Collaboration is a term frequently misunderstood because people think it means compromising. In truth, organizational collaboration means leaving preconceived notions at the door and finding the best solutions for problems.
— By Kim Persaud

Compromise and collaboration are not the same thing. Compromise is a process in which each person gives something up in order to gain an end result. In compromise, each person wins and loses something. Collaboration is different, because it is a strategy that seeks to find the best solution to a given problem. There is no winning and losing because the final solution is designed to satisfy all needs, to the highest extent possible. Collaboration takes many forms and is a powerful strategy for finding the most elegant solution to a problem by using the talents and knowledge of those participating in the process.

Organizations are increasingly using cross-organizational collaboration to leverage talent. Similar to the gestalt principle that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, collaboration brings people together to pool their knowledge and talents to arrive at solutions. It is a much more powerful strategy than piecing together bits of information or ideas to make a sum or adding up separate solutions developed in silos, department-by-department or unit-by-unit.

Organizations use collaborative methods internally and externally. Internally, they are used as a team-building strategy, because they promote trust and communication. For example,

Canadian-based Aecon developed a major internal project called “One Aecon,” an initiative promoting collaboration between three business divisions and more than 100 business units. The purpose of creating the collaborative team was to bring the various perspectives, differences, concerns and challenges to the table to create a more unified company after a merger.

The Director of the Ryerson University Diversity Institute in Management and Technology, Margaret Yap, led a study on executive perceptions of diversity training. The study surveyed more than 11,000 executives, managers and professionals across Canada. Yap says that companies can get the most results from offering diversity training when employees understand it is meant to facilitate collaborative behaviours among members of a diverse workforce. She also says that collaborative behaviours will improve the organization’s ability to solve problems and will lead to greater productivity, creativity and innovation.

Accelerating Change and Closing Gaps
Getting people to work together when they are coming with different perspectives and objectives is challenging under the best of circumstances. However, collaboration has become increasingly important as companies are more diverse and more globalized, and staff at all levels is more likely to operate in high-stress environments. Collaboration can lower the risk of conflict and promote the ability to work across a variety of boundaries created geographically, by internal divisions or by personal perspectives that limit human resources interactions.

Collaboration is used to grow businesses. Typically, collaborative business arrangements enable companies to land contracts or projects they could not qualify for otherwise or to expand into new locations. Collaboration represents scalability in many cases, in that the collaborative effort increases in capacity and multiplies talent. Collaboration can also represent an effort by companies to accelerate change. The Network for Business Sustainability recently published a report, Changing the System: The 10 Sustainability Challenges for Canadian Business in 2013, in which it was pointed out that the easy changes, such as cutting emissions were done, and it would take the collaboration of leading green companies, like TD Bank Group and Suncor Energy, to continue progress. Collaboration is seen as the strategy that will make it possible to move beyond a pivotal point in sustainability efforts.

Internal or external collaboration can bring enormous benefits to businesses. They include faster decision-making, increased innovation and creativity through sharing of perspectives and talents, and reduced costs as a result of combining resources. Collaborative models can take various forms. For example, a group of employees representing various employee groups can meet to discuss human resources issues, reducing potential conflict and increasing understanding of different perspectives. Project teams represent collaboration between divisions and functions, such as product development, engineering, materials sourcing and so on. Joint ventures and alliances are types of collaborative arrangements that enable companies to blend their strengths to do more than they could manage alone.

Constructive Conflict is Welcomed
Collaboration is frequently viewed as a type of teamwork, but that is not the case. Teams often set a common goal and then spend a lot of the time being politically correct and polite while working toward the goal. In effect, they box themselves in, because the focus is on the goal rather than creatively solving a problem while managing conflicts. When people are focused on a team goal, personal achievement or self-defined priorities, they are not looking at maximizing problem-solving through innovative thinking. The reality is that bringing people together is not a guarantee they will actually work together, embrace honest conflict as a source of learning and focus on the root causes of problems. What is often lost in the use of the word “collaboration” is that conflict is not something to be eliminated, because people will always have different perspectives, knowledge, interests, backgrounds, competencies, experience, needs, job requirements and so on. In a true collaborative effort, those conflicts are seen as a source of new approaches, ideas and strategies.

Canada is pressing for more government and private collaboration to promote a higher rate of innovation. However, some of the expert leaders in using collaboration are people like global procurement directors and supply chain managers. For example, Indy Sian, Director of Business Enablement, Procurement and Supply Chain Management at TELUS, says he is driving innovation in his supply chain by developing diverse, collaborative relationships because “…suppliers solve problems we did not even know we had.” At the Montreal firm Merck Canada, Serge Sauvé, Director of Global Procurement, wants to bring diverse suppliers into the supply chain and collaborate with them because he is “always looking for novel ideas.”

Collaborative efforts can take many different forms, but they all have one thing in common: a desire to harness the best of peoples’ talents and knowledge to bring about innovative change. That is truly where its power lies.