They won't collaborate!
Hello all,
I manage a group of six IT system administrators. They work in pairs on specific technology platforms. One of the pairs does not seem to be able to work together. One member has been with the company for a few years and the other arrived a year ago. All was going well during the initial probationary period: the more experienced employee would share his knowledge of the company, procedures, etc. Several months ago, however, all seems to have stopped. I met with both employees seperately to look into what was going on. The more experienced worker thinks that the new guy has had enough coaching and should be able to work on his own by now. The new guy still makes mistakes, but nothing drastic. He says he is open to input from his partner but his partner no longer gives him feedback. They are both working well individually right now, but the new guy is starting to feel ill at ease...
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
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Collaboration
'They are both working well individually right now'. Is that how the other teams are as well? Since the new guy still makes mistakes, are they mistakes that feedback from his partner would have avoided or not? Could it be that the new guy needs to start getting feedback from other sources, such as you, or his direct customers (whoever raises problem tickets, whoever needs the form filled out correctly etc).
If the other teams are working well as teams, rather than individuals, why not set the new guy and his partner an assignment that is only partially inside their comfort zone, thus making them have to work as a team for a while. Nothing large, expensive or time consuming, just something to get the communication flowing again. Even something as simple as building an FAQ document for new starters in your dept. They would have to get feedback from the other teams, and work together to get the thing complete.
Colin.
shared experience?
The way the army gets people to run towards gunfire is to bond them into a very tight group. The core method they use is the 'shared experience', where they have to overcome a challenge together, for example getting everyone home from many miles away in rough terrain.
One way of doing this in the workplace is to create some kind of pressured task -- and carefully, where everyone will be needed. You can also take them out of the workplace and bond them through exercises, sports, games, and so on. Even a regular bowling night where they work in teams can help. Look for differing strengths in everyone and let others see them. Build personal familiarity, out of which will develop stronger bonds.
:Dave
Maybe some underlying competition?
I have a group that consists of folks that have been in the group for a long time (5-10 years) and some young folks that are 1-3 years out of college. At first they seemed to group and collaborate along those lines and I couldn't figure out how to get them all together as a team. I started poking around and I found that the senior group felt that the 'kids' were after their jobs and were trying to change everything without understanding the history of how things grew into our current products. The 'kids' felt like the seniors didn't want to share their knowledge or help them.
We established an internal wiki where everyone was required as a part of their annual performance review to create some number of pages to share their knowledge. After three months both groups are talking, laughing, sharing and collaborating.
This is a much bigger group than you are talking about, but perhaps your experienced worker feels the new guy is being groomed to take over. And as a side note, the idea of all your sys admins collaborating on a wiki might prove usefull in many ways to your whole organization. Perhaps the 'challenge' suggested by other postings could be to establish a wiki for all sys admin groups. They would have to collaborate with eachother as well as with all the other groups.
Melissa
Wiki
I love that idea - it could work in any area where technical and experiential knowledge can be leveraged across members of a group. How much time did they each end up spending? Any things you would roll out differently a second time?
Cheers
Marne
Time spent on Wiki Creation
Hi Marne,
Sorry, I've been traveling a lot and not spending much time on the web. So the wiki is really working out great! We just did 6 month reviews for performance for each team member and one of the questions I asked was how much time they spent creating and updating wiki pages. The average was like an hour a day for the 6 months and we have a huge repository of "good stuff" in there now. What is really nice and an unexpected bonus is that other teams in our company are now using the wiki and as a larger group we've created general pages that define best practices, lessons learned, and a bunch of other stuff that everyone finds useful. Our company had dictated that we have defined processes and they had some way to get to them that was pretty archaic, now they are using a wiki too and folks throughout the company are sharing their information. I don't know that it is because of us, but the whole wiki idea is catching on everywhere and depending on the tool you use to maintain it, it is a very easy place for your team to share, document their products, keep a running history of things to watch out for, and collaborate on a lot of levels. I love it.
I think I'd be more careful about the tool I picked. We used a shareware wiki called MoinMoin and it's pretty good, but the things that aren't good are somewhat frustrating. We actually had a paged called MoinMoinSucks for a while that everyone shared their gripes about the product on, now it has migrated to a page called MoinMoinLocalHelp and all the gripes usually get addressed by someone who's resolved the same problem. The amount of time between entry of a gripe and someone posting a resolution is really low, so I know they are using it well.
What I worried about was that since I was "forcing" them to use it by making it part of the performance criteria was that we would get a lot of minimal stuff and the spirit of using the wiki would never catch on. Turns out that forcing them to use it was the right thing. When I interviewed everyone, most of them admitted they really liked the wiki, but would never have used it in the beginning without it haveing had to do so for performance appraisal criteria.
All in all, I like it a lot, my bosses like it and my team is happier and more trusting of eachother than they were before and now collaborate across cultural, age, gender and even difference of opinion lines. As a matter of fact the conflict resolution issues for me have decreased because they tend to fight it out on the wiki and resolve their differences there instead of fighting in meetings. That was a totally unexpected benefit and one I could see in some cases being bad because there have been a few instances where the postings break down into a never ending war. The way I've solved that one is to watch the posts using the "recent postings" section and then if I see a unresolvable fight brewing I step in and post my opinion (usually pros and cons of each and a opinion on a solution that best fits our long range goals). This usually gets them thinking in a different direction and they often come up with a whole new collaborative solution.
Don't get me wrong, the wiki isn't a miracle cure for us, but it has really given us a new way to communicate and share.
Let me know if you set one up and how it works out for you!
Melissa
Wikis
Melissa
I am intrigued about your experiences in setting up a Wiki and how you have used it. I am currently part of a group that it is looking at upgrading our organisational intranet. We are at the stage of looking around the market for a suitable product and we have managed to get the list pretty much whittled down to few enough companies to engage our procurement process. My role in the organisation falls within education and training and apart from many other aspects of the product I want to see us get a Wiki as part of its Web 2.0 functionality so that I can use it for supervisory, managerial and technical leadersip development.
The wiki will serve to enhance our knowledge management, serve as the repository for information and must be attractive to contribute to and benefit from. What I am really looking for is a kind of checklist of best features and I am trawling around the web and my other networks seeking the experience of others, both good and bad so that I can end up with a shopping list that goes beyond what I have now. Thats basically not much at this stage !
All contributions and lessons learned will be gratefully received.
Kevin
What to look for in a wiki
Kevin,
We looked for cheap, but now that it has caught on so well and I've heard months of pros and cons of what we have (from the groups that use it, not advertising) I would suggest you look for a good interface. Depending on what kind of group you have this will totally define whether or not your group will use it. I have a lot of software developers and they have learned to use the mark up language, but the testers and others who are not developers hate the WYSIWYG interface. It has to be easy to create nice pages with good tools for formatting and adding and creating diagrams. It also has to be easy to navigate. A good search engine comes with most wiki software, but be careful about what the default search modes are, our default is by page name so you need to name your pages carefully. Now you can alter the defaults for each person's individual login, but when the default is page name rather than content search it probably means the content search hasn't been optimized and those kinds of searches will take longer than you'd like.
You might also want a wiki where you can lock down some of the pages if you are going to use it as a repository for information that shouldn't be changed by others. The main advantage of a wiki is that people contribute to any document and if you can trust them then you will end up with an amazing living respository. For us, the software changes with every build, now the developers have an easy and fun way to keep the documents related to their areas up to date. They also feel free to add things like history of why certain designs were chosen and any lessons learned during the development.
The wiki is less for management to monitor the groups progress, though I look to see what is being added and changed almost every day, it is really to get them to share and leave a written legacy that will help when they move up or leave the company. In just a few months everyone has gotten used to looking at the wiki first then track down the author if they have additional questions.
One final lesson, don't choke down the team's creativity. If they start to add some pages about their interests outside of work or advice on things that aren't really related to your vision of the wiki, just let it go. We definately have rules for what is inappropriate, but as long as they don't hassle others, use foul language, or talk about things that would get them fired, anything is fair. Sharing of their interests outside of work helps them all learn something about each other and feel more connected. It can also be pretty entertaining. There is a prank page where they post picture or narratives of people's pranks on each other. There is one of the whole team decorating my office in pink (a color I can't stand) to get me back for being gone 3 weeks in a row during a busy time in the schedule. In every way the wiki tends to bring them closer together, which makes them work and collaborate more smoothly.
Good luck and let me know what you pick. We have started discussing changing the underlying tool we use, but so far can't find one we think we'd like better.
Melissa
Update - They won't collaborate
A thought about ‘They won't collaborate!’
Interesting read on the topic
Conflict is one of the most mis-understood and avoided behaviors in an organization. It can be one of the most useful and meaningful achievements for a team by providing a "crucible of crisis" or moment of truth to demonstrate leadership. The two folks in this thread stepped out and demonstrated real leadership to their teams with the wiki and the workshop. I can see both of these techniques being risky for a bunch of reasons but in the end it depends on the leaders knowledge of their team to select the right approach to manage the conflict.
As a reference, I read a good book on this topic called Becoming a Conflict Competent Leader by Rund and Flannagan. It presents a useful framework and list of concepts to enlighten the read on the topic.
Turning Conflict into an Asset
Like many of the discussions here one thread leads to another so I am not attempting to comment of the initial challenge but to comment on conflict in the workplace. Conflict can be healthy but if not managed appropriately. What tends to happen however is the strong shout down the timid and experienced devalue the inexperienced. When this happens the ‘team’ or ‘group’ and then ‘business’ become less effective. Conflict can tend to degenerate into personal attacking or even worse in some cases avoidance behavioural patterns. So how do we deal with this so that everyone is given equal share of voice, we hear everyone’s ideas and we become a more effective and harmonious unit.?
We have spent a lot of time in addressing destructive conflict and avoidance behaviour. We have introduced a set of Rules of Engagement. The rules apply to how the team or group operates and were compiled by the ‘group’. If we are entering a discussion that we know will result in conflict we restate our rules and reach agreement on how we will conduct the discussion or problem resolution planning session etc. If conflict arises in an ad hoc fashion everyone and anyone is responsible for calling a halt citing our Rules of Engagement. We have established decision making protocols. Protocols are based on majority 80/20 or the power of one. An agreement is reached prior to the session with respect to what the decision making rule to be applied will be. The last piece of the puzzle is to ensure in a team or group situation the role of the facilitator is clearly defined.
We have reduced the level of personal attack. We are increased the participation level in many areas. We have improved our problem resolution and ideas generation skills. All good!! The real measure of our success however is our employee satisfaction ratings which increased 28% 2007 over 2006. We have the highest employee satisfaction rating within our group (AsiaPac) and we are fast approaching best practice in this area. In my view as the senior executive within my group this is the true measure of our success.
These are our rules of engagement
1. Courage & Willingness to Participate & Resolve
2. Challenging & Safe Environment that is Honest & Open
- Address the issue – do not label people
- Identify / prioritise projects
3. Support Each Other & Our Decisions4. Have FUN!
Kate
Conflict discussion
Kate,
I read this and connected with a number of your points. I took your first paragraph, and used it as the discussion starter for our leadership group, asking if the people in the group saw conflict, (both constructive and destructive in our plant), and avoidance in their daily work. I then handed them the full text from the post above, and they agreed with and liked your rules of engagement. I expect that some of the group will follow a similar set of rules when they are next in similar sessions, and I hope they will share that experience back to us. I know that there are a couple of points in your rules that I do not do, which I will endeavor to next time.
What was interesting is that we can see this not only in meetings, but also in the teams we develop here to do our particular projects. There were a couple of examples that I think you would like to hear.
One of our group described a trip she was on in China, which was being lead / guided by a chinese lady and her czech husband. Occasionally the leaders would ask whether the group would like to stop and eat, or get food to eat on the road. When this was asked, only a couple of people would volunteer an opinion, everyone else remained silent. (There were 14 or so people on the group, our member was one of the vocal ones.) At the end of the trip, as they were wrapping up, those members of that group who had remained silent started to complain about how only two people were making the decisions (this suprised our member). What did not seem evident to them was that they had all had the chance to contribute, but had chosen not to. What I am told also happened, was that my friend did not look around for any other input after giving her own, (the 'I am giving input, not leading' mentality) and that when the group leaders had had some input, they seemed happy with that, and took it as consensus, rather than checking for any additional input.
Another of our group described how when he organises a brainstorming session to try to solve a problem, he invites all the members to contribute, says that he values and appreciates their contribution, and only gives them his vision of the expected result of the storming session. He is facillitating the session, and sees the positive results this brings.
One other thing which came out of the discussion was sources of conflict. The most interesting of which was organisational conflict. This came into two areas. 1) One group not understanding another group, and 2) tasks being required to be done, but the resources not being available or defined, so that the responsibility for who should be managing it is also not clear and becomes a cause of conflict.
To the second point, we discussed the difference between being in a team, and stepping up to the leadership role in a team that has no defined leadership. This is one of those things that I ask them to consider, and, if they are comfortable doing so, to step up and help develop their leadership skills. The same thing applies to taking ownership of one of those unclear tasks, rather than continuing the argument.
There is a particular MBTI that tends to do this, I think it is the INTJ, who will not actively seek a leadership role, but will step up if they feel that the leadership is inadequate.
Hope this may stimulate a bit of discussion.
Colin.
safe criticism
It's a common pattern, isn't it, where people avoid the risk of making active choices and then sit safely back and grumble afterwards.
Perhaps there's a leadership thing about spotting these folks earlier and asking them directly. If you ask a group, many won't reply, but if you ask individuals, they are more likely to give a viewpoint. The leader can also deliberately put people off commenting ('any comments? -- no, good, lets ....).
:D
Non Participation
I have one such person in my team. The rest of the team were really frustrated by this behaviour. It took a while to understand that when he has an opinion he will voice it. If he doesn’t speak it is because he doesn’t have an opinion or anything to add and that he will go along with whatever decision is made.
Kate