A deadly serious message to all Executives and CEOs.
Stop your team members collaborating – unless you are certain you have the correct strategy. Otherwise collaboration may well make things far worse and could even bring your organisation to an end.
This is counter-intuitive, and bucks the trend for collaborate, work together, the whole is greater than sum of the parts. Don’t believe all those things, because right now, that will cause you major problems.
In my experience, there are five key reasons why this is true, and here is just one to whet your appetite.
Hard-Wired Brains
The brain is built to find what it is looking for, unless an alternative slaps it in the face. This means each potential option on the table for consideration, the executive leading it must totally believe it has legs. They must believe it so completely that they will stop at nothing to find the way to make it workable.
If you foster collaboration ahead of a clear decision, the ideas will compete at a political rather than rational level. Each executive will progressively work towards advancing their idea by working the informal system, by hook or by crook. Less able ideas will be disturbed while the feasibility study is ongoing, potentially eroding beliefs ahead of the facts.
At the extreme, by the time you as a team are ready to decide, only one idea is left standing, the other all knocked out by politicking.
How many executives could resist the opportunity to do all they can to make sure their idea wins?
Collaboration has its place, and generally that is when the way forward is clear. Before then, creative ideas need to be given a chance to find their feet, free of politics.
So, at the start, do all you can to isolate the ideas, encourage those working on them to give it their all, confident they can find a way to prove their idea is the best. They, when you are ready to choose, because each idea has achieved a similar state of readiness for competition, then tHrash it out and decide as a group and go for it, he’ll for leather!
The Gautrey Influence Blog
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