Collaboration as a Performance Improvement Strategy

Collaboration is a partnership between people and or groups intended to generate a product or achieve a singular objective that is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Collaboration tends to move forward any kind of work or goal faster than any other approach because it is powered by skills, knowledge, expertise, experience, and insight of many people, not just one person.

It is particularly critical in public service industries because the needs and demands in these industries are complex, multidimensional, and in industries such as health care, filled with severe risks and often times, dire consequences. In a laboratory, for example, a “simple” blood test involves multiple staff, processes, and knowledge areas. All of these units or players must work together not only to deliver the service (blood test) but also to achieve an interdependent goal (accurate and timely test results). A lack of cooperation (an element of collaboration) by team members in any step in this service process results in various negative outcomes, such as patient dissatisfaction, staff frustration, and delay or error in diagnosis or treatment.

More often than not the lack of collaboration surfaces as ineffective behaviour, not deficiencies in technical knowledge and capacity. At the extreme, ineffective behaviour is dysfunctional and includes poor communication, sabotage (conscious or unconscious) of existing processes, refusal to work with or participate in teams, gossip-mongering, apathy, procrastination and disregard for time frames, constant complaining, argumentativeness, rudeness, and resistance to constructive feedback.

That being said, collaboration as a performance improvement strategy, is a necessary ingredient in today’s complex, ambiguous, fast and every-changing workplaces.  If the corporate culture goal is for a collaborative workforce, then the critical factor is that everyone – from the top to the bottom – is crystal clear on the types of behaviours that are acceptable and desired, and more importantly, the types of behaviours that are ‘relationship killers’.  For most people, it seems this should be common sense, but because we’re unique human beings, what’s common sense for me, and for you, is never the same.  People behaviour is at the heart of any corporate culture and must be ‘owned’ by the company.  People behaviour is a dynamic ever-changing phenomenon of all healthy organizations and must be addressed, developed and entrenched as often as people move and change roles within the organization.

There are thousands of training sessions out there touting to change workplace behaviours, but it won’t stick until each and every  individual takes responsibility for their own behaviour and for the environment within which they work.  To do that, a person needs a deep understanding of themselves – the way they think and feel – and how they affect others around them.  It is a matter of creating a common ‘behaviour language’, and then learning how to change one’s thinking to produce the necessary behaviour habits that are needed for a positive, happy and productive team, at every organizational level.   It is a matter of developing the skill of Positive Presence in every individual at every level of the organization.  The skill of Positive Presence is innate in every human being, and with this skill comes the mindset, the vocabulary and the skills needed to take both yourself, your team and your company to the next level.