Is Working Together Harmful to Your Organization?

I was behind on my reading when I stumbled upon an article in April's Harvard Business Review, titled: "When Internal Collaboration is Bad for Your Company." My immediate reaction was to buy up every copy and hide it from my leadership team. As I read the article, I understood the point Morten T. Hansen was making...essentially that sometimes collaboration takes up too much time and in fact eats into your opportunity cost of doing a project.

One of his main arguments is that forcing people to work across silos will only lead to turf wars and the time to tear down those silos will kill a project. That could be true but if you never attempt to tear down walls, those walls will grow higher and higher and stronger and stronger until one day, they will never come down. Is that really a good operational strategy?

I am really anti-silo. I believe that roles and responsibilities and domains should be clearly established within an organization to prevent turf wars in the first place. Oftentimes, to make a project or initiative successful, multiple domains need to work together. This is why allowing kids to play in the sandbox together is so important. Adults have to do the same thing in real life, and we are not great at it. (Maybe we only fought over whose bucket the blue one was in our sandboxes.)

Hansen states that asking how can we get people to collaborate more is the wrong question. That instead, we should ask: Will collaboration create or destroy value? Value is exactly right. I agree that more collaboration does not necessarily equate to more value but I have yet to see a time where one person in his cubicle had all the answers.

Maybe not everything needs a cross-functional team assigned to move it forward but, at a minimum, sharing ideas and allowing others to have input will help manage change! That is something Hansen does not talk about in his article. Sometimes, collaboration isn't all about the bottom line, although you can certainly set up measures to try and determine that. Collaboration is getting people to play in the sandbox, building off of one person's idea and thinking through all the possible implications to a decision. To me, that is invaluable.