Only a poorly-designed organization needs collaboration that badly.
Who doesn’t like collaboration?
It’s an irresistable image – hardworking people across the hierarchy and from different teams rolling up their sleeves and coming together to achieve bigger, better things that none of them would be able to separately.
Seeing employees and teams all over the organization coming together to collaborate is such an appeal to executives and middle managers alike.
And yet that’s all bullshit, of course.
When people work together, despite of where they are from in the organization and along the hierarchy, and achieve great things seemingly effortlessly, seamlessly, productivley or creatively, we usually don’t call it collaboration. We call it synergy.
Compared to synergy, collaboration is merely a second-class citizen in the kingdom of Workapolis. Practically, collaboration often means different groups of people coming together despite their conflicting interests or independent operations. It usually signifies employees going out of their way in order to achieve.
Hence the question: if employees and teams had to go out of their way just to achieve what an organization needs, then is that even good organization design?
If the Client Name Team had to collaborate constantly with the Client Email Team just so their parent unit, the Client Management Division, can successfully manage client information, then is that a cause for celebrating cross-team collaboration or is that one for serious concern for the quality of their idiotic organization design?
The need for collaboration is inversely correlated with the quality of your organization design, because organization design aims at creating well-aligned organizational structures and affording synergy, not at creating collaboration.
The more you need cross-team collaboration in more places of your organization and at more times, the less well-designed your organization is.
In other words, the mounting need for collaboration is an indicator of bad organization design.
A well-designed organization works well without needing collaboration all the time and everywhere and to a large extent. Only a poorly-designed organization needs it that badly.
Good organization design reduces the need for collaboration down to cooperation or coordination by creating networked, well-aligned organizational units and by affording synergy across that network of units. Good organization design would never separate managing client names from managing client emails.
All models are wrong, some are useful – compromises are always made in your organization design. Collaboration is needed to compensate for some of the design flaws. Collaboration is still occasionally needed in the presence of good functional structures and interpersonal or cross-team synergy.
The next time you feel like boasting about or promoting collaboration in your organization, ask these:
- Why is there no synergy in your organization to achieve what collaboration is achieving?
- What is the collabration trying to achieve? What problems is the collaboration trying to address?
- What is creating the need for cross-team collaboration? How much and how frequent is that need?
- Why are cross-team cooperation and coordination insufficient in your case?
- How do you define “good” as in “good organization design” in your case?
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Noah Fang 