MIT Sloan Management Review | Failure to Collaborate and Share Knowledge --> Team Failure

Collaboration and knowledge sharing don't sound mission critical until you consider this: Teams that fail to do both, fail to perform. Bridging Faultlines in Diverse teams (A Dummer 2007 study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review) details the kinds of performance failures that result when teams fail to collaborate and share knowledge:

• Teams could not deliver on time.
• Teams fell short of hoped-for productivity.
• Teams were unable to produce innovative results.
• Teams broke up in acrimony or bad feeling.
• Teams foundered in incompetence.

The authors Lynda Gratton (Professor of Management Practice at London Business School), Andreas Voigt (Research Assistant in Organizational Behavior at London Business School) and Tamara Erickson (President of the Concours Institute) studied 55 teams in 15 large European and American companies between 2004 and 2006. Team size averaged 43 but ranged from 4 to 184. Their judgement of diversity was based on differences including age, gender, nationality, education level and functional role.

In an analysis of the problems detailed above, they concluded that there are two root causes for failure:

• Failure of Collaboration - In which team members did not develop trust and goodwill among themselves.
• Failure of Knowledge Sharing - In which team members withheld their individual knowledge from other team members or from other teams.

These are internal factors which can be controlled versus external factors like dependencies on vendors, market changes, or weather!

While some may argue that subgroups don't need to interact on a day to day basis, the authors claim that "knowledge sharing across subgroups is critical for complex teams to operate effectively."

The authors argue strongly for good leadership as the antidote to the problem, but when you have far-flung teams - or even teams that operate independently under the same roof, teams that operate over a long period of time, or teams with more than a handful of people, collaboration tools are necessary. Leaving the solution simply to mechanics to be orchestrated by the project leader is like asking them to hold up the sky.

You also have to look for "leaders" to operate at the grass roots - encouraging team members to collaborate from the top and bottom of the project organization.

Leadership must also come from outside the immediate project team, in the form of enterprise wide efforts to bolster collaboration as a whole. I talk further about creating a culture of collaboration in Making Wikis Work in Business - Leading User to the Water and Pros and Cons of Emergence.

Collaboration and knowledge sharing problems are solved easily with the right mix of human and technology factors. Blog style status reporting over time and wiki style knowledge sharing coupled with good leadership offer the simple antidote to the expensive alternative of team failure.