Episode 191: Collaboration – Important, Underutilized, and Needed for Success
In this edition of Around with Randall, we focus on collaboration. From the moon landing to scientific discoveries, all rely on a collective effort rather than individual achievement. We will also address the benefits and challenges of collaboration, stressing the importance of clear roles, effective communication, and trust to overcome obstacles and achieve shared goals.
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. Here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
I'm so appreciative that you would take a minute or two of your time to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. I have been struck recently, as working with clients and doing some teaching as I've had the privilege of doing over the last couple of weeks, to really contemplate and think about the aspects of collaboration.
We spend a lot of time blaming other people. We spend a lot of time making excuses. We tend to look at ourselves as lone rangers. I think, in some ways, the world in which we live in today with social media, the echo chambers of news and commentary and chat rooms and all the other social media platforms has caused a lapse in the understanding and really the value of collaboration.
I'll steal from John Maxwell, who has written, I don't know, 20 books or so on leadership and about communication: "Nothing of significance was ever achieved by an individual acting alone. Look below the surface, and you'll find that all seemingly solo acts are really team efforts." I think there's a lot of truth in that.
If you look through, jump outside of, let's say, the world of philanthropy and just look at history, things like the Civil War and my all-time favorite book which I've referred to thinking, the ten reads that I recommend regarding leadership in the particular case is Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet, a book written by Doris Kerns Goodwin on the team of rivals. Lincoln knew he couldn't do it alone. He needed a team of people that would move together with him to repair the union.
Certainly, when we think about exploration, it wasn't Lewis, and it wasn't Clark, it was Lewis and Clark on their amazing world of adventure, discovery of Louisiana Purchase. And by the way, there were multiple other men as part of that group, it wasn't just two. Even scientific discovery, I have been fascinated recently reading more about rapid eye movement discovered in 1953. That was discovered as part of the way in which we sleep by three individuals, one of whom was a medical student. But it took all of them to figure out what it all meant when we now take for granted an understanding of rapid eye movement and the importance of deep sleep.
Going to the moon may be the greatest adventure of the 20th century, my goodness. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people that were part of that process, and many of the astronauts from Neil Armstrong to Gene Cernan to pick your favorite, Alan Shepard, all said there were a lot of people who made that possible.
I love historically reading about the Panama Canal. There were multiple efforts to build the Panama Canal until the United States reached success in the early part of the 20th century, 1903 through about 1907 or so, maybe 1908. How many thousands of people, including specific leaders all the way to the President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, saying we got to get this done?
Flight, just the thought of flying, the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, those were two individuals that had to work together, collaboration to get to their goal of getting off the ground.
Even when we think about psychology and the idea of loss, we're taught that it's better not to go through it alone. It's a group effort. It's a group momentum. It's a group journey. And yes, there are individual pieces of it, but when we lose someone we love, we tend not to go through it alone. In fact, what's one of the things that's recommended for those that are struggling with the loss of someone they loved? Group therapy. Go and be around others that have been through the same process. The same is true when we think about alcoholism and certainly drug addiction. There are tried and true methodologies, scientific and medical, around group therapy.
But really, when it comes down to it, the best examples of what we do every day, collaboration. You can't be a great fundraiser without great donors, and you can't be a great donor without a great nonprofit with somebody representing it. And so, our world is built into collaboration.
There's a couple of different ways of looking at it, one of which is the idea of leadership, sharing power, sharing responsibility. Are you willing to delegate and give authority to others? A second way of looking at it is pure teamwork. Maybe there isn't a specific leader. Does the team work for a common goal? Is there sharing? A third way of looking at it is what I think of as software or project manager software. I use this very consistently with many of the projects I work on with clients online. So they have access to it. They can see exactly what we're doing, the steps we're going to go through, how that works.
So collaboration from a technical perspective can be looked at in many different ways. But they have two important things that we have to really consider. Number one is what are the benefits of collaborating, being collaborative, and what are the challenges? And then the tactical piece which we'll cover at the end, which is what are the keys to successful collaboration.
Benefits of Collaboration:
So let's start with the benefits. What are the benefits of collaboration?
The first is that it creates goal alignment. Many times the things we have to do, we don't have to do alone. So in philanthropy, let's take gift officers as an example, yes, you may have individual goals, but if there's more than one of you, the team has goals. The office has goals. Are we aligned on what those goals actually are? Are we all rowing in the same direction? Goal alignment, if you're looking at it from maybe an infrastructure standpoint or an internal perspective. Are we building the processes and procedures for the office to operate and run? Are we all in agreement on that? Do they actually use them from a board perspective? This is all about agreeing on strategy and strategic planning based on the mission. Goal alignment is bringing everybody together so you're kind of moving towards the same opportunities. And frankly, it's unbelievably frustrating when one person or a couple of small group people have success, but nobody else is a part of it and the organization didn't succeed. And so this goal alignment is really critical.
Number two of the seven benefits for collaboration is skill sharing. I think we'd all like to be omnipotent, all-knowing, all-being, having all the skills necessary to do all of these things. That's not the way the world works. We all bring unique skill sets, opportunities, wisdom, knowledge, and experiences. The power of collaboration is pooling those things so that you have more tools in the toolbox to accomplish the, as mentioned, goal that you've all agreed upon. I do some things really, really well. There are some things that I am not a zero. I'm a negative. The essence of skill sharing, and so we'll move this into the interpersonal just for a second, and also goal alignment is the way I look at my marriage. Beyond love and beyond the aspects of just adoring my wife, there is a function of parenting, of managing a house, of managing a family. We have different skills. One of the things that I think we've done very well, and there are many holes and problems and challenges that we certainly, maybe more I have caused than she, but we recognize each other's skills and they're not the same. I'm able to delegate certain things to her so that she can take the lead. She delegates certain things to me so I can take the lead. That skill thought process in an office is powerful if everybody comes to the game with a sense of team, skill sharing.
Number three is transparency. If you collaborate and do it well, everybody kind of knows what everybody else is doing. A really basic element of this is using your calendar and having it open to people. I always had, as much as I could, my calendar available to my team. Maybe where I was. There were no secrets. To this day, and it's done for a totally different reason, but I'll jump back into the interpersonal. My wife has access to my calendar, my office calendar. She knows where I am, what I'm doing, and when my appointments are. We do that because she's trying to get things done and working, fitting in if she needs something from me versus when I'm not available. But that transparency makes it really easy. That's a very tactical thing. What about transparency when it becomes about emotion? When it becomes about, I want certain things? If we think about collaboration between a leader and a subordinate, does the subordinate have transparency about what they want their career to be? Opportunities to grow. Does the leader have transparency about those opportunities being available? These are all tactical, one-off things that exemplify the bigger cause or issue or benefit. In this case, transparency.
The fourth is that it saves time. When we have proper collaboration, we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we start something. The best example of this is the assembly line. That is the essence of collaboration. When a car is being built in, let's say, modern times, it was built by two or three people building the whole car. Henry Ford may not get the credit for actually developing the assembly line, but he perfected it with his Model T, the ability for someone to do one job and then pass the next job on to the next person. They don't move the car modes, but that's collaboration because everybody has a critical role in building the car. That's how every car is made, basically in the world, except for incredibly specialized cars. It's an example of how that saves time, saves money. They could produce cars at much greater rapid success. And collaboration then exemplifies two things. The first in saving time is you become incredibly efficient at doing that function if you have other people doing other functions. And then secondarily, because you're being efficient, there isn't a lot of lost motion or downtime.
Number five is innovation. And the best example of this, and it is often referred to as maybe the greatest collaboration of the 20th century and maybe the most innovative part of the 20th century. If you think about history, and this is one of the things I love about collaboration and leadership, you have to think about history. History doesn't tell you how to get from point A to point B. It tells you what the mistakes were and what worked in that particular time, which gives you a baseline of understanding about how you might accomplish that goal in your world today. This goes to the essence of that innovation and collaboration, and that is World War II. For those of you that know history, there was incredible collaboration amongst the allies. A lot of people look at Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, at least for a period of time, Charles de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek as leaders of their particular areas. But the collaboration was thousands of people who came together and said, "We have to fight for a common goal." The innovation out of that war, it was life and death. So sometimes you get the best out of people when it's life and death. Radar. We don't think about radar today, but it wasn't invented but perfected during World War II. The use of planes and the fact that planes at a certain altitude needed certain things. And let's be honest, the atomic bomb. There are hundreds of innovations that came out of World War II that have benefited mankind, even though at the time it was the worst time ever. And collaboration was required because you had scientists, military people, regular citizens, intelligence people, intelligence networks, military personnel on the front lines, generals. Everybody was a part of it.
In fact, Eisenhower would go on to say when he became president, that you will never find better examples of collaboration than people on the front lines where their lives are at stake. And he talked about the fact that his greatest joy of leading troops into World War II was that he found that collaboration was as good as anything in the world.
The sixth benefit of collaboration is better results. It’s about the goal, and if you have shared goals and you're working together, the outcome is going to be better. A lot of times we think about this as the donor journey. So let’s take the gift officers that are, let's say, in a smaller shop. In a lot of cases, they may have a finance person who is handling some of the gift processing, reporting. You may have someone in the operations, or if they're big enough, a prospect researcher. But the outcome is the relationship between the donor and the organization. And that is multiple people touching that process. The outcome is better because you have more people involved. When I was at the Children's Hospital Foundation in Omaha, our practice was the hospital. So donors are giving to the hospital. Our job was to facilitate the donation. The reason I bring this up is that there were multiple people who touched it. It was our department, but then there were often people from the hospital who were part of it, clinicians, doctors, social workers, nurses. They all were part of that donor's journey because they would give out of the goodness of their heart, but we provided the avenue for which they can make that contribution. So that donor journey was a lot of collaboration between a lot of people. It wasn't just one. Yes, there was a gift officer or somebody to handle it, but the results were always better when more people were involved.
And the last of the seven benefits of collaboration is that it creates trust. Trust, trust, trust. If you're going to have a successful relationship in your personal life, it takes trust. The same is true in the work environment. The same is true in the military. The same is true on a sports team. The same is true in philanthropy. And when you collaborate, you build trust. If you don't, trust is easily broken, easily lost, and incredibly difficult to get back. So the benefit of collaborating is that you actually have a sense of trust because you're working together. You're communicating together. You're working towards a common goal together. That sense of trust is the single most important thing in many aspects of life, but certainly in collaboration.
Challenges of Collaboration:
So those are the benefits of collaboration. Now let's talk about what are some of the challenges. And there are three of these. The first is that collaboration takes more time. There is no way around it. If you want to have a truly collaborative environment, it's going to take time to work through it. That is often what people, leaders, struggle with. It's just easier to do it yourself. You're not going to do it as well. The outcome will not be as positive. But it's going to take more time. And so if you are committed to collaboration, you need to allocate the proper time and space to make sure that that collaboration can be successful. Time is a killer of collaboration because people don't want to invest in it. It's going to take more time to do it collaboratively than it is going to do it yourself. No way around it.
The second challenge is that there will be disagreements. You will not agree on everything. I think the second thing my wife and I do really well is that we disagree very well. That doesn't mean there aren't times we don't hurt each other's feelings or that there aren't disagreements that aren't maybe difficult. But in the end, we end up at the same place. If you have a work environment and you have collaboration, you have to understand that people are going to have different points of view. And in the world we live in today, that is even more true. And those different points of view are really healthy. That goes back to the skill sets and experiences people have. You want that. It's going to take more time to work through those disagreements, but they are going to happen. You need to prepare for them. You need to plan for them. You need to make sure that people understand that they will happen and that there are ways and processes to work through those disagreements.
The third challenge is a lack of accountability. This is a little bit of a twist because when we talk about goal alignment and skill sharing and transparency and all of the benefits, it’s really easy to say, "Well, I thought so-and-so was going to do that." Or "I thought this was going to happen." And nobody took the accountability or responsibility. That goes back to transparency, and particularly transparency around roles and responsibilities. It goes back to goal alignment. Who's responsible for what? It goes back to transparency in the sense of making sure everybody understands what's happening. If you don't have that, collaboration breaks down because nobody wants to be responsible or accountable. And that's a real challenge. But if you don't do it, you lose all the benefits.
Keys to Successful Collaboration:
So those are the three challenges. There are multiple things we can do. I picked the four keys to success for collaboration. We end every podcast with actionable items that you can implement into your organization.
Number one is effective communication. When I teach in schools, undergrads or masters, students are always talking about, "What do I need to learn?" Learn how to communicate. I don't care if you're talking about marriage, you're talking about an office, you're talking about sports, military. Effective communication is the number one skill set that people need to be successful. And collaboration is absolutely the same. If you don't have effective communication, you will fail. So that means transparency. That means setting expectations. That means having constant touchpoints. It means when you hit bumps in the road, you don't run from them. Effective communication is critical to collaborative efforts.
Number two is role clarity. If you want to have effective collaboration, you better have effective role clarity. People need to know what their roles and responsibilities are. They need to know what they're accountable for. And they need to know what their authority is. If they don't have those three things, roles, responsibilities, and accountability, you will fail. Collaboration will not work. And it takes more time to clarify those roles. It takes more time to make sure everybody understands their responsibilities. But if you don't do it, it will not be successful.
The third key to success is shared goals. If you don't have shared goals, you're not collaborating. You're doing parallel play. And there is a real difference. Collaboration is about working together towards a common goal. Parallel play is working in the same space, but not necessarily towards the same thing. And we see a lot of that in philanthropy. You see a lot of people who are doing things in the same space, but not necessarily towards the same goals. And that's where you see a lot of breakdowns. So you need to make sure you have shared goals, shared objectives, shared outcomes.
And the last of the four keys to success is trust. Trust, trust, trust. We talked about it as a benefit. It's also a key to success. If you don't have trust, you don't have anything. And trust is built over time. It's built through communication. It's built through transparency. It's built through effective role clarity. It's built through shared goals. If you don't have trust, you don't have collaboration. And if you don't have collaboration, you're not going to be successful.
The more we realize how important the team is—small team, big team, subparts of the team, doing multiple teams within a bigger team. However you want to look at it, we need better teamwork because that's how we're going to solve the problems that nonprofits and our world have. The more we work together, the easier it will be.
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We need nonprofit work now more than ever. I think there are going to be some interesting times over the next six to nine months as to exactly what we're trying to accomplish. The key here is one way to do that is through having great collaboration as a team to be able to get to where you want to go and where the organization needs to go.
Don't forget, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and then there are those who wonder what happened. At the end of the day, the length of weeks, it's all about people who are making things happen—either as employees, volunteers, or our donors—or the people in the causes that are wondering what happened.
That's a great existence professionally. As I've said before, I have some days, most days, I just don't think I go to work. I just go help people. That's a pretty cool way for you, me, and anyone else to spend their professional life.
I look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall. And don't forget, make it a great day.