Discover the Collaboration Code for Innovation, Part 2

In my last post, I attempted to “connect the dots” on collaboration’s relationship to innovation with a few key references. Let’s recap:

• Based on IBM’s 2013 C-Suite Study, CEOs view innovation as key to future growth, with collaboration serving as the vehicle for achieving this objective.

• The Center for Creative Leadership’s (CCL) 2014 report Future Trends in Leadership Development report indicated that “innovation is a result of large numbers of connection points that cause existing ideas to be combined in new ways—and that it lives in the social network (versus emanating from the individual).” 

• The concept of “mindset before skillset” is integral for developing collaboration skills. Mindset equates to one’s underlying assumptions that shape values and influence behaviors.

• Alternative mindsets must be cultivated to support genuine collaborative teamwork, as argued by Danah Zohar in An Alternative Sports Metaphor for Understanding Teamwork as Complex: Soccer. 

With that as backdrop, let’s segue (in more detail) to the question: How can organizations cultivate an alternative understanding of genuine collaborative teamwork?  

In The Collaborator:  Discover Soccer as a Metaphor for Global Business Leadership, I present 11 operating principles (or assumptions) that human capital professionals can use to support collaborative teamwork.  Those operating principles are (in no order):  

1. Focus on team—not position

2. Understand that everybody can play

3. Embrace diversity

4. Rely on each other

5. Promote both individual and team values

6. Seek skillful, adaptable players

7. Charge the team to perform the work

8. Empower players to win

9. Coach teams to respond to changing conditions on their own

10. Develop partners on the field

11. Achieve cross-cultural agility.  

Again, these principles serve as the “governing assumptions” an organization or team must have in place to support genuine collaborative teamwork.  Once these principles are understood—and learned—the next step to developing collaboration skills “starts with teaching managers a new range of competencies that focus on collaboration and influence skills,” reports CCL in Future Trends in Leadership Development. 

These competencies will provide the vehicle that drives the development collaboration skills.  For example, the principle, “Focus on Team—Not Position,” has five underlying competencies that must be targeted for development:  

1. adaptability

2. learning agility

3. relationship building

4. team management

5. team player.  

Through the process of developing competencies aligned with this operating principle, as well as the remaining operating principles, team members can build collaboration skills and acquire a deeper understanding of the mindset needed to fully support genuine collaborative leadership.