Walls in the open space

I recently worked with a group who were all working in an open space office layout. This was an ideal open office layout in the sense that each single work station was identical. That is not always the case in Thailand ... In another group I work with, there are 3 'grades' of open space working areas: the higher someone is up in the organization chart, the higher the partitions separating his particular work space from the one next to it !

So in the first group, the situation was really ideal. Open space. Frequent exchanges and interactions. A habit of asking one another if any help was needed. But when we started an Action Learning session to find a solution for an important shared challenge the team is facing, members very quickly realized that although they were sitting next to one another, and chatting all the time ... none of them really understood what the others were doing, or what challenges they were facing, or what help they really needed. The open space creates part of the context. This context can be conducive for collaboration, but it is not enough just to put people next to each other, and then assume (or hope) that they will collaborate.

This reminded me of a recent quote from Stefan Lindegaard, the Open Innovation guru. When it comes to getting innovative ideas from your team, Lindegaard says "People First, Processes Next. Then Ideas". In other words, ideas will come when you focus on your teams and put in place processes to allow them to share their ideas. I extrapolate this to my open space situation. You cannot create collaboration by putting people in a certain environment, however colorful and encouraging these surroundings might seem. Collaboration happens when people WORK together, share challenges, share successes and help each other to learn from failures. That is built through developing a mindset of really helping each other out, and establishing processes where cross-functional teams work on shared tasks. A nice open space is cool, but that is not the end of the job !

Trust ... between others !

I recently had an interesting conversation with a business leader about the importance of creating trust with the people working with you. This director has a real coaching mindset, and sees it as his job to help his direct reports with their professional development. He always comes back to the issue of trust, how you create it by what you say and do with your team members ... or how you lose it by doing the opposite.

This exchange made me think ... This expat manager will be the leader of the team for maybe 4 years, and will then be posted at another assignment. His successor could be very similar, or very different from him. So what will happen with all that trust that he has built up, over 4 years, with each of his direct reports ? Will the team transfer all this trust to the successor ? Probably not. At best, the successor will start with a blank page and maybe some credit based on his or her experience. At worst, the successor could start with a handicap. And what happens next depends on what the successor does with the team. 

Should a team start from scratch every time a new leader shows up ? Obviously not ! So what is missing ? What is missing is the extent to which trust has been built up BETWEEN team members, and that is not something you can dictate. This level of trust depends obviously a lot on how the leader works with each team member, individually and collectively. But it is not sufficient. Trust is not something that by capillarity or osmosis affects everybody that comes in touch with it. Trust exists between 2 people: A can trust B and B can trust C, but that does not mean that A trusts C automatically.

Developing trust with your team is great. Developing and nurturing trust BETWEEN team members is what ensures that the investment pays off even after the leader has moved on. Action Learning is one method that creates this level of trust: team members build on others' ideas, ask questions and collaborate to put in place the solutions they created. The level of trust that is built up within a team working like this, remains for a very long time !