Tammy Erickson on the Wikinomics blog highlights research on best performing collaborative teams and identifies 10 key attributes:
"... more and more of the work that differentiates our businesses today depends on divergent or creative activities. Our challenge is one of creating environments that encourage people to become engaged, to take initiative, invest discretionary effort in a wide variety of collaborative activities, and, as a result, develop new approaches and ideas, provide extraordinary customer service, or ramp productivity. Think of this challenge as one of setting the stage, creating an environment that engages players from multiple constituencies. It is a “pull” rather than “push” approach to achieving business results.
Does your organization have the processes and practices, the leadership skills and the relationships among participants that you’ll need? Do you have the capacity to collaborate?
Over the last several years, our research has identified the characteristics of organizations that are successful at collaborative activity. With extensive data from teams from around the world, we identified ten factors that are highly correlated with successful collaboration:
- Highly engaged, committed participants
- Trust-based relationships
- Prevalence of networking opportunities
- Collaborative hiring, development, and promotion practices
- Organizational philosophy supporting “community of adults”
- Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
- Executive role models for collaboration
- Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
- Well-defined individual roles and responsibilities
- Important, challenging tasks
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