Improving the Rhythm of Your Collaboration

Alternating between always-on connectivity and heads-down focus is essential for problem-solving.

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Count-offs at the beginning of musical performances, whether verbal (“One, two…”) or symbolic (with a baton or a snap), are a fixture of live collaboration for musicians. Conductors use them to establish tempo and feel, and to provide guidance on how to interpret the written rhythms — the patterns of sound and silence — that the ensemble is about to play.

Similarly, in the workplace, leaders help set the beat for their organizations’ and teams’ collaborative efforts. For at least a century, they have done this largely by planning working-group meetings, huddles, one-on-ones, milestone reports, steering committee readouts, end-of-shift handoffs, and so on. Through 30-, 60-, and 90-minute calendar meetings scheduled weeks in advance to prevent conflicts and at odd times to accommodate global team members, they have established the patterns of active interaction (“sound”) and individual work (“silence”) that form the rhythms of their employees’ collaboration.

But such rhythms have gotten much more complex and less controlled in recent years. Organizations now have a treasure chest of digital tools for collaboration — Slack, Teams/Skype, Chatter, Yammer, Jive, Zoom, Webex, Klaxoon — that they didn’t have before. (The global collaboration software market was $8 billion in 2018 and is projected to double to $16 billion by 2025.1) Add to that email, texting, and messaging, along with the meetings that haven’t gone away, and the math is telling: Research shows that executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours per week in meetings (up from less than 10 hours 50 years ago),2 while McKinsey estimates the average knowledge worker spends 65% of the workday collaborating and communicating with others (including 28% of the day on email).3 So collaboration has gone omnichannel. You can see why orchestrating all of this has become such a challenge.

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1. Grand View Research, Team Collaboration Software Market Analysis Report, 2018.

2. L.A. Perlow, C.N. Hadley, and E. Eun, “Stop the Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review 95, no. 4 (July-August 2017): 62-69.

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Jeff Shuman
A very interesting article. What I liked was the concept of rhythm -- in 1998 I published a book, The Rhythm of Business: The Key to Building and Running Successful Companies, Butterworth Heinemann. There are however, two points I want to make. 1) Clearly, one's rhythm isn't fixed -- it must iterate over time in keeping with the dynamic environment in which it operates. 2) If you're in a silent phase while other people in the "on" phase are trying to collaborate with you to get information from you to do what they are trying to do, they'd have to wait for you to "turn back on" to get the info the need, thus delaying their ability to move forward.

Jeff Shuman, PhD
The Rhythm of Business, Inc.