Process: Collaboration

“Organizations…often develop barriers that hinder information sharing and collaboration. … The job of a leader is to spot these barriers and tear them down….”—Morten T. Hansen

Organizations differ in their ability to collaborate within and across teams and business units. A unique combination of organizational, cultural, and interpersonal barriers to collaboration afflicts any organization that is experiencing difficulty collaborating. Therefore, to assess their organization’s ability to collaborate, leaders must first determine what barriers to collaboration exist within their organization. One effective way of doing this is to conduct a survey to identify which of the behaviors that hinder collaboration commonly occur within their organization.

Once leaders understand what dysfunctional behaviors are preventing their people and teams from collaborating effectively, they must tailor solutions to address the specific barriers to collaboration that exist within their organization. They must motivate their people to change the behaviors that are preventing or diminishing the success of collaboration within and across teams and business units.

In this column, I’ll describe some common organizational, cultural, and interpersonal barriers to collaboration and provide solutions for overcoming them. To create a culture of collaboration, an organization must overcome these barriers. Read More

This two-part series describes some common organizational, cultural, and interpersonal barriers that hinder the ability of people and teams to collaborate effectively. It is important to understand what unique combination of barriers to collaboration exists within your own organization, then devise solutions to overcome those specific barriers. In Part 1 of this series, I described four common barriers to collaboration and provided solutions for overcoming them.

1. A lack of respect and trust
2. Different mindsets
3. Poor listening skills
4. Knowledge deficits

Now, in Part 2, I’ll cover the remaining five barriers to collaboration:

5. A lack of alignment around goals
6. Internal competitiveness
7. Information hoarding
8. Organizational silos
9. Physical separation

For an organization to create a culture of collaboration, it must overcome these barriers. Whether your role is that of a leader or an individual contributor, you can help your team to overcome these organizational, cultural, and interpersonal barriers to collaboration. Read More

In many respects, we have reduced the ambiguity in our world. We can now sample an entire music album before deciding to purchase it, use a smartphone app to learn what’s happening at home while we’re on vacation, or click a button to discover who has viewed our LinkedIn profile. However, while we might enjoy the occasional mystery/thriller novel or movie, in which the story’s outcome remains uncertain as we’re propelled through suspenseful twists and turns, we are becoming much less tolerant of mystery in our daily lives. We like to disambiguate the circumstances of our lives. We like to know things. This gives us comfort and favors predictability, which in turn reduces our anxiety and stress. Resolving uncertainty is actually something for which people are willing to pay.

But ambiguity is still alive and well in the work we do as UX designers. Those of us who design enterprise software should be very familiar with ambiguity. We encounter it often, whether in vague feature requirements, unfamiliar capabilities that derive from the acquisition of a new product or company, or the complex workflows that are characteristic of the highly specialized domains in which we work. Read More