Our Story: We Build Trust through Collaboration: A 2018 Close Up
With the right teams, a streamlined way for stakeholders to be a part of solving the problems, and a little collaboration, the team explored possibilities to decide on the best solutions to work in the complex organizational environment with regulatory constraints and high stakeholder expectations – the ideal business rules, processes, and communication mechanism. They built trust in each other through the simple acts of sharing, communicating, and understanding.
As consultants, our measure of success is our clients’ success. Collaboration makes the team better and the solutions more forward-leaning and less risky. This leads to strong relationships and lasting trust.
Organizations build trust by using a common language and behavior mirrored across all levels of the organization. One of the easiest ways to build trust within an organization is through collaboration:
Rather than telling your team, ask for their input
Rather than posting a new policy and expecting compliance, form a cross-organizational team and have them write it
Rather than demanding loyalty, earn it through involvement, communication, and outreach
Collaboration at this level does take time – but in the end, it saves time. So, don’t use ‘we don’t have enough time’ as an excuse. Instead, adopt a ‘we won’t stay on schedule unless we collaborate from the start.’
About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio is a management, strategy, and technology consulting firm that takes a mission-oriented approach to complex client challenges. Focused on innovation, Arc Aspicio provides services in strategy, design, human capital, operations, analytics and visualization, technology, and information sharing. The company is known for a strong, collaborative culture that values gratitude, provides leadership opportunities, and explores the future. Our teams use a human-centered approach to working with clients and are flexible and responsive within dynamic Government client environments that often have new priorities and evolving missions. We thrive on these situations and promote continuous improvement and new ideas. And, #welovedogs! Follow us on Twitter @arcaspicio or learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.
“Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work.” – Warren Bennis
Without internal trust, organizations cannot build external trust with clients, customers, and stakeholders. Trust drives growth, expansion, innovation, and success.
On a current project, we have significant operational responsibility for completing a large volume of processing at the same time as leading a transformation of both our organization and the clients in parallel. The organization desired to transform for years – but had been ‘stuck’ because of the significant work needed to design the new organization and processes. We created and empowered Tiger Teams (a cross-functional team with different perspectives) to design and recommend solutions. As they worked together and with client leaders, they discovered that their solutions were better because they had collaborated. Collaboration inspired trust and resulted in the right solution.
We had two Tiger Teams, working in parallel, to identify the milestones for transformation, the impact on stakeholders (and the communications and training they’d need), the process changes, etc. The Tiger Teams made progress until a certain point. They were collaborating, right? In their groups, yes, but not across groups. So, the teams began to reach out and pull in stakeholders, ask questions, pose problems, and gather insights. One of the biggest breakthroughs came when the teams teed up what they had learned and involved the stakeholders in solving the problem. That reaching in was the turning point for the integration across the teams. After that, the team met milestone after milestone, realigning the teams to the transformed environment and setting the stage for the client to align their teams next.
