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Teamwork and Collaboration: Overcoming the Barriers to New Product Development Success
By harveyrobbins | February 27, 2008
Not everyone believes in innovation, creativity and new product development. Of course, those are individuals who work for organizations who are destined to fail. If you work for a boss who doesn’t believe that new product development should be high on your priority list, then move to a different department or go work for someone else. With all the competition in the marketplace, your very survival as a company depends on the life blood brought about by your new product development efforts.
Critical to new product development success is you ability to create high performing teams. Unfortunately, not every organization makes the connection between excellent teamwork and excellent innovation. They go hand in hand. New product development depends upon the ability of the organization to muster resources and efforts across departments and functions…in a collaborative spirit.
Once again, however, human behavior tends to create hurdles which must be overcome to create the collaboration needed for new product development success. These hurdles are created by the natural human struggle between people’s desires to collaborate on one hand and the human tendency to beat your opponent bloody in competitive games on the other.
To start creating the collaboration you need, you first need to define who the “enemy” really is. It’s not the person in the department down the hall or across town who works for your very same company. It’s the real competitor who is trying to take the meat off your table.
The collaborative spirit needed for successful new product development starts with how you define your team and how you structure your collaboration so that everyone is engaged in the process of new product innovation. But, like I said, some cultures are competitive rather than collaborative. Organizations seeking the collaborative spirit of teams without structural barriers should consider attacking their existing non-collaborative culture hammer and tongs.
The way to create a collaborative atmosphere or “teaming environment” is neither mysterious nor expensive. You begin by sending a simple but unmistakable signal through the organization: you stop rewarding destructive, competitive, one-up behaviors, and you start rewarding group minded behaviors. Focus on the common outcomes achievable through your new product development process.
Then you examine, as honestly as possible, exactly how your organization actually works. Examine behavior, not executive memos. Do people hoard information, keep it from one another? Do they allow one another to fail, without stepping in to provide assistance or encouragement? Is it an organization in which not just functions are enclosed silos, shut off from others by expertise, but one in which every person is an enclosed silo, shut off from others by fear? How can you possibly have successful new product development efforts if people are hesitant to share information and expertise? Well, you can’t.
It is impossible to have a successful new product development process existing within a competitive environment. If you have such an environment, then get a clue. Work hard to promote collaboration through word and deed. If you can’t create internal collaboration, then I suggest you put on your life vests and learn to tread water.
If people aren’t willing to collaborate, try napalm. When I was director of organization development for Honeywell, I was once described as having a backpack filled with Vaseline and dynamite. I got things moving one way or the other. I always preferred creating a collaborative environment, but, when meeting resistance, I was not afraid to use some explosives. Got me into loads of trouble, though, so be careful.
Take a little thing like e-mail. In a highly competitive environment, e-mail tends to be infrequent, disclosure of negatives tends to be rare, crucial information is typically withheld, and interested parties are conspicuously excluded. There is a lack of teamwork. And the information needed as input for such things as new product screening is non-existent.
In an environment striving to become more collaborative, e-mail is a common way for people to share news of their progress, or lack of progress. If someone is having a problem or is unable to get over the hump on a project, he or she calls attention to it, and others rally to his or her side with suggestions. E-mail provides a wonderful little collaborative tool – and the CC list, a quick way to include others in the message. Everyone who is affected by your work or who may even be slightly interested in your project should be CC’d with relevant messages. You just never know where value-added input will come from.
Obviously, you can go overboard with the CC command. You can bring an organization to its knees by including everyone in it in every message. But you get the idea.
Another way to collaborate is through joint staff meetings. Get people outside your function, but whose work your new product development activities may affect, involved in your planning and reporting. Help teach others in your organization about your new product development process and why their input in so important to success.
A third way is to create leadership “bridge teams.” If your organization doesn’t have formal teams, the leaders of work groups can still get together to touch base and alert one another to upcoming problems, and put an end to inevitable turf wars before they flare out of control.
A fourth way is to fiddle with reporting relationships. Just because you work in a silo does not mean you always have to report within that silo. IT and finance types benefit immeasurably by having direct-line relationships outside IT and finance, with the production or sales or engineering or new product development departments, for example. It’s like a fresh breath of air – in fact, a blast of real life. And amazing innovation and creativity will infuse your new product development process.
Topics: New Product Development Best Practices |