Unlocking Collaboration: A Case Study in Navigating Growth

A recent conversation with the leader of a nonprofit organization made clear how challenging it can be to collaborate amid rapid growth.

For this organization, rapid growth had resulted in new team members, new roles, new programs, and new priorities. While such growth bodes well for the organization’s ability to advance its powerful mission, it also presented strategic, relational, and operational challenges:

• The leader had noticed repeated and specific examples of program leaders unintentionally working at odds, duplicating efforts, and underleveraging opportunities.

• Individual departments were creating systems and approaches that didn’t harmonize with those of other departments.

• Resources and intelligence that could benefit the whole organization remained unintentionally siloed within departments.

These challenges point to an ineffective use of the organization’s resources. Even more importantly, these challenges threatened to undercut the organization’s reputation and ultimate impact.

The leader reached out to ask for my input on how to rebuild effective collaboration in the wake of all this growth. We identified three desired outcomes:

• Increased awareness of each department’s work and a deeper understanding of the interconnections among that work.

• Integrated solutions (e.g., systems, strategies, databases) to effectively coordinate, track, and leverage relationships, resources, intelligence, and efforts.

• Within six months, see efficient and effective collaboration in service to the organization’s mission.

Here’s the path I recommended:

• Bring the department heads together for an engaging, highly interactive 1-day cross-functional, in-person retreat that interweaves personal experiences, activities, discussion, reflection, and collaborative action planning.

• To help the team sustain post-retreat focus and momentum, and to fully translate their good ideas into transformative action, provide a tailored set of virtual follow-on workshops spaced a few months apart.

• To support the leader’s efforts to integrate and guide the collaboration recalibration, provide executive advising between the sessions.

• To deepen awareness of everyone’s perceptions and experiences around these topics, as well as to help identify progress and emerging priority areas, administer a simple self-report tool in advance of each group session.

As this plan makes clear, collaboration recalibration is much more complex than simply proclaiming “We need to collaborate better!” It takes careful planning among those involved, ongoing support, and access to information to evaluate progress. Yes, it takes time. It takes resources. And it takes effort.

Why did this organization want to invest all these things in improving collaboration? Because effective collaboration is a force multiplier of successful organizations.

If you could use a hand recalibrating your complex, multi-stakeholder collaboration, email admin@debmashek.com. Let me help you drive impact and achieve your vision.