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Authored by:
Gregory Simpson
Research Administration Associate Director
Tufts University
Email: gregory.simpson@tufts.edu

Part 1 of a 2-part article. Look for Part 2 in January's Catalyst under the Professional Development Insights column.

Teamwork, team building, teaming, collaboration, cooperation, leading with teams: these keywords, and similar words or phrases, are seen often in organizational administrative literature and often discussed in research administration and leadership trainings, and explicitly or implicitly defined or referenced in strategic plans or planning activities. Many workplace models, frameworks, and case studies have demonstrated the importance of, and factors related to, influencing the success of collaborating teams in varying ways (see Mattessich, Murray-Close & Monsey, 2001, for instance).

There are various tools that can help research administration supervisors or leaders assess an administrative team’s effectiveness, strengths, barriers, current weaknesses and places where development is needed. Using tools that measure collaboration and teamwork specifically can provide indicators for measuring collaboration and teamwork. Research administration leaders are often tasked with identifying indicators where interventions may be necessary to reach goals or outcomes. They may ask, “What types of evidence or tools are available to provide answers to the complex question: ‘How do we know how well we are doing?’”

Developing and identifying appropriate and measurable indicators is important in all organizations, including research-focused organizations. If we have identified teaming, collaboration, and related organizational behaviors as important, how do we know that our team is adopting or modifying behaviors in sync with defined practices and policy? How do we know if members of a collaborative are viewing collaboration and teamwork in constructive, meaningful ways?

There are various tools that can be used to measure teamwork, some that provide simple analysis and other that provide a more nuanced, complex evaluation. There are also diverse ways for defining or distinguishing collaborative management skills, those skills or professional behaviors that can help create and sustain teamwork activities or initiatives. Agranoff and McGuire (2001a, 2001b; McGuire 2002, summarized in McGuire, M., 2006) define four collaborative categories: activation, framing, mobilizing, and synthesizing (McGuire, p. 37).

Activation centers on identifying “the right people and resources needed to achieve program goals” (p. 37)—this means identifying resources (personnel, funds, space, time, etc.) required for formulating and sustaining collaborative efforts.

Framing behaviors involve defining and codifying a team’s leadership and administrative roles, establishing team identity and culture, and developing a working structure for the team or collaborative (in other words, defining the expectations related to committee or team participation, assignments, overall strategy, etc.).

Mobilizing behaviors center on creating an environment for commitment to cooperative activities and building or defining the requisite support structure(s) or resources from a) key stakeholders, or decision makers outside the collaborative effort and b) the team members directly involved.

Synthesizing behaviors involve facilitating relationships within the collaborative or team, including defining and bringing about productive and purposeful actions and interactions.These behaviors and operational activities build rapport, help define collaborative processes, and create conditions that should strengthen cooperation and joint abilities for defining problems and developing or providing context-specific solutions.

This general model can help guide research administration management and leaders and are certainly important behavioral skills that, without their implementation, can lessen collaborative competency. They provide indicators of why collaborative initiatives may succeed or fail. However, they do not necessarily provide measurement tools.

A first step toward collaborative measurement could involve the opportunity for a team to discuss and better understand what Garber calls “Collaborative IQ” which “is the potential sum of the talent of the members involved in [a] collaborative process” (p. 101). He argues that collaborative IQ has five important elements or roles that leaders and team/group members need to address and should ensure are operationalized as part of collaborative activities:

1) Pay attention to the perspective of those involved in collaboration.

This means creating opportunities to ensure all participate actively and all provide ideas and points of view that would not otherwise occur under other circumstances.

2) Accept that credibility increases as a result of collaboration. Collaboration can be hard work, and it does involve redirecting resources or asking collaborating team members to schedule time out of their often busy days to meet, discuss, and possibly take on new responsibilities. This means, though, that some rules or guidelines need to be set. Team members need to agree that teamwork needs to include integrity, trust, and positive, productive interactions, and despite conflicts or disagreements and the greater burdens that collaborative activities may entail, the actual process of continuingly providing opportunities for collaborative activities can increase organizational credibility. Let’s say departmental and central research administration is primarily decentralized and decisions and strategic planning is not often seen as a collaborative venture. Increasing collaboration between central and departmental administrators could increase the management abilities and capabilities of both parties and could increase the credibility not only of research administration on the whole but the also the credibility of members of a collaborative.

3) Recognize the critical moments that occur in collaborative experiences—especially paying attention to important decision points or “rubs” identified during the collaborative process (and/or those that have been identified as causing conflict within the team). Identifying issues that may not currently be endorsed or codified by the organization (which may involve practices, procedures, policy, strategic plans or guidelines) is important, as is identifying those issues that may be conflicts or barriers for positive, active teamwork. Collaboration should help define unmet expectations, current biases, problems, issues, impasses, etc. both within the team and also those aspects of the organizational behaviors or processes that the team is working to identify and solve.

4) Be willing to break norms (recognizing decisions that aren’t really important to you but are tremendously important to others and vice versa). This means that collaborative work should define and then develop means for not undermining but altering organizational culture or norms that may no longer be viable, or biases that do not result in advancing the changes necessary to reach or define outcomes. Thinking outside the box might be cliché, but if you can identify “black boxes” or areas of a process that need greater clarification and explicit mapping, then more effective, efficient, or increased management or administrative perceptions could lead to greater organizational capability.

5) Acknowledge collaboration. Recognize the importance of collaborative efforts, processes, and successes. Collaborative, open-minded groups or networks of groups can generate more ideas and more differing kinds of ideas and can provide greater creative capacity, as Björk and Magnusson (2009) note in their study of innovation: “more connections within [a] network resulted in a higher proportion of high-quality ideas” (p.662). Celebrate and publicize collaboration and the higher-quality ideas that result.

These elements could be used as a framework for collaborative activities, and/or guidelines or team rules.

References

Björk, J., & Magnusson, M. (2009). Where Do Good Innovation Ideas Come From? Exploring the Influence of Network Connectivity on Innovation Idea Quality. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 26 (6), 662-70.

Garber P.R. (1999). 51 Activities for Collaborative Management. Amherst, Massachusetts: HRD Press.

Klubeck, M. (2015). Planning and Designing Effective Metrics. New York: Apress.

Mattessich, P. W., Murray-Close, M. & Monsey, B.R. (2001). Collaboration: What Makes It Work, 2nd Edition: A Review of Research Literature on Factors Influencing Successful Collaboration. Saint Paul, MN: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation.

McGuire, M. (2006), Collaborative Public Management: Assessing What We Know and How We Know It. Public Administration Review, 66: 33–43. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6210.2006.00664.x

Woodcock, M. & Francis, D. (2008). Team Metrics: Resources for Measuring and Improving Team Performance. Amherst, Massachusetts: HRD Press, Inc.