In today’s creative teams, the traditional command-and-control management structure is declining, in favor of a flatter, more flexible organizational structure. In this brave new world, information silos don’t work very well, collaboration rules, and brilliance flows freely. At least they should.
The truth is, despite all the speechifying about the importance of collaboration, most creative teams are stuck somewhere between the rigid structures of yesteryear and the open, collaborative world of the future. Managers and directors might encourage team members to share their thoughts and ideas openly, but for the most part, the tools and processes that are supposed to support this collaboration fail miserably. As a result, creative teams still hide their information away on separate desktops. Conversations—meaningful as they may be—are still so scattered across email, IM, sticky notes, and whiteboards that they can never be assembled and used in a meaningful way.
‘Collaboration’, it seems, is bound for the trash heap of once-hip buzzwords, right?
Wrong. Real collaboration is possible for creative teams, if they establish the right processes and tools to support it. Here are four ways creative teams are making collaboration more than just a buzzword (and reaping the benefits):
1. Make Meetings Count
Some team members may consider meetings a four-letter word, often rightfully so. According to one Salary.com survey, 49% of workers consider unfocused meetings to be their biggest workplace time-waster. But even the biggest meeting-haters have to acknowledge that meetings hold an indispensable place in creative teams. The trick is to use them sparingly and then, when they are used, to make them lean.
A collaborative leader won’t use meetings for status updates, but for critical issues only—issues that apply to all attendees, so no one’s time is wasted. She will use strict agendas to keep the conversation on point and the pace brisk. Then she will limit the time length of the meeting as much as possible. Counter-intuitively, meetings where the clock is allowed to run freely don’t produce the highest-quality collaboration. Structured, time-compressed meetings do.
2. Break Down Silos
Often much of the planning and execution of an integrated marketing campaign is done in silos. Too often, single individuals store their information in documents, spreadsheets, or other tools on their desktops that only they have access to. These are usually not shared with anyone else. Similarly, team members can be overly guarded about telling anyone what is happening with their projects outside of their personal circles of trust. All of which present a major barrier to collaboration.
When it comes collaboration, sharing is caring. Whenever possible, collaborative creative teams keep their project information in shared drives or in the cloud. They send out regular notifications to managers, team members, and stakeholders on the progress of their projects. Especially, they all share information regarding who is working on what and when those projects are due. Needless to say, these teams experience much higher quality collaboration. Why? Because they don’t waste time asking, “What happened? Who’s doing what?” Instead, because they already know what’s happening, their collaboration gets right down to “Okay, this is the challenge we’re facing. How can we solve it?”
3. Report Abundantly
Few times can be as nerve-wracking as when a riled-up executive descends on your creative team, demanding to know what happened to Project XYZ. Underlying this unpleasant situation is one single truth: your assailant doesn’t know key information about the project in question. And who is responsible for not informing the executive of the project? At this point, your finger is probably pointed at you and your team.
Sharing project information between members of the creative team is good. Making that information accessible to management in frequent, clear-cut reports is better. Best of all is using solutions that allow managements to see, at their own leisure, what is happening at the portfolio and project level in real time. With this kind of reporting constantly streaming information back and forth between you and management, your meetings with them transform from confrontations to collaborations.
4. Convert Communication
The majority of today’s creative teams know how to create communication, pumping out scores of emails, texts, and social media updates on a daily basis. Much of this communication could be useful. Unfortunately, however, this communication is splintered across so many different tools—email, IM, documents, sticky notes—that the act of capturing these conversations and distilling them into something useful can be like herding kittens. This herding takes a toll, with studies finding that knowledge workers who constantly field emails, text messages, and calls lose 10 IQ points. Creative teams, it would appear, struggle to convert their abundant communication into useful collaboration.
Creative teams can avoid this mental strain and make their communications more collaborative by centralizing and consolidating the tools they use to communicate. The tools they keep should capture and display all communications in chronological fashion so that team members can refer back to them and see who said what and when. This kind of record provides rich fodder at project completion when teams sit down and discuss how the project could’ve been done better.
Most importantly of all, however, having all that communication captured in one place, in the order that it occurred, then starts meaningful conversation based on a complete view of the situation—not scattered snippets of conversations.
Collaboration Can Be a Reality
Yes, collaboration is possible, but it requires more than just talking. It requires real changes to processes and tools. Those creative teams that provide the right structure to support collaboration will find themselves enjoying the benefits of fewer conflicts, richer ideas, and more team buy-in.