The Heart of Engagement : Leadership Development, Management Education, Retreat Facilitation & Executive Coaching : Mike Cook : AMJ Group

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This past Sunday afternoon I was fortunate enough to be able to have lunch with my good friend Dwight Frindt. I have known Dwight for over twenty years but since we’ve always lived in different parts of the country our times spent in person have usually been organized by our shared commitments to The Hunger Project or The Pachamama Alliance. Since I moved to the west coast six years ago we’ve been able to get together a bit more frequently but still never enough to satisfy me.

Dwight is one of those people with an insatiable curiosity about what it takes to allow both people and organizations to reach their highest potential. Aside from a shared interest in supporting groups with very large social visions this is another interest we share in common. So Sunday when we got onto the topic of “collaboration” in the workplace the conversation consumed two hours and could easily have kept going except Dwight had a plane to catch.

For Dwight the topic was particularly timely. He is one of the elder statesmen in the Vistage International network. Vistage, as you may or may not know, is one of the most successful of the peer coaching networks for small business CEO’s, having been around for over 50 years and Dwight has been around Vistage for over 20 of those years.

Among other things Dwight has a responsibility for the success of newly formed CEO groups in Seattle, WA, Portland, OR and Orange County, CA. He expressed a certain amount of frustration in being able to have the coaches in these new groups understand that the real key to sustaining a successful group was having the members relinquish their myopic obsession with the success of their own business and become open to the concerns and interests of the other group members. “The group coaches continually confuse cooperation with collaboration, like somehow being willing to listen politely to a member report on their business and the issues they were facing was the same as really getting involved with that business owner in resolving their issues.” It seems that letting go of our own agenda for the possibility of something even greater doesn't always look that attractive.

Right about now many of you reading this may already be asking yourself, “Why spend time on this tired topic, haven’t we covered this ground before and maybe to death?” I say no, and here’s why. We are afraid to collaborate and we continually put it off and defend and limit ourselves with cooperative behavior.

Fear is the primary barrier to collaboration in our places of work and mainly because collaboration implies vulnerability and we, all of us, have spent years developing measures to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows of our colleagues at work. We are so good at these methods of protection that we cannot ourselves often distinguish between the minimal levels of “cooperation” we have learned to survive with and true collaboration. To make this distinction just a bit clearer, to wipe some of the smudge from the window of recognition, I’d invite you to review David Wedaman’s posting to his own blog on January 12^th this year aptly titled, ‘Liaisons, Collaboration, Cooperation and Soup.’

David Wedaman works in a very different environment than where Dwight and I most frequently find ourselves but his thoughts clearly echo Dwight’s own from his 2010 posting ‘Issues of Collaboration’.

What I find most provocative about attempts to collaborate or promote collaboration is captured in these words from the Wedaman piece…

                   “Collaboration (and learning in general) is anxiety producing.”

Correspondingly what I find most of us are challenged by when faced with a situation calling for collaboration is captured here in Dwight’s words…

         “...to become truly collaborative there are some critical pieces that must be put into place … Participants surrender their own protective barriers  and come with a commitment to create an essential atmosphere of mutual trust, respect, and safety…”

So, given the absolute, irrefutable necessity we are all faced with these days to collaborate why do we continue to hesitate? My guess, what we’ve done historically in many cases is engage in cooperation begrudgingly. The time has past when we can make any legitimate argument for anything other than a full embracing of the reality that cooperation and collaboration are inextricably linked and admit to ourselves that we have still a lot to learn and it is high time for the learning to begin.

• Where do you see yourself or your own reports settling for cooperation where collaboration is called for?