In November 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, there is an interview with John Chambers who is CEO of Cisco. I read all the interview. First of all, I like his approach to problems he encountered in Cisco, in general telecommunication business.
The whole interview is about business strategy. And he was stressing the importance of team work and colloboration. I have a couple of comments on this. Team work is essential in today's business world, but it is not enough. First of all, team members should not think that the degree of their contribution to the work decreases as time passes.
Human beings is more prone to finding excuses than finding answers. Therefore, working as a team makes it harder for individuals to motivate themselves. They will tend to outsource their self motivation capability to someone else in the team, manager or team-mate. So, although the team is working perfectly in technical sense, the team will be less productive in long term if it consists of people who have
communication problems with each other, or some problems other than communication issues.
Collaborative work environment is more than essential for success in today business world. On the other hand, bringing employees together does not mean collaboration for tomorrow's business world.
Success will come with multidimensional collaboration in future and today. Employees should collaborate emotionally, technically, professionally with each other. They should be competitive against competitors but not their team-mates. Of course, this brings us a very important and fundamental concept: MISSION and OBJECTIVE. Everyone should understand and state clearly the objective of business. Every employee should answer this question: What does their company stand for?
As long as team members keep their business objective in their mind, true collaboration will be achieved with little cost and with high return!
Volkan Sevindik
Copyright 2008
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