Collaboration

In providing professional services to clients, I've recently faced an increasing number of situations where our teams are asked to collaborate with other providers. This can create a number of challenges. Culturally, it may be difficult to reconcile different beliefs, values, and/or perspectives. Operationally, the working model can be very different. The physical separation constrains visibility and transparency. Despite these barriers, our clients ask us to work together for a reason. They see an opportunity to combine different strengths to build a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. Despite the challenges, I believe we have an obligation to make it work.

In a recent presentation, a colleague described a collaboration between our management consultancy and a creative ad agency. In one sentence he described how we were working in "partnership". In the next sentence, he described how a source of value that we brought was "keeping them in check." This struck me as conflicting. At the risk of being sanctimonious, I privately expressed concern over the sentiment that this language revealed. I'm certainly not above this -- I've had my fair share of conflict and tension in these efforts. That said, if we agree to collaborate with other professional service agencies as partners, we need to think and behave in this spirit.