Myths of Collaboration

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This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, or in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission. Copyright © 2012 by Vantage Partners, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Myths of Collaboration
Elizabeth Rayer, Principal
Carol Bonett, Senior Consultant

 Mission: Drive measurable business results by transforming the way
companies negotiate and manage relationships with key business
partners
 Practice Areas: Strategic Alliances, Sourcing and Supplier Management,
Corporate Education, Sales Effectiveness
 Spin-off of the Harvard Negotiation Project
 Faculty at Harvard University, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth,
and the US Military Academy at West Point
 Leaders in international conflict resolution through CMG (now part of
Mercy Corps)
 Arias Peace Accords
 Post-apartheid South African constitution
About Vantage Partners
Copyright © 2013 by Vantage Partners, LLC. All rights reserved. 1

Vantage Partners publications

 Type in one or two words that come to mind when you think of
collaboration within your organization?
What does collaboration mean to you?
3Copyright © 2013 by Vantage Partners, LLC.

Matrix Corporation is the world's top
provider of products and services.
Among the leaders in almost every
market in which it competes, the
company focuses primarily on its
growing services business, which
accounts for well over half of sales.
Welcome to Matrix Corporation
Copyright © 2013 by Vantage Partners, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 4

Meanwhile…
5
Copyright © 2013 by Vantage Partners, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
How can we serve
complex accounts that
require seamless
internal collaboration?

 For any given sale, four or more
lead salespeople and their teams
have to agree on issues of
resource allocation, solution
design, pricing and sales strategy
Boots-on-the-ground view of Matrix’s challenges…
6Copyright © 2013 by Vantage Partners, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
 Sales people from eight of Matrix’s product and service
groups have been called on to design and sell integrated
solutions to their customers

The answer…
7
Copyright © 2013 by Vantage Partners, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Better
Collaboration!

 Matrix finds that a large sale generates so much internal conflict
its actually getting harder to close deals
 Results: wasted time and damaged relationships
This just isn’t working!

 What’s the right result and how do we get to it?
 In an attempt to avoid conflict people begin to avoid having to
collaborate at any cost
 Or they become confrontational, fighting over who’s right and
who’s wrong or haggling over small concessions
 The Results? No real value gained as people either “split-the-
difference” or find themselves in outright deadlock
Frustration takes over…

Matrix makes a plan to improve collaboration

 They run hundreds of managers and individual contributors
through an intensive two-day training on teamwork.
“Teamwork” training

 Breakdowns occur not on actual teams but in the rapid and
unstructured interactions between different groups within the
organizations
 Breakdowns almost always result from fundamental differences
among business functions and divisions. Teamwork training
offers little guidance on how to work together in the context of
competing objectives and limited resources
 People who need to collaborate more effectively typically don’t
need to align around a common goal. They need to quickly and
creatively solve problems by managing inevitable conflict
Myth 1: Effective Collaboration means “teaming”

 Sales people will receive
bonuses not only for hitting
targets for their own
division’s products but also
for hitting cross-selling targets
 Staff in corporate functions
like IT and procurement will
have part of their bonuses
determined by their ability to
get positive feedback from
their internal clients
So teamwork training didn’t get the results Matrix
hoped for…
Let’s try a new incentive system
to encourage collaboration.

 Sales people still focused on the sale of their own products to the
detriment of selling integrated solutions
 Employees continued to perceive IT and procurement as difficult
to work with - too focused on their own priorities
 Why?
 Individuals believed if they performed well in their own
departments/operations they would be “taken care of” by their
bosses
 The costs of working with individuals in other parts of the
organization – the extra time and aggravation – greatly outweigh the
rewards for doing so
Myth 2: An effective incentive system will ensure
collaboration

 New structural and procedural
solutions:
 Cross-functional task forces
 Collaborative “groupware”
 Webs of dotted reporting lines
on the org chart to create
greater internal collaboration
So the bonuses didn’t help either…
Let’s try restructuring.
That will help them to
collaborate more.

Matrix decides to form cross-unit account teams to drive collaboration
 Account Management, Delivery and Service are redeployed to form a
core team to service key accounts
 This new structure will serve to mitigate intra-department conflict
and increase cooperation
 The core team will now be able to prioritize projects and optimally
deploy resources
 Results are disappointing
 To avoid conflict around prioritization, core team members quickly learn
to bring their requests to their own solid-line managers
 The extra layer of dotted lines adds complexity to decision making
without any measurable productivity gains
Myth 3 – Organizations can be structured for
collaboration

 You can’t improve collaboration if your goal is to eliminate
conflict
 Recognize that efforts to increase collaboration (especially in the
case of restructuring) will mostly likely produce conflict
 Conflict is inevitable and important
 Disagreements sparked by different perspectives, competencies,
access to information, and strategic focus within the company
actually generates much of the value that can come from
collaboration across organizational boundaries
Root cause?

 Clashes between parties are the
crucibles in which creative
solutions are developed and wise
trade-offs among competing
objectives are made
 Instead of trying to simply to
reduce disagreements, Matrix
Senior Executives have decided
to embrace conflict, and
institutionalize the mechanisms
for managing it
Matrix’s new perspective…
Manage
conflict!

 Strategies for managing disagreements at the point of conflict
1. Devise and implement a common method for resolving conflict
2. Provide people with criteria for making trade-offs
3. Use escalation of conflict as an opportunity for coaching
 Strategies for managing conflict upon escalation
1. Establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation
2. Ensure that managers resolve escalated conflicts directly with
their counterparts
3. Make the process for escalated conflict resolution transparent
Six Strategies for Managing Conflict

 Establish a companywide process for resolving disagreements
 Reduce transaction costs (wasted time, accumulation of ill will)
 Increase chances of innovative outcomes
 Clear step-by-step process
 Integral part of existing business activities
Strategy 1: Devise and implement a common
method for resolving conflict

 Provide a common method for solving conflict…may still need to
make zero-sum trade-offs between competing priorities
 Top management needs to clearly articulate the criteria for
making such choices (not easy but worth it)
 Even if its not straightforward, guidelines can foster productive
communication
 Example: tell sales people that five points in market share is
more important than a ten point increase on in customer
satisfaction on a survey
Strategy 2: Provide people with criteria for
making trade-offs

Starting point:
 At Matrix, employees learned the best thing to do with cross-unit
conflict was to toss it up the management chain
 Managers at Matrix spend much of their time playing the
organizational equivalent of hot potato
 They take a quick pass at resolving the issue, but being busy
themselves, they typically toss the problem upstairs
 Senior managers are a number of steps removed from the source
of the controversy and rarely have a good understanding of the
problem…and subordinates have little opportunity to learn how
to deal with conflict
Strategy 3: Use escalation of conflict as an
opportunity for coaching

 Coaching for conflict: Executives get training on conflict
management and are offered online resources to help them
coach others.
Strategy 3: Use escalation of conflict as an
opportunity for coaching
 One tool on the
corporate intranet walks
managers through a
variety of conversations
they might have with a
direct report who is
struggling to resolve a
dispute

 Equipped with common conflict resolutions, trade-off criteria and
supported by systematic coaching…but certain complex disputes
will inevitably need to be decided by managers
 Matrix managers needed to make sure that, upon escalation
conflict is resolved constructively and efficiently
 To avoid hearing “one-sided” stories and the subsequent
deadlock, subordinates must present a disagreement jointly to
their boss or bosses
 Goal: reduce or eliminate the suspicion, surprises, and damaged
personal relationships associated with unilateral escalation
Strategy 4: Establish and enforce a requirement of
joint escalation

 Managers refuse to respond to unilateral escalation
 Subordinates must jointly write up a description of the problem,
what has been done so far to resolve it and its possible solutions
 Send it to their bosses and stand ready to appear together to
answer questions
 Result? Requirement of systematically documenting the problem
helped people think through and solve the problems themselves
with fewer needing to be escalated
Strategy 4: Establish and enforce a requirement of
joint escalation

Starting Point:
 Not unusual for Matrix managers to escalate problems that had
been brought to them
 In the end the decision was usually made unilaterally by the
senior manager with the most organizational clout, which bred
resentment back down the management chain
 A sense of “we will win next time” took hold
 Set a poor example and wasted time
Strategy 5: Ensure that managers resolve
escalated conflicts directly with their counterparts

 Commitment by managers (codified by a formal policy) to deal
with escalated conflict directly with their counterparts
 Created standing calls for managers from across the company to
discuss and resolve cross-unit conflicts that were hindering
important sales e.g. the difficulty sales people faced in getting
needed technical resources from overstretched product groups.
Strategy 5: Ensure that managers resolve
escalated conflicts directly with their counterparts

 A problem is escalated, solved jointly and the decision is
delivered down the chain of command…then what?
 How was this decision made?
 Based on which assumptions?
 A frank discussion of the trade-offs involved provided guidance to
people trying to resolve similar conflicts in the future
 Clear communication about the resolution of a conflict can
increase people’s willingness and ability to implement decisions
Strategy 6: Make the process for escalated conflict
resolution transparent

 On a scale of 1 – 10, how well is your company using these six
strategies?
Poll

 Conflict is a valuable resource to be managed and exploited
 Recognize patterns and trends from recurring disputes as
unaddressed strains within an organization
 Conflict can provide new perspectives on a variety of issues
Key Takeaways

 We are undertaking a study about the dynamics of working in a
matrixed organization and the prevalence and effectiveness of
different influence strategies, and welcome your participation
 This survey is completely anonymous; responses will only be
reported in aggregate and will not be attributed to any individual
or company
 The survey will take approximately ten minutes to complete and
you will receive a complimentary report of our findings
www.surveymonkey.com/s/Vantage20130409
Working in a Matrix – Survey

A spin-off of
the Harvard Negotiation Project,
Vantage Partners helps
companies achieve breakthrough
business results by transforming the
way they negotiate with,
and manage relationships with, their
suppliers, customers,
and alliance partners — and
enhancing collaboration across
internal organizational boundaries.
Vantage Partners
10 Guest Street
Boston, MA 02135
USA
T: +1 617.354.6090
F: +1 617.354.4685
www.vantagepartners.com

Myths of Collaboration

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