Organizations have discovered the power of collaboration to increase knowledge sharing, speed up problem solving, create new knowledge, and spur innovation. But even having implement great technology, too many organizations are finding collaboration is not as robust as it needs to be.
The good news is that we know how to increase collaboration. The research* is clear - trust improves collaboration, whether it is across a network or within a team. Building trust requires on-going interaction that allows employees to experience others’ capability, reliability, and to witness their integrity in a work situation.** So the real question is how to create situations in which employees can learn those things about each other.
I have found Peer-Coaching to be the most effective answer. It increases collaboration by bringing together small groups of 4-6 employees, in ninety-minute coaching sessions that occur over several weeks. Trust is built as participants talk together about issues they encounter in their own work. These self-directed meetings, called CoachingOurselves®, are guided by modules developed by leading management thinkers. However, primarily, they provide carefully crafted discussion questions that spur participants to reflect together on their own work issues. By the time they have met for six sessions, participants have come to know and trust each other. During a ninety-minute coaching session, they have helped each other solve problems, laughed with each other, commiserated together, watched each other improve, and most importantly, discovered that they have learned an enormous amount from collaborating with each other.
Fujitsu group in Japan is a good example. It began peer coaching in 2008. Fujitsu is a large global conglomerate with 159,000 employees. This chart illustrates the relationship Fujitsu found between participating in peer coaching and the increase in the ratio sales to profit. Pretty impressive!
I love doing demos, so let me know if you want to get a small group of people together to try a CoachingOurselves module over Zoom. I'm at [email protected]
*Al- Ani, Marczak, Prikladnicki, & Redmiles, 2013; Henttonen & Blomqvist, 2005; Jimenez et al., 2017
** Nilsson and Mattes,2015