SYDNEY, Aug. 20, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Truly effective collaboration can be difficult for many organisations. When executives commission new work and make individuals in charge of seeing it through, the need to work in teams is replaced with individual priorities reinforced with performance bonuses and other financial incentives. While a challenge, there are certain steps to alleviate the pain.

Agile consulting experts, Zen Ex Machina, goes through the essential dos and don'ts for successful company collaboration.

DO share a common goal. In order to encourage collaboration between people, including executive and management staff, each person must share a common goal. It's the role of executive to be explicit about the goal and the shared responsibility to achieve it. 

DO open up to new ways of working. Many traditional management paradigms and frameworks create unnecessary pain for 21^st century companies. Over 70% of traditional projects experience some kind of failure to deliver their promises. Contemporary ways of working only fail 8% of the time. Success involves changing the way leaders support and manage these environments, creating a cross-functional team-centric environment of self-organisation and collaboration over a hierarchical, serial, linear work process that is "thrown over the fence" at each step of the project.

DO listen to others. For people to feel comfortable and confident contributing their ideas to a common goal, they need to feel like they are being listened to. Leaders welcome suggestions and comments in a collaborative environment knowing that giving everyone equal voice supports increasing transparency of problems and giving permission for teams to innovate to address them.

DON'T be afraid to criticise. Psychological safety is created by leaders to promote an environment where people feel that it is safe to shed light on problems in their system of work – whether its large programs or projects or even business as usual. Leaders should understand that even though all suggestions should be acknowledged and treated fairly, you should not be afraid to criticise ideas presented by your colleagues. Although it is important to be honest, frame criticism positively and constructively to keep team morale high and project momentum going.

DON'T forget to make a plan. Effective collaboration needs a plan over a "just do it" approach. Continuous planning is needed to help create focus and adapt to changes in the marketplace, changes to stakeholder needs and expectations, and to take advantage of emerging, innovative ideas that help the organisation achieve its goals faster.

About Zen Ex Machina:

Zen Ex Machina Agile Program Management company's mission is to improve the quality of people's working lives – from executives and their managers through to teams – through contemporary ways of working. Our entire purpose is to help executives transform the way their entire organisation operates, so they become more productive, and more responsive to changing market, customer and stakeholder needs though smarter ways of working. Combining unmatched practical agile experience that spans almost two decades, Zen Ex Machina's consultants work as catalysts to the cultural change that agile demands, combining executive mentoring, change leadership, and agile coaching and training, to embed helps teams, complex programs, and whole organisations, to nimbly adjust to and take advantage of emerging opportunities.

SOURCE Zen Ex Machina