In a previous blog on agility we promised to delve deeper into the four critical mindsets you need to be truly agile. Here we take a look at Collaboration.
It’s about all the various parts of your business working together seamlessly as one to better serve your customers. Truly collaborative organisations understand that customer problems are too complex to be solved by a single team or department in isolation, and that they need to pool their collective knowledge, experience, and ideas. There is no silo’d working, which needlessly cripples your ability to deliver quickly and efficiently for your customers.
How do we do it?
Every department needs to communicate with the others openly and regularly. This requires informal and formal channels, but the result is that information, intelligence, and ideas are collected, shared, reviewed, and actioned by people from across the business.
And to be clear, we are talking about true cross-enterprise collaboration, not intra-team. We mean whole departments coming together across your organization, in an easy and frictionless way, all laser focused on the ever-evolving needs of the customer.
This isn’t about simply having a team meeting and inviting someone from Finance. It’s about having a forum where everyone feels equally part of the group and actively participates in decision making. This means having a culture of inclusion and actively seeking out and valuing the contribution that everyone in the business makes to solving customer problems.
What business benefits does it have?
If you’re not collaborating on collating, reviewing, and acting on external data and insights, and tapping into your own people’s knowledge and experience, then you’re missing out on rich sources of ideas and innovation that can unlock huge opportunities in the market. That’s how nimble start-ups are often able to move quicker and steal market share from mid-large size companies.
Organisations that have their various pieces of the business collaborating are more innovative and effective at solving customer problems, can get products and services out to market faster, attract and retain the best talent, and outperform the competition.
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