Blog Viewer

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

Part 2 of a 2-part article. Find Part 1 here.

Peter Garber suggests using a simple questionnaire, distributed among your organization's team members, where they provide scores (1 (none) to 5 (great) about collaborative experiences within the organization, the scores added up and the results shared. Such a questionnaire can provide indicators of areas that may require intervention or improvement.

However, collaboration is not an ad hoc activity—effective teamwork is an organizational behavior that affects many activities, decision points, initiatives, and processes.

Thus, collaboration should be viewed as a broad, wide ranging scaffold, and thus can be seen across a range. But how? One method is employing an activity that centers on defining and discussing collaborative continuums, especially as related to a specific team or set of interrelating teams. Garber says that organizations have a “continuum of different levels of collaboration” which may or may not be relevant for a specific team or set of teams. His 16 factor collaborative continuum matrix includes differing levels of collaboration, including:

1. Little or no collaboration,

2. Collaboration is utilized in a few instances

3. It is viewed as important to the organization or team and

4. It is a key value and a part of team or organizational culture.

The categories, which a facilitator has collaborating members score, include: involvement, information sharing, problem magnitude, finding solutions, cost awareness, creativity, problem ownership, accountability, diversity of participants, sponsorship, access to top management, trust, input, respect, implementation of recommendations, and recognition. The matrix can serve as a measurement of attitudes, but can also help define the utility of collaboration and is useful for identifying collaborative gaps and hence can provide indicators where collaboration may need strengthening. For example, for the area of creativity, collaboration is strengthened if leadership encourages employees on all levels to find, define, and provide ideas for creative solutions, and is low if all creative thought occurs at the top of the organization, or is not encouraged by team leaders.

Other researchers have devised tools or a suite of measurements that can more fully measure a variety of collaborative aspects. For instance, Woodcock and Francis (2008, x) provide “a collection of ‘metrics’—instruments that provide measures that, through numerical scores, provide a form of assessment that goes beyond the impressionistic” nature of assessing teams and instead provides several ways that can identify indicators of a team’s strengths, capabilities, and barriers while also providing insights into areas that are in need of development and intervention. This approach moves away from limited approaches that center on gut-feelings, imprecise judgments and negative motivators and instead focuses on an evidence-based approach. It does not replace leadership methods or techniques, nor of data analysis or standard performance management, but rather can augment or strengthen existing approaches.

Their approach to measuring collaboration uses team metric tools that can provide team members, leaders, and facilitators with autonomous scores that combined together can provide windows of understanding that other means of evaluations may not.

Their book, Team Metrics: Resources for Measuring and Improving Team Performance, is designed to provide a means to develop metrics of teams that “taken together [can] provide a comprehensive, although not complete, set of instruments to assess” individual organizational teams (p. xiv). They have developed 27 assessments, surveys, audits, and questionnaires, divided into five general areas:

1) Metrics for Auditing Team Effectiveness: instruments that enable a holistic assessment of of a team’s effectiveness

2) Metrics for Assessing Team Leadership: instruments that examine aspects of the role of the team leader

3) Metrics for Assessing Team Strengths and Barriers: instruments that examine strengths and barriers that frequently occur in teams

4) Metrics for Assessing Top Team Performance: instruments that enable top teams to assess their performance

5) Metrics for Facilitators: instruments that help facilitators plan and deliver effective team development interventions.

Using a few of the 27 tools could be useful, though the tools are most useful, like any tool, in a contextual locale: each office of research administration, sponsored programs, grant and contracts administration, etc. is a department within a network of other departments and schools within a single university or research focused organization. Hence, the tools’ indicators must be assessed within the understandings and policies and structures of the organization the tool is being used to assess. The metrics elicited by facilitation of a tool or tools should be used as “a catalyst to investigation, discussion, and only then, action [hence] only proper response to metrics is to investigate—a directed and focused investigation into the truth behind the indicator” (Klubeck, 2015, p. 59). Collaborative and team metrics may indicate evidence of several problems, issues, successful initiatives, and other organizational behaviors, but it’s important to use the metrics collected as a means for focusing decisions that are often pushed or pulled by organizational priorities, strategy, and defined or developing outcomes.

He further notes the importance of “using more than two methods to collect data in the context of gathering and using research data” (p. 83). By using multiple metrics or approaches, we help “ensure that we have a comprehensive answer to the question” (p. 84).

Hence, to use only one of Woodcock and Francis’ tools would not prove as useful as using tools at differing points during collaborative work. For instance, using a Team Meeting Effectiveness Index (or select parts of it) can provide insights related for formal meetings or learning events and can identify how effective the structure and content of meetings or events were, and help to define action points for both the leader and for team members. A Team Blockage Questionnaire on the other hand can provide “a framework for assessing the performance of teams” and is designed to help “identify where team development would be beneficial” by helping “a team discover which ten potential blockages or barriers may be inhibiting the team’s performance” (p. 45).

Using tools to define the parameters of collaboration, and to measure activities and processes, can provide data and can provide opportunities for dialogue, discussion, and action plans for how to collaborate effectively and how to collaboratively resolve organizational priorities and barriers as well as help provide change solutions and pathways.

These tools are adaptable and thus can be applied to various research administration organizations or structures.

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.