Developing Collaborative Practices Within an Enterprise

Management 3.0 aims to reach a more balanced relation between managers and collaborators. To go toward this balance, some change in practices and minds will be essential, whether it’s a significant or minimal change. It comes with a maximum transparency policy, the promotion of autonomy, leaving initiatives to employees, granting the right for failure and, overall, giving more freedom to everyone, both managers and collaborators. 

Achieving this goal can’t happen without developing collaborative practices.

1. What Are Collaborative Practices?

In a collaborative project, the splitting of tasks isn’t set in stone:

• The accountability for success (or failure) is on the group and its collective efforts, rather than on each individual in their intervention area.
• The many contributors of a project pool their skills and achieve the project together, from A to Z. 
• The manager embodies a role of facilitator and lets collaborators position themselves on the topics and tasks they feel they will bring the most value to. 

Setting up collaborative practices comes with many advantages:

• Exchanges and feedbacks are accelerated thanks to a lighter hierarchic structure.
• Sharing knowledge and skills is promoted.
• Collaborative work allows for a faster implementation of change, for more reactivity towards a changing environment.
• Initiatives and decision-making are developed within the teams.
• There’s no competition between collaborators, the atmosphere is cleaner.
• The commitment of talents goes deeper. 

Do you want to learn how to develop your collaborative leadership, and more precisely for your remote projects?

You can discover how to develop and embody collaborative leadership in this article. 

2. Tips and Tricks to Develop Collaborative Practices

French magazine “Question(s) de management” interviewed over sixty experts and researchers on the question of collaborative practices and their capacity to produce collective intelligence. 

Here are the good practices to remember from the aforementioned issue. 

Sharing information

The foundations of collaborative work is a clear shared objective, whose details were explained to everyone. Each member of the team must have the same level of information to contribute to the project in an efficient way. Power struggles are simply not welcome in collaborative work. 

Transparency is essential: Information being left out or an overall lack of communication are disasters-in-a-making for team cohesion. 

Inspiring trust

Let’s forget about the top-down management: ideas and initiatives can come – or even must come – from team members. 

Open-mindedness, attentiveness, and kindness must be core values of management. In order to be capable of expressing oneself, collaborators must feel the atmosphere is ideal to do so. 

It’s also necessary for everyone to speak, particularly about disagreements on the collective being left unsaid. Not considering those unsaid things could eventually lead to failure. 

At Wemanity, we’re in favor of a hierarchy as simple as possible. This allows us to better bounce back and grow. A tight-knit group sharing the same horizon, combined with our culture of lifelong transformation deep in our roots, gives us the necessary resources to adapt to a context of never-ending change. 

Promoting autonomy

A concrete proof that the management trusts their teams is to let go off some control and make everyone more accountable.

By giving room for maneuver and some freedom to collaborators for them to contribute in their own way to shared goals decided by the team, you show them the trust you grant them. 

Initiatives, creativity, and performance from your collaborators will be the rewards. 

Gathering knowledge and skills

Within collaborative work, individual skills and talents are gathered to work together for a common goal. 

Each contributor must be aware that their knowledge and skills are valued when combined with those of other members of the team. Everyone must know they can bring something to the collective, but also that the collective can bring something to them. 

It’s important to promote knowledge-sharing. Many ways are possible: The creation of transversal work groups gathering members with varied expertise, the development of community practices, the organization of hackathons, etc.

Showing coherence

In order to truly be efficient, the promotion of collaborative work must not be only words. Intentions are shown and acts must follow. 

A lack of coherence in the way of managing would be counter-productive (e.g. setting individual goals to some project contributors). Trust takes time to be gained, but no time to be lost…

Building a team and strengthening its links

An important step in creating a talented team is to achieve the identification of multiple intelligences of everyone to combine them in the most relevant way possible. The talents of every team member, once combined, make it a talented, performing team. 

The team also gets its cohesion from the strength of the links between its members. It’s important to create opportunities for strengthening the links between collaborators: Corporate events, team building, etc. 

Do you want to better understand how to apply those good practices on a daily basis? Wemanity Learning Center offers trainings on collective intelligence.

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