The Strategic Choice: Collaborative Ventures

In a business world of dramatically increasing rates of change, complexity and speed, the requirements for gaining and maintaining a competitive edge are changing, too. The emerging consciousness defines business leadership in terms of whole systems: synergy and innovation, sustainability and interdependence. Networks, webs, connectivity, interfaces, integration, optimization-all familiar terms in the world of technology-also refer to critical needs for learning environments, cross-functional teams and alliances.

Innovative businesses are increasingly choosing strategic alliances and joint ventures as a preferred vehicle for growth. These ventures require collaboration at every level of structure and individual interaction. The architecture for a successful joint venture or strategic alliance goes far beyond legal and financial considerations. Your challenge in collaboration is to achieve strategic results in co-creative relationships. For this you and your partners need a keen awareness, desire, and capacity to build, sustain and restore collaborative environments and relationships. Structured like a web, all the interfaces and relationships contribute to the strength or vulnerability of the whole.

These are high stakes ventures. The costs of communication breakdowns and conflict are tremendous. And the potential or tendency for such breakdowns is just as high, especially under extreme time pressure and stress.

The need for trust building - Trust is the foundation of relationships and is vital to individual, team and overall organizational performance. Trust - and the absence of betrayal - can be critical to the accomplishment of strategic organizational goals. Nevertheless, today's business leaders are often faced with the task of rebuilding trust in organizations without the support, tools or understanding necessary to work with the consequences of betrayal and complex dynamics of trust. Trust-based leadership promotes flexible, adaptive and productive work environments.

Collaborative excellence is essential for creating innovative solutions or results, especially where speed and adaptability are critical. It takes awareness, skill and practice in communicating and coordinating for effective action.

Successful collaboration depends upon bridges of trust between people working together. The essential structure for bridges in collaboration requires communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, collaborative process, and agreement structuring that all contribute to an environment of trust and co-creativity. Where trust breaks down, collaboration breaks down. Breakdowns cost you time, money, wellbeing and opportunities.

"The signposts of transition are disorientation, dis-identification, disintegration and disenchantment. A bridge-builder and skillful facilitator knows how to inspire and motivate processes and experiences that provide re-integration, re-identification, re-orientation and re-enchantment." Angeles Arrien

 

The signs of collaboration breakdown are familiar everywhere:

Power Struggles
Political Intrigue
Unethical Behavior
Communication Impasses
Escalating Conflict
Deepened Organzational Cynicism
The list goes on...

 

"Since in order to speak one must first listen, learn to speak by listening." Rumi

 

When collaboration and trust falter, you know and feel it:

Communication may be withheld or feels incongruent, manipulative, dishonest, misleading
Negotiation
is adversarial and strives to "win the deal," not win the relationship
Conflict resolution
is positional, coercive, conditional, punitive, and too little too late
Collaborative process
is an afterthought or unskillful, without necessary focus, structure and coherence; it often feels futile and like a waste of precious time - what process?!
Agreement structuring
is unrealistic, incomplete, focuses on control measures with insufficient consideration for what would support alignment and reconcile ongoing relationships

Collaboration is a process of collective alignment where the energies in a system are all working congruently, in harmony, consistent with a common purpose.

What is your margin for error?

For collaborative excellence, attend to "self" and "trust" in all aspects of the "bridge"...

Communication - to promote dialogue and clear understanding of values, needs, actions and goals. Surveys of top executives and business leaders consistently cite poor communication as the number one cause of failure in business ventures. Surprised?

Negotiation - to optimize mutual gains and develop relationships of reciprocity. Myth or reality: the goal of a negotiation is to "win the deal?" This can backfire badly when the ones who feel cheated also feel entitled to get you back, any way they can and probably within the terms of the agreement. If your goal is collaboration, then you need partners who consistently negotiate to "win the relationship" and to expand your creative options.

Conflict resolution - to facilitate reconciliation--restoring trust and healing from betrayal--and to regenerate collaboration. Conflict is a cost and opportunity of doing business. Your choice is what to do about it. Address it in "real time" to dissolve any blockage or mine it's potentially creative riches? Do you have processes for managing and resolving conflict to meet needs for fairness, mutual gains, and workable results?

Collaborative process leadership - to generate participatory decision making and buy-in. Optimal results come from balanced attention to process to make meetings productive and efficient. Process builds and maintains the web; it keeps communication feedback loops fluid, useful and complete.

Agreement structuring - to clarify adaptable guidelines and to manage expectations and results from a clear foundation of reciprocity and trust. The goal of every negotiation, conflict resolution process, and collaboration process is a reliable, clear and accurate agreement that accommodates change. These agreements can take many forms, but ultimately they must serve your core needs. Do your agreements promote collaboration?