Cooperation and Collaboration

1
Cooperation and Collaboration

• Farrokh Alemi, Ph.D.

2
Why Work in Teams?

• To improve coordination and cooperation
• To empower people
• To harness creativity and innovation
• To cut overhead costs

3
Types of Teams

• Mix of top and lower level managers
• Mix of managers from different departments
• Mix of front line managers and workers

4
Teamwork and Cooperation Is Critical to a Firm's
Long-term Success and Viability

• Yet This Issue Is Often Ignored

5
Todays Focus

• What specific factors prevent management
  personnel from working together as a team?
• What specific problems emerge when managers do
  not work together or cooperate with each other?
• 3. What are the keys to getting managers to
  cooperate and work together as a team?

6
Top Five Causes of Not Working Together

• Personality conflicts and egos
• Conflicting goals
• Reward systems based on individual performance
• Lack of unifying vision
• Ineffective leadership from above

7
Cooperation Is Not the Norm

• When left to their own devices, aggressive,
  strong-willed, self-starting managers do not
  naturally gravitate toward working together.
• Some do not have the skills to work together.
• Others face structural barriers.

8
What Happens When Managers Do Not Cooperate?

• Break down of communication
• Duplicate work and waste
• Loss of productivity
• Reduce morale
• Increased work place conflict
• Failure to focus on customers

An Organization that is hurting itself
9
What Can Be Done?

• Most managers want to work together
• Many do not know how
• Many do not have a conducive environment

10
Five Solutions

• Develop consensus around a common vision and
  organizational outcomes.
• Implement team-based performance feedback, and
  reward systems.
• Top management support cooperation in word and
  deed.
• Train for team building skills.
• Facilitate front-line management ownership of
  decision processes and outcomes.

11
Despite All the Talk Empowerment Is Still Mostly
an Illusion.

• The change programs and practices we employ are
  full of inner contradictions that cripple
  innovation, motivation, and drive.

12
Differences in Commitment
13
It Is Unrealistic to Expect Management to Allow
Thousands of Employees to Participate Fully in
Self-governance.

• How Participates?
• What Is Self Governance?

14
Contradictions Do Your Own Thing -- the Way We
Tell You

• When employees' actions are defined almost
  exclusively from the outside (as they are in most
  change programs), the resulting behavior cannot
  be empowering
• Use of champions in virtually all contemporary
  change programs sends a similar mixed message
  from CEOs to employees
• Organization politics does not disappear

15
Charade or Reality

• Recognize that every company has both top-down
  controls and programs that empower people.
• Some inconsistencies are inevitable and must
  simply be managed. Encourage individuals to
  bring them to the surface otherwise, a
  credibility gap will be created.
• Don't undertake blatantly contradictory
  programs.
• Understand that empowerment has its limits.
  Specify the likely limits of permissible change.

16
Charade or Reality

• Establish working conditions to increase
  empowerment in the organization.
• Calculate factors such as morale, satisfaction,
  and even commitment into your human relations
  policies, but do not make them the ultimate
  criteria. The ultimate goal is performance.

17
Charade or Reality

• Help employees understand the choices they make
  about their own level of commitment. One of the
  most helpful things we can do in
  organizations-indeed, in life-is to require that
  human beings not knowingly kid themselves about
  their effectiveness.
• Remember that empowerment can run contrary to
  human nature, and be realistic about how to
  achieve and use it.

18
Organizational Politics

• You cannot have human activity that does not
  involve group dynamics and political coalitions
• Organization coalitions for team work

19
Think It Through Exercise

• What is the limits of empowerment you can accept?
• How do you organize a coalition among the
  employees to support team work?