Collaboration is not an ethos or a culture, it’s a set of skills. So, teach it.
The past nine months have been an eye-opener for many organisations in terms of just how capable ‘they’ – meaning ‘their people’ – actually are. Crises have a habit of revealing extended skillsets that people have no opportunity to deploy during peacetime. However, the genie has been well-and-truly released from the bottle in 2020. The question is what to do with the genie?
Priority number 1 in March for all organisations was survival – basic functioning in a global lockdown. However, the emerging aftermath has driven a transformation agenda – with one small problem: Given the ongoing turbulence, what do you transform the organisation into? Ideas on this abound, but what is clear is that organisations are facing significant changes ongoing for the next 3-5 years (both COVID itself and the aftershocks). How those changes are handled is likely to be the key determinant of the organisation’s future.
All of this change will require resource, effort and knowledge. The conventional mantra is that transformation is a game for experts, but given how your people have performed in 2020, why would you not harness their abilities to make those changes? Sure, expertise is very important in identifying the changes – the what and the how – but when it comes to making the changes, could that be better executed by your own team?
Historically, contractors and consultants have been viewed as out-performing internal staff in the delivery of programmes. I’ve seen many instances where senior managers have said that the programme stakes are ‘too high to try to do it ourselves.’
Having worked with, and developed internal teams, I strongly disagree with that sentiment, but there are three things that you will have to give your internal teams to make them successful as your new change capability.
1. Time. If there’s one phrase that should attract the full £10 tariff on the programme management swearbox, it’s ‘side of the desk.’ It’s a euphemism for doing a project in addition to the day-job, and I’ve yet to see it work. Projects and programmes are full-on and full-time. So give your people the time. Ask them to do a project or their day-job, not both. Otherwise you’ll end up with a poor day-job, a failing project and an exhausted employee.
2. Support. Remember that in most organisations, employees take a denuded role in change delivery. They are consulted as subject matter experts, impacted process owners, etc, but most have long been told to leave it to the professionals. If you are then going to overturn that message, staff will need to know that they will be supported; that their inevitable mistakes will be treated as learning. That they won’t be replaced by the external, expensive professionals at the first hint of programme trouble.
3. Training. If your first thought was ‘PRINCE2 training’ you’ve failed the test. It’s not just the people managing the projects who need training, it’s the wider delivery team. And the real skills are mostly soft skills. By far the biggest challenge is teaching teams how to collaborate. Collaboration is often presented as an ethos or a culture; in reality it is a set of (mainly soft) skills. How many times have you endured meetings attended by people with poor listening skills? Painful, isn’t it? And poor listening has been the root cause of more programme difficulties than I care to remember – to the point where I actually started to teach listening; surprisingly easy to do and even more surprisingly effective. And that is just one example of the skills that make up a collaborative skillset.
So before your organisation’s hard-earned talent walks out the door via an expensive redundancy process, it’s well worth another look at your change challenges – not just the what, but as importantly, the who. Just remember to give them the time, the support and the training.