Published On:Tuesday, August 24, 2010

By Yvette Bethel

IN A collaborative work environment, employees put aside their personal differences and work together. This type of environment is grounded in trust, integrity, human value and respect. Unfortunately, collaboration does not always occur. Here are five ways you can set the stage for a collaborative environment.

1. Break Down Silos: Silos occur when there are self-sufficient teams of employees that do not communicate or connect with each other regarding achievement of their goals. They operate as if they are the only department within the business, ignoring the need for working together. When silos are present in your business, employees don't network internally, or consistently help each other.

In order to demolish silos and build bridges across your organisation, it is important to create relationships that can help you get work done. Building bridges by helping your coworkers can lead to reciprocity and to building or reinforcing a foundation of trust. Another way you can demolish silos is by opening the flow of communication by implementing a schedule of meetings designed to share the right information with the right people at the right time.

Developing appropriate leadership competencies is another important consideration when deciding to break down silos. If leaders can recognise when walls are being built and maintained, they can proactively encourage or reward collaborative behaviours.

It is important to note that in a collaborative workplace, employees will continue to express different points of view. The differentiating factor is when there is collaboration, various perspectives are considered from an interest based view, focusing on deeper common interests and using those interests to overcome differences. Therefore, through inclusive leadership practices and trust building, shared goals will begin to emerge and the walls of the silos will be systematically broken down.

2. Navigate Office Politics: Trust and respect have already been established as fundamental building blocks of collaborative behaviour. In the absence of trust and respect, a highly political environment can evolve and survive because it is being fed by coworkers who only care about their success. Based on observation, overly political behaviour can be divisive, creating "us and them" circumstances.

At its core, politics is about relationships and alliances. Unfortunately, there are people who are overly political who exploit relationships by being more concerned with form than substance. In response to this type of political behaviour, author Deborah Hildebrand once said, "Office politics impact employers and employees alike, so it is important to understand how to navigate the minefields in order to ensure a positive work environment."

In order to create a collaborative, politically savvy environment, leaders can contribute by building a team through opening top down and bottom up channels of communication and building reward systems that acknowledge team achievements versus individual achievements. Additionally, an objective based performance management process can help to break down political structures at work because results based performance measurements can obliterate tendencies toward favouritism.

3. Power Plays: Power and politics are inextricably linked. There are power starved, overly political persons who want to build and protect their power bases so in their minds, this means they have to diminish what they perceive to be your power. Obviously, destructive power players negatively impact your ability to collaborate because their myopic approach strangles coworkers into a state of inefficiency and ultimately, reciprocated negativity.

When power plays emerge, like saying no to show you who is in charge, pettiness and insecurity are at the root of the power dynamic and training in isolation is not going to change their behaviour. This is because the power player is doing what he or she needs to do to keep insubordination or noncompliance in its place. Therefore, training supported by the implementation of systems of accountability to the right behaviours will help to make positive changes and if this doesn't work, corrective action can be considered as a viable option when seeking to achieve collaboration.

4. Bad Attitudes: Bad attitudes can be encountered with customers, executives, managers, supervisors or front-line employees. A bad attitude can show up as passive aggression, nay-saying, being rude, knowing-it-all, being exact, withholding information or complaining. When you display a negative attitude your coworkers prefer not to interact with you and this usually includes your reporting manager. When your reporting manager avoids you, it appears that you are not favoured, but you are contributing to your own circumstance of isolation.

Another bad attitude consistently identified by managers is persons who are not open to constructive criticism. As a result, accelerated progress is difficult because managers who decide not to criticise because of the perceived consequences may do the work themselves and slow down the process or they avoid confrontation by allowing errors to recur.

If you are displaying a negative attitude, you will need to become aware of your divisive behaviours and self-correct. It can mean managing your body language or outbursts. If you are a manager it can mean that you learn the skill of coaching so you can coach desired collaborative behaviours.

5. A lack of integrity: When there is a lack of integrity, division occurs because you have a group of people who will observe the integrity deficient behaviour and decide to mirror the behaviour because if one person is getting away with it, why can't they? Alternatively, the honest persons don't want to be a part of dishonest systems of behaviour and have to decide how they will confront the situation so they can avoid being indirectly implicated. They ask themselves questions like: Should I report the dishonest behaviour to management and become a whistle blower? Should I confront the people involved and become a known potential liability and risk being sabotaged? Or should I leave the company?

Transforming your corporate culture from one characterised by entitlement and dishonesty to one characterised by collaboration, accountability and results is a colossal task and it requires integrity at the top levels of the organisation and a will to implement integrity based policies and systems. As we all know if policies are in place but not enforced they are only empty words.

* Yvette Bethel is CEO of Organizational Soul, a company that offers Human Resource Consulting and Leadership Development services. If you are interested in creating authentic change at your organization, her contact details can be found at www.orgsoul.com