking the genius of your introverts.
Not tapping into everyone’s talent is a sub-par result
Every day there is an executive team somewhere making decisions without having heard the best and brightest ideas. Every day there is an executive team crowding out time in their schedules for strategic and creative thinking by adding … Yet. Another. Meeting. Diversity of inputs and broader inclusion are powerful for getting bolder ideas, which we need for disruptive innovation, and for creating moonshots. Technology, like Google’s hybrid stack of tools, has made that broader and inclusive collaboration more accessible than ever before, opening up ways to Meeting Shift—to shift whole cycles of collaboration out of meetings to work with our collaborators asynchronously and accelerate the process of innovation. But that only happens in the top 15% of truly world-class teams that don’t believe that meetings are the only way to collaborate. We need to start “Teaming Out”—thinking and acting outside traditional silos to invite relevant insight and expertise in. Never before has it before been so approachable than in an increasingly hybrid and remote world of work.
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