Collaboration Conundrum

​Some interesting results from Dave Ulrich's RBL group, including that whilst 95% of survey respondents suggest that collaboration is critical within their companies, only 21% report doing it well.

RBL ask whether we focus enough on alignment issues versus the time spent on interpersonal skills? "The easy fix is for companies to train people on how to collaborate but in our experience training has less impact than aligning your systems to reinforce collaboration."

RBL's MD Mark Nyman suggests "many organizations try and fix organization issues using interpersonal tools and it doesn't have much impact.  Our work has been focused for years on ignoring functional boundaries and creating horizontal project teams.  It is not easy but the results are worth it."

That's what I suggest in The Social Organization too - companies need to fix their organizations first, and then they have a chance to make their people's relationships work as well.