The collaboration system I set up in every team I lead

Set these 7 things up for every team or project you lead - and give everyone a rhythm that helps them do their best work.

 

Today, I want to give you a framework that is the foundation of how I set up every team I work with or lead. It handles the work, the norms, the comms... and feelings! 

Around 15 years I was in full swing, running my comms agency. We had nearly 20 people and about 50 client projects at any one point in time and we were absolutely flat out. Deliver, deliver, deliver, go go GO!

It was all a bit of a mess (as you might well imagine!)

- Project briefs were inconsistent or incomplete

- We kind of flowed with clients and how they wanted to work - so making decisions was particularly tricky!

- There were loads of documents, links and lists flying around

- Managing tasks and deadlines was inconsistent across projects

- Meetings weren’t consistently recorded and emails were cluttered so it was hard to get a handle on what was going on* 

Though many companies I work with are not in quite this mess, collaboration overwhelm is real, in part because of no clear norms.

 

Big companies definitely didn’t have the answer

 

But what I saw our big clients using at their end made me feel exhausted just looking at it! 

A dozen large, unwieldy document templates with tables and decision logs. Think: “if Compliance managed creative work”

Inevitably, they were completed laboriously at the start, rapidly went out of date and we never looked at them again!

 

So I made my own collaboration 'system' - and I’m going to share it with you

 

I developed a framework for handling all this which I think you might find really helpful.

(Framework, pattern, process - hmm, none of these words are quite right!)

Though a lot of time and experience has passed since then, it’s amazing how little that framework has changed. 

It is essentially a social contract with 8 buckets. Let me show you and I think you’ll get it. 

 

Every collaboration needs:

 

1. A motivating purpose + goals 

 

I know you know this - so this first one is not really a surprise!

But my twist on this is that the purpose must be less than 5 words and ideally it's 3 and includes a verb.

That way you can use the purpose all the time (including in meeting names). It forces concision and deliberately focuses everyone. If you can make it sound exciting, so much the better.

The goals just break this motivating purpose into specific chunks.

 

 

2. Ownable workstreams 

 

Not every project needs these but anything of any size needs to be divided into workstreams.

We manage the workstreams, not the people. 

Meetings are structured around workstreams and owners speak for the workstreams rather than for themselves.

Each workstream has a scope and forms part of a wider roadmap (i.e. some plan for how those things fit together) to help join up and make sense of the whole.

 

 

3. "I know exactly what I'm doing" roles

 

I know there are lots of play on this, but my simple approach is to define who:

- owns what

- is consulted on what

- is kept up to date about what

 

4. A cadence that creates momentum

 

We are trying to create a rhythm here - a system or cycle that runs itself and that we can get well practice in so we decide on:

- cycle length

- how check ins will work

- when we will regularly share and get feedback on our work.

- when we will regularly reflect on and improve HOW we work (this is important - if we know we can talk about something that's bugging us next Tuesday, we're not going to ruminate on it for the rest of the week!)

 

5. We streamline channels

 

We agree a digital 'HQ'. This was always a shared spreadsheet in the good old days (literally called Project X HQ) - with tabs for different areas so it was all in one place. The modality doesn’t matter but it’s essentially the ‘digital home’ of the project. 

It could be the wiki pages to the right of the Teams channel.

It could be in Confluence.

It could be a shared doc.

 

We agree where the day-today conversation will be held.

We agree any conventions about how that takes place e.g. how information is shared on Teams channels and what a ‘thumbs up’ means.

 

We agree where documents will be stored and any naming conventions. 

 

We agree how tasks will be assigned and managed and how progressed will be tracked.

 

 

6. We handle risk and psychological safety

 

We agree what styles are going to be most helpful to make sure we get the progress we want - and can quickly spot bad news early.

We agree what we will do if one of us is worried about how we’re working or what we’re doing.

We agree what we will do, if we feel we can’t speak to someone else on the team.

 

 

7. We declutter with comms shortcuts and proxies

 

We agree any norms that are going to speed things up like:

- Flashtags (not heard of these? I explain here - go to Norm 5)

- Styles e.g. BLUF (not heard of this? I explain here - go to Norm 3)

We might ask people to share their own strengths and preferences to help us understand differences between us. Here's the technique I use for this.

 

 

Woah there, that’s a LOT 

 

Now if that all sounds like overkill, here’s what I say to you.

1. People are figuring this stuff out day in day out. It does take a bit of time to set up, but it’s generally time saved. You are simply explicitly answering the questions that will swirl around this project anyway.

2. It absolutely doesn’t all need to be a discussion! Some of these, you will just set up and tell people. 

3. And of course, over time you are developing norms across projects and maturing your organisation’s way of thinking about ways of working so they are not all brand new categories of decisions to make. 

Not every team will do it the same way, but you’ll probably find a couple of core options emerge which people are happy to switch between.