Five Myths about Collaboration

1. The Right Tools will make you Collaborate
Technology can make it easier to collaborate when applications directly mirror a more intuitive, fluid work style, but selecting a tool without addressing roles, processes, metrics and the organization’s workplace climate is putting the cart before the horse.

2. Collaboration is inherently a Good thing
Many organisations can’t articulate what benefit they hope to achieve by employing social media to become more collaborative. This decreases the likelihood of achieving a successful implementation. The most successful social media initiatives solve real business problems. The KPI impacted must be real and relevant to the business.

3. Collaboration takes up Valuable Time
When IT leaders perform a thorough analysis of the target audience's workflow to make sure key integration points among applications are identified, they will avoid the common mistake of simply layering collaboration tools on top of existing applications that workers are expected to use. If collaboration and social software tools are not integrated with other critical applications, workers must shift context, which slows them down or duplicates effort (e.g., cut/paste from one application to another).

4. People will Naturally Collaborate
Depending on their level of cynicism, people believe that humans naturally collaborate, or naturally don't. While there are individuals at each end of the spectrum, most are somewhere in the middle and can be encouraged to collaborate under the right conditions. IT leaders should ignore the reluctant minority and work on motivating the majority of workers who can be persuaded to collaborate when expectations are clear and collaborative behaviours are rewarded.

5. People Instinctively Know How to Collaborate
Individuals will be forced into using their own interpretation of collaboration, without a set of expectations about what it means to work collaboratively with others. Few organisations have a clear set of guidelines that describe how people should interact with each other to produce optimum results. A better approach is to clarify what attitude a collaborative individual needs to bring to their work, what abilities and skills they need to master and what personal style works well in a team setting. It is also critical that managers demonstrate the behaviours they want their employees to mirror.