Collaboration in Training

 Recently I was thinking of three common challenges that we see in most collaboration-based activities within our training and how to overcome them:

1) No engagement due to lack of connection and trust - In my group we provide classes on leadership principles and we often find that bringing in employees from several different contracting companies (who are commonly competitors) and asking these learners to engage in collaboration-based activities is a hard sell due to their inherent dislike of the other companies, or there lack of trust in their co-learners.

2) Lack of buy-in to learning outcomes - Similar to the above we have difficulty with people jumping into collaboration-based activities due to confusion about what they are supposed to get out of this. Suffice it to say, many in our community do not get much opportunity to train, so when they get that opportunity and we throw them into the "deep end of the pool" with an activity, there is hesitancy. 

3) Disagreement on the nature of the process - There are times when we have working groups who don't share the leaderships enthusiasm for projects, either in terms of the intent or in terms of the process they are following. This can make collaboration more difficult. 

So what are the best strategies for tackling the three common challenges:

We find that the best way to help build trust and to ensure immediate engagement is to provide and "ice-breaker" game or challenge that is designed toward enhancing understanding of a learning objective as well as build trust among the group. Ice-breakers are seen as hokey and a waste of time among our learning community who are driven to complete training as quickly as possible to get back to work, but their value at building trust and breaking down barriers to create immediate engagement are without question worthwhile. One we are currently using for new leaders is to break the class into four teams and give each team a puzzle to solve as a group with the first team done being the winner. This enforces a sense of competition (which our learners enjoy) makes them work together, and since we broke one puzzle into the four groups, no puzzle can be completed without interacting with the other teams (this is something they must figure out over the course of the activity). As Paloff and Pratt (2005) state when citing Johnson and Johnson (2000) and positive group interdependence "when one perceives that one is linked with others in a way so that one cannot succeed unless they do (and vice versa) and /or that one must coordinate one's efforts with the efforts of others to complete a task" . . . this is exactly the dynamic we are promoting with this puzzle icebreaker. 

Regarding the lack of buy-in to the learning outcomes, we work to ensure that the learners understand the rationale for our work at the beginning, throughout the training, and at the end of the process. We believe that it's important that the learner see a roadmap with a destination and shared vision for success in order for them to work and strive to meet it. Without this they could stumble in the wrong direction, waste time, and not finish with the learning objectives we want to see. All of our instructor -led classes and our eLearning classes are built with this roadmap to the finish sketched out for the learner to see and understand.

Finally, in many working groups, we have seen that there is not buy-in not because team members don't see the finish line via a roadmap, but rather they don't agree with how the leadership for that project intends to get to the finish line. There needs to be sufficient buy-in from all parties towards the mission and the objective, and where or when that buy-in doesn't occur, the leader needs to ensure that the mission and objectives are re-stated, stated differently, or the process outlined in such a way that there is buy-in. Without that trust in the process and buy-in the team will have a much harder time meeting the objectives from all of the participants concerned. In could be as simple as re-stated from another source. In one group I was in, the leader, our COO, was determined to perform operations in the manner he was used to. No matter the amount of research we showed him, or data that proved our process was right, he was recalcitrant and refused to accept the change. Finally, our leadership team found one of his loyal disciples and convinced that person of why our process was the correct one to follow. Once we had him bought into the process, he convince the COO for us. 

References

Palloff, R.M., & Pratt, K. (2005). Collaborating online: Learning together in community. pp. 3-18. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.