On the list of skills, behaviors, or attributes your organization measures and rewards, is “generous collaborator” on the list? I would hazard a guess that it’s not.
Most organizations measure success through hard numbers such as the highest number of closed deals or the most positive KPIs. But the best collaborator? “Good team player” will likely get you a pat on the back, but not the big bonus.
It’s time to think differently about what you tolerate and what you reward.
What you reward should be using one another’s time effectively. Consistently delivering on commitments to the team. Going above and beyond to support other functions and other teams.
What needs to go is collaboratively “dialing it in.” Multitasking in meetings rather than staying in the conversation. Coming late and unprepared to conversations. Sending out poorly formed thoughts or requests in an email and expecting recipients to just figure it out.
These behaviors are so common in many organizations that they become acknowledged cultural norms. “Oh that’s just [Company Name] time. Everyone shows up late…”
Selfish collaborators place an invisible tax on the rest of the organization. Rather than taking the time to provide clear feedback or prepare for meetings, they implicitly demand that others fill in the gaps. Often they are senior leaders or high performers in other domains, so they are given a pass for these behaviors.
In the workplace, wasted time is more than just an annoyance – it’s wasted money. And the hours add up quickly. Take a few common situations:
- A senior-level manager arrives 15 minutes late for a 60-minute meeting, spends 15 minutes getting oriented to the purpose, and then causes the meeting to run over by 30 minutes. If you assume 10 meeting attendees, there’s 15 hours of largely wasted time.
- Having lost an extra 30 minutes in the meeting above, another manager speeds through a document review, providing only vague feedback to her direct report. As a result, the team spends several hours revising it in the wrong direction, necessitating two additional rounds of feedback. Let’s call that 10 more wasted hours.
- Focused on document revisions, one of the team members fails to respond to a “quick question” email from a cross-functional colleague. Impatient for a response, the colleague schedules an urgent meeting for the following day, including the three other people he copied on the email. Five more wasted hours on what literally should be an email.
The above disconnects alone cost the organization ~30 hours total of time waste – aka 75 percent of one FTE’s entire week. Most organizations don’t have a lot of spare FTEs sitting around, and yet collaborative waste is regarded as the cost of doing business. In my opinion, that cost is too high.
For a better outcome, let’s prioritize – and reward – excellent collaboration the same way we reward excellent outcomes. Chances are, those excellent results will come a lot more often – and without leaving so much time on the table.