Brand Central Station

(Company Press Release)

BOSTON – Innoveer Solutions, an award-winning customer strategy and solutions consultancy, today announced the availability of its most recent white paper, “The Pursuit of Partner Relationship Management,” which details how companies can expand their reach, reduce costs, and minimize risks by sharing more sales-related responsibilities with their business partners during uncertain economic times. The paper is now available in the white paper library on Innoveer’s website.

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This is from a great post directed to freelancers on the Freelancefolder blog.

Freelace writer Laura Spencer provides a list of 45 questions for every freelancer to ask a new client (the entire list is posted after the jump).  Looking over that list, though, it occurs to me that many (if not all) of these questions are relevant things for an account manager to ask an agency – or internally – for a marketing manager to ask a new “client” inside their own company.

Some of these questions might be considered a bit mundane.  In my experience, new client relationships are often filled with the excitement of the “win” for the agency and the high expectations of a client who has been wooed by great creative and charming personalities. 

Questions like “Which is more important, quality or speed?” seems to have the potential to take all the romance out of the relationship right away.  (Double entendre intended.)

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It sounds good, but it isn’t easy. It takes a combination of technology and technique to really be an effective, collaborative worker.

Corporate leaders we interviewed said that their companies offered very little training in collaboration but they try to hire individuals who demonstrate an ability to work well with others. “The ability to build and foster relationships is a trait that we look for in new hires,” explains a senior marketing executive at a national hospitality company.

“Collaborative skills are in short supply in most new hires,” says consultant Peter Davidson. “It’s a fundamental skill going all the way back to learning to share as toddlers.” But companies seem ill-prepared to continue developing that skill in the workplace short of providing new technologies that are supposed to foster collaboration.

“I’m a sort-of new hire myself,” claims Jinal Shah a recent college graduate, new employee and blogger living in the Northeastern US. “However I wasn’t spoon-fed. I was just thrown in and I learned my way quickly.”

While some companies provide mentoring or buddy programs for new hires, others leave assimilation into the corporate culture up to the new hire. The result can be a stifling of creativity and intimidation when it comes to collaboration. An executive currently working inside one of the top three auto companies responded to our inquiry on this matter with the following insights:

“There is an awareness that new hires will not be “accepted” by the old guard, but 110% of the burden is placed upon the new hire and no attention is placed upon changing the worst aspects of the old culture.”

So, as tough as it is to bring in new employees with strong collaborative talents, how do the best companies go about leveraging the skills and abilities of their human resource? There seem to be some common themes in the businesses we interviewed:

1) Knowledge and information was transferred from text-based repositories to more interactive medias (i.e. a wiki or some other interactive database structure) that provided both access to the information and the ability to add/modify content on the fly;2) The transformation to a project management scheduling tool that was both web-based and interactive, allowing workers to set their own production schedules, share information, etc.;

3) Clear and objective direction from managers tasked with keeping “the big picture” in full view and instructed not to worry about the small stuff;

4) Active engagement by management when things went astray – including the disciplining of team members who could not stay on task or get jobs done on time – in essence a higher standard of accountability;

5) The development of trust between all members of the collaborative team and between the teams and management, thereby avoiding devious politics and micro-management;

6) Benchmarking and measurement of results to use for constructive feedback.

Interestingly enough, most of the innovations required to create a collaborative workplace involved changes in behavior (by both employees and management) and were not, necessarily technology-reliant.

Maybe there’s a greater lesson to learn here?

There are some significant challenges facing management if the desire is to create a more open and collaborative work environment. In short, managers have to learn to listen more, talk less, follow through and step back. Not necessarily in that order.

But first, before actively “managing” co-workers in a way that fosters collaboration, managers have to come to terms with the basic necessity of collaboration in the first place. It’s a significant change in orientation for older managers who still recall the days of “command and control.” The top-down management styles of the 20th century were often patterned after traditional, military control structures – which made sense, actually. So many men of the 1940’s and 50’s had served in the military which was orderly and organized enough to beat facism, the same management premises were bound to work at home, too.

Well, not exactly. (more…)

It’s ironic, in a way, that while the communications profession is busy trying to find ways to promote collaboration and social interaction through media channels like blogs, wikis, whiteboards and the like, that true collaboration is being taught online everyday in places like Second Life, an online role-playing game developed by Linden Lab of San Francisco.

And what seems to be the greatest skill taught to people so they can collaborate freely? Believe it or not, it’s autonomy. The ability to act on your own.

Hiro Pendragon, writing in Flack Attack, acknowledges the apparent dichotomy of it all:

“It may at first seem ironic to approach the idea of autonomy, when thinking in the scope of a global virtual community such as Second Life. When the whole basis of an online world is to provide a place for to interact in common space …”

Like the real world, every aspect of the virtual world of Second Life is subject to the influence of other people. No player is truly alone. There is a difference between being alone and autonomous. As Hiro writes in his article: “…autonomy is not a state of separation from our environment, but a distinction from it while still existing in it.”

Virtual media environments, like Second Life, are uniquely suited to promote autonomy by teaching collaborative skills.

“Autonomy is an ideal greatly supported by virtual worlds. We have an opportunity to interact with people across the globe. This opportunity creates the greatest set of cooperation that we can currently achieve.”

And the benefit of this collaboration is innovation.

“The bottom line is that collaboration leads to innovation. People together exchange ideas that lead to new thoughts. Larger projects require more than one person. Really large-scale projects require interaction of several organizations.”

“As working relationships become larger and more complex, we need to investigate tools to make it easier…”

It’s called the Hawthorne Effect and it was discovered in the 1930’s. Yep. That’s right. The big marketing and branding breakthrough of the 21st Century was discovered about seventy years ago.

Way back then, researchers from Harvard Business School were running employee feedback research on various proposed innovations in their working conditions … this is what the Harvard researchers found:

• Brighter lighting conditions resulted in better productivity but so did dimmer light conditions.
• Shorter working hours also improved productivity, but then so did longer working hours.

Further research resulted in the following – dubbed the Hawthorne Effect:

“If you seriously involve others in trialing, testing, reviewing and suggesting improvements in your work/products they will inevitably become positively disposed to it and be among its biggest champions.” (more…)

It seems like common sense, doesn’t it?

As social creatures, it would seem that people should work together in a group rather than alone. Division of labor and all that. Synergies. Sparking ideas. Great chemistry. We’ve heard it all before.

So, then why does it take so many people so long to “get” collaboration? Why don’t people want to work together?

“Collaboration is key to making everyone in the organization better,” explains Adam Hayes, of AH Digital FX Studios in Idaho Falls, Idaho. “Everyone has specific skill sets that they possess and are thus beneficial in improving the overall quality of any given product.”

When we interviewed corporate communicators and business leaders and asked them about the collaborative capabilities of their new employees – those employees hired with the understanding that today’s workplace calls for collaborative skills – over 40% of those incoming employees were rated at or below average ability. Is that setting ourselves up for failure?

After looking into this problem, the short answer is that we are often too hard on ourselves. Collaboration is not easy. Some cultures have a greater difficulty with the concept than others – but the fact is much of what it takes to be a great, collaborating organization is counter-intuitive to accepted business practices.

Today’s business environment – the one that calls for greater collaboration – faces serious economic challenges that requires each employee to be more productive and requiring less oversight. In short, we are asking people to be more autonomous and more collaborative at the same time. This apparent contradiction works thanks to advancements in communications technology.

We know the traditional communications channels (e.g. meetings, call reports, e-mail) won’t cut it any more. Some take too much time, others are not easily modified to meet the needs of multiple recipients easily and efficiently. Still others are one-to-one communications that quickly become confused and inefficient when shared with parties outside the original relationship. Instead, co-workers need to find the best ways to communicate and collaborate that combine technology and technique.

The management challenges of structuring a more autonomous and collaborative workplace are signficant. Believe it or not, management’s success boils down to its ability to communicate and it’s willingness to trust employees. More on that here.

Ironically, we may already be training our workers on the new collaborative processes of the future through online entertainment and other media. While blogs, wikis and other social media has been stealing the thunder in the business workspace, online games like Second Life and other social interaction role-playing games have been teaching people how to work together without even being in the same time zone.

The secret for success in the coming generation of employees may lie in an ability to identify those prospective employees with the greatest collaborative training. “Identifying this skill (collaboration) in potential new hires is a skill in itself and our capabilities here could be improved,” says one corporate marketing director.

Finally, there is one last area of collaboration that has been long-recognized as being a high-value practice among businesses: collaborations with customers and suppliers. The economic benefits of collaborations in these areas (whether they are joint ventures, preferred customer/supplier relationships, etc.) are fairly obvious. There are marketing disciplines growing up around this phenomenon (i.e. word-of-mouth marketing, customer evangelism, etc.). You can read more about that in our Brand Crafting blog (re: consumer collaborations) and our Business of Business Marketing blog (re: supplier/customer collaborations).

And, of course, because this is a blog, please feel free to contribute to this discussion at any time.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, Branding, Collaboration, Partnership, Hawthorne Effect, Customer Relationships, Vendor Relations, Leadership, Culture

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