Want to improve collaboration on your team? Or collaboration between teams? Before diving into those team building exercises, or buying everyone donuts (and I do love a good donut…), you might want to take a step back and think about workplace culture.
Why Workplace Culture is the Foundation of Collaboration
The where and how things happen at work can cultivate or dampen collaboration. Collaboration can thrive when a culture of creativity is fostered.
Creativity is any act that changes an existing area or process into something new (Csikszentmihalyi). One of the big challenges of creativity is that it requires a tolerance for uncertainty and openness, and an interest to surpass what is routine.
Similar things can be said of collaboration.
Both creativity and collaboration also don’t happen in isolation. Creativity takes place in context — in the world, with particular people. It’s not just a simple, singular thing we each do on our own. Creativity is something we do, as human beings in organized, structural ways, as well as involving our emotions and full human capacities.
Both the structural/organizational AND the human/emotional parts are important.
When repeated over time, these different parts enact a particular culture of creativity. What we do — how we organize or structure things, AND how we interact and work as human beings — creates the workplace culture, whether it’s creative or not.
But if you want a more creative or collaborative workplace culture, it can be nurtured.
So, what’s the difference between the organizational/structural aspects of working, and the more human/emotional aspects, and how could both of these nurture a collaborative and creative work culture?
I wrote a bit about these in another post about why collaborations sometimes fail, but I’ll also provide some details here.
The Structural Side: Organizing Work
What processes are in place, and why are they there? How do they help or hinder work getting done? Where do people meet or congregate to discuss things, or problem solve? (are you meeting in person? If so, what is the space like? Or maybe you’re meeting on-line? etc) How are the products of work documented and stored? These are just a few questions to think about how your workplace might be structured, and how the people doing the work are able to connect, or not, with the work itself and each other.
A Real-world Example: Theatre.
Traditional, professional theatre in North America is a highly organized practice, including distinct roles that execute specific tasks and processes (like, the actors, director, stage manager, designers, technicians, among others). Theatre also takes place in an actual space and building, although some tasks could happen in a digital space, like production meetings.
A more specific example: Once a theatre production is ready to be performed after a period of rehearsals, it moves from the rehearsal hall into technical rehearsals (or just ‘tech’) in the theatre building itself (during this phase the artists to put together different aspects of the production, on and behind the stage — like, how the lights will change from cue to cue, organizing where people move backstage between scenes, etc.) Tech involves very long days and are structured and scheduled with the aim of being efficient, given the financial implications for every day working in the theatre when there is no paying audience. Tensions can run high given the need to work efficiently, while balancing safety and storytelling needs.
Tech is one example of the kind of structure and organized process in theatre where collaboration takes place within a creative and community-oriented work culture. There are a number of contexts — the nature of the work taking place in a physical location, financial implications, technical aspects, etc. — that inform how things are structured and organized.
Of course, things are structured so people can actually do the work, including collaborating.
The Human Side: People, Emotion, and Connection
This people part is what we ironically sometimes forget about, even though it is the people themselves that actually do the work.
To continue with the theatre example, theatre is a professional practice about human stories, including emotions and actions of people embedded within complex worlds (cultural, social, within a historical moment, etc.). Organizational structures are put in place to guide people to do this story-based work.
People themselves aren’t removed from the process; who they are and how they relate are a large part of the point and recognized as important.
But all workplaces will include the emotions and actions of people within complex worlds, and it’s important to recognize and make space for that in different ways. This will support everyone’s psychological safety to contribute meaningfully.
Leadership, Power, and Collaboration
Of course, theatre — and work places generally — isn’t without its problems, especially given this confluence of organizational/structural and human-centred aspects of working. Leadership, power dynamics and hierarchies are always at play. At their most problematic, these have resulted in issues that have received global and cross-industry recognition in the wake of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, among others. But I’d encourage people to think and discuss openly about the need to address the interrelationships of roles, hierarchies, and even power in collaboration, rather than pretending these dynamics don’t exist.
I’ll flag again my other post about why collaborations can sometimes fail which speaks to some of these dynamics further.
**This post is adapted from excerpts from my co-authored article: Playing well with others: lessons from theatre for the health professions about collaboration, creativity and community
