One of the biggest barriers to establishing a culture of collaboration is the natural human inclination to resist change. Whether it’s a reluctance to share information with another team or a recalcitrant attitude toward new processes or technology, this resistance can sabotage our ability to cultivate a collaborative culture where advanced analytics can flourish.
Interestingly, it’s often employees on the ground who find cross-team collaboration difficult. Even when executives have agreed to work together across organizational lines, lower-level employees are less likely to follow suit. Although it may be tempting to blame this disconnect on a lack of tools or technology, some research suggests that it’s actually a cultural divide—not a technological one—that keeps teams from working together.7
Fragmented cultures can often breed misaligned goals that cause further dysfunction. If teams are to produce value for the company, all ships must sail in the same direction. But it’s not unusual for teams to have different or even competing objectives. For example, finance is often the foil for other departments—with their hands on the purse strings, it’s easy to cast finance as the villain, determining which initiatives get funded and which go without. The tension can be especially high between finance and HR, which is responsible for recruiting and retaining top talent—an endeavor that can be expensive (just ask the New York Yankees). To alleviate these tensions, goal alignment and partnership are key. Joint strategy sessions and integrated datasets are a good start. But without a collaborative culture to support and nourish the relationship, it isn’t likely to survive when the going gets tough.
Frances Hesselbein, former CEO of the Girl Scouts, gives us a hint on how we must proceed.
“Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organization is transformed; the culture reflects the realities of people working together every day.”8
Changing work culture, then, requires two components: organizational transformation, and a shift in the day-to-day experiences of our people. Culture is not dictated; it is created in every interaction between and among the members of our organizations.
To create a culture where collaborative, integrated decision-making based on advanced analytics can thrive, HR leaders need to focus on three areas. We must empower employees to collaborate, measure collaborative behavior, and model and support collaborative behavior from the top.
You’ve probably heard that adage, “That which gets measured gets done.” If the goal is to change behaviors to encourage more collaboration, then perhaps the perfect place to initiate change is with key performance indicators (KPIs).
In addition to metrics that determine how well an employee is performing her job, we need to craft KPIs that assess adoption of new behaviors. Indicators might include whether employees are collaborating across business units, how well they’re engaging with the wider organization, and whether they’re advocating or promoting the new behaviors. This last KPI is particularly useful, because creating internal champions on the ground can turn a top-down mandate into a grassroots groundswell for change.
Many behavioral-change initiatives founder because employees are not empowered to adapt, or they fear that change could actually hurt them. What if the new ways of working don’t produce results? What if they take longer? What if they cause confusion? What if they don’t work with the current processes or technologies in place? These are fair questions, and some employees will resist because they fear failure. To combat this, we need to create an environment where failures are accepted—even celebrated—as a natural part of innovation.
The notion of celebrating failure might seem strange, but the purpose is to encourage curiosity and find opportunity. When executives and managers share their failures with their teams and probe these tales for lessons learned, it changes the cultural mindset. It reveals failure not as a career-ending mistake but as a learning opportunity. It demonstrates the need for resiliency as a core competency. And it encourages employees to take their own risks even if it means striking out. This willingness to stumble and bounce back is necessary in any thriving organization. Change is messy and non-linear; mistakes will be made along the way. And yet, change is the only way forward.
Freedom to fail is a core component of any successful change initiative. But there’s another equally important aspect: trust. If employees don’t trust the data, don’t trust each other, or don’t trust the vision of the organization, they’ll be difficult to corral and their behavior, hard to modify.
Next Chapter: Trust
