Building A Collaborative Team

1. Making highly visible investments in facilities that demonstrate their commitment to collaboration.
2. Demonstrating leadership that models collaborative behavior.
3. Mentoring and coaching, especially informally, in ways that help people build networks across corporate boundaries.
4. Ensuring that collaboration skills have been taught to the team.
5. Building and supporting a strong sense of community.
6. Assigning team leaders that are both task– and relationship-oriented.
7. Building on heritage relationships by putting at least a few people who know one another on the team.
8. Sharply defining team roles and individually assigned tasks.  

This observation means project managers must set an environment that nurtures the exploration of open-ended thought and interactive collaboration. To accomplish this, team interactions cannot be just a series of point-in-time activities. The traditional team meeting must be replaced with continuous interaction and relationship building. To directly address this need, Cisco created the Emerge Engineering Team and TeamTV.

• The “team mode” version of TeamTV with all members on-screen;
• A “popcorn mode” where all members can watch an event or something communally across distances;
• TeamTV channel ticker, where team-relevant information is available across the bottom of the screen; and
• A virtual assistant bot with facial recognition technology capable of recognizing team members and serving up relevant email and instant messages. 

Building collaboration across an enterprise is not a quick job. It requires a combination of long-term relationship building and trust, a culture where senior leaders openly exhibit cooperation and make smart near-term decisions on team formation. Legacy practices that may work well with simple, co-located teams are likely to fail when teams grow more complex. Although most factors that impede collaboration today have always been there, the modern teams that are needed to solve global business challenges require much more diversity, long-distance cooperation, and remote expertise. Project managers would, therefore, do well to update their approach to today’s business challenges by addressing the eight factors listed above.  

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