Generation Collaboration

Employees are looking for more than a paycheck these days -- the good ones want an interesting, innovative environment. Today's collaboration tools can help you do that, if you use them in the right spirit. I was reviewing a paper on collaboration the other day and the text revealed an interesting dichotomy. The paper intended to explore the ways in which collaboration enhances productivity, and woven through the writing were references to how today's collaboration tools make it much easier to assign tasks to employees. As I read, something about the context of that phrase -- assign tasks -- jumped out at me. Given the importance of innovation to success in today's world, I suddenly wondered, is creativity or innovation something that you can mandate? What role does hierarchical delegation -- the lifeblood of command-and-control management during the halcyon days of manufacturing and mass production -- serve in today's communication-driven knowledge economy? Today's Workers Want More Nearly a third of the 153 million workers in the United States change jobs in a given year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor -- generally to pursue a better opportunity. The average American worker will have held more than 10 jobs by age 40. Today's workers are looking for more than a paycheck; discussions I have with the students in my local high school indicate that they are much more likely than I was to voluntarily leave a job in which they lack interest to pursue one that is personally fulfilling. And there's also a natural tendency for people to perform better in a job that interests them. What does that mean? I believe it means that employers must do a better job of creating an interesting environment for employees. In the past, management selected workers based on their skills and assigned them tasks. In the workplace of the future, where data flows freely and knowledge, not information, is the coin of the realm, leaders must adapt their styles to the reality of a much more informed and mobile workforce. Give too many unpleasant tasks to one worker without considering the ramifications and you may unwittingly thrust her into the arms of a competitor. So, rather than thinking of collaboration tools as a way to assign tasks, I think of them as a way to unlock potential. Today's young adults enter the workforce with a different, more globally aware perspective than I did -- their preparation and development is different. While the subjects my sons are studying in school are largely the same, teaching and learning processes are much more stimulating and engaging, encouraging the type of creative collaboration that celebrates and capitalizes on the differences in the children's skills. In my day, we played a lot of games that had clear winners and losers -- zero-sum games, they're called; my sons play games where the value of diversity is harnessed for cooperative gain. I think that's a great training ground for a world where creativity and innovation drive growth and prosperity. A quote from educational author and consultant Matthew Moran gets to the heart of it: "The best and the brightest -- whether they recognize it and verbalize it -- do not work within the confines of title, role, and responsibility. They work instead in the broader context of desire, passion, and achievement. I think this is a good thing. Organizations that cannot match their working environment with that broader context are doomed to lose the best and the brightest." Create an Environment of Innovation So how do we create a work environment that more effectively harnesses the innovative potential of our workers? I think it goes far deeper than putting a Ping-Pong table in the break room or encouraging radical behavior just to seem hip. I think we create an environment of innovation by trusting and empowering our employees and stimulating their interests. By more clearly stating the vision and strategy of the business, and then giving the employees more freedom in selecting the tasks that they find interesting. By measuring their success not by how busy they are, but by how successfully they contribute to the goals of the organization. And by rewarding them in a way that reinforces the value of collaboration. These are not trivial undertakings. They will require trust, confidence, and realization that improvement in this area is not only difficult, but absolutely necessary. We must persist, however. As Jonathan Ive once put it, "It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better." Roger Farnsworth is the research director of Executive Thought Leadership at Cisco Systems Inc.