Summary: What does it take for an organization to truly work as one team? In this article, Mark S. Kenny explains why strategy, structure, and process are not enough on their own, and why collaboration depends on what people give one another beneath the visible work: Presence, Truth, Grace, and Belief.
What does it take to build an organization that actually, truly works together as one team?
A lot depends on it: how we serve customers, how we execute across departments, how well we achieve our strategic objectives.
We almost always start with what’s visible: structure, processes, meetings, communication plans, and even strategy.
All of that matters.
But I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations in various capacities during my career. All of them focus on what’s visible. Only some of them actually worked together cohesively.
Those visible elements help coordinate people. But they don’t necessarily cause people to collaborate.
That’s why two organizations can have equally good systems and vastly different abilities to work as one team.
There is work to do beneath the work. Before people can execute the strategy together, they have to give one another what makes joint execution possible.
Collaboration isn’t what we do together. Collaboration is what we give each other.
What do we need to give?
- Presence: enough attention and curiosity to understand what the other person or team is carrying.
- Truth: enough honesty to put what is real into the room.
- Grace: enough room to recover from mistakes, friction, and history without letting the past keep controlling the future.
- Belief: enough confidence in one another to trust people to contribute, grow, and own their part.
Before people can execute together, they have to give one another the conditions that make execution possible. Those are not soft extras around the work. They are what turn coordination into collaboration.
Before asking “Do we have the right strategy, process, or meeting structure?” ask another question first:
“Are we giving one another what we need to make any of it work?”
