The Culture of Collaboration

Mayo Clinic Enhancing Collaboration

The Mayo Clinic, founded on the principle of collaboration, is taking collaboration and innovation to the next level. With a mission nothing short of transforming how healthcare is experienced and delivered, Mayo’s Center for Innovation integrates emerging collaborative tools into processes and culture. The Center for Innovation includes Mayo’s innovative S.P.A.R.C. design lab.

 

While writing The Culture of Collaboration book, I conducted on-site research at S.P.A.R.C. and throughout Mayo. Now it’s time for an update. The catalyst was a recent conversation with Chris Yeh of PBworks, which offers a hosted wiki-oriented business collaboration platform with newly-added integrated voice conferencing. Mayo is piloting PBworks along with other online collaborative spaces. “We call it a sandbox where people can figure things out,” Francesca Dickson of Mayo’s Center for Innovation told me yesterday during a Skype video call.

 

Francesca and Beth Kreofsky of Mayo’s Center for Innovation provided an inside view of how Mayo is evolving, and we talked about the role of tools. Aside from PBworks, Mayo is also piloting “ideation” tools that let team members share ideas and build on them based on “focused questions.” One such tool is Jive.

 

Besides asynchronous social tools, Mayo is now piloting instant messaging in several departments including nursing and radiology. Paging, a precursor to instant messaging, is deeply engrained in Mayo’s culture. Anybody can page the CEO and expect a prompt call back. Hierarchy is muted at Mayo, and the CEO is always a practicing physician. Mayo’s culture is ripe for IM and unified communications through which people can connect spontaneously through IM, voice or video regardless of level, role or region.

 

Meantime, paging persists at Mayo. The Center for Innovation’s mission is to keep Mayo, well, innovating. So the Center is demonstrating to the organization that IM offers a clear advantage over paging.

 

Video is another tool that’s part-and-parcel of Mayo’s culture. Mayo was an early user of videoconferencing to encourage collaboration among its three campuses. Mayo has already piloted Cisco TelePresence with a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. And beginning in April, patients in Canon Falls, Minnesota will receive consultations from Mayo specialists via TelePresence.

 

By integrating new collaborative tools into its already collaborative culture, Mayo will likely enhance healthcare delivery and create greater value.

Telepresence Enhancing Travel?

Videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have traditionally marketed their products as a replacement for travel. This is shortsighted in that real value creation comes from integrating real-time video into business processes. Using telepresence so that people can come together spontaneously and design an airplane or develop animation or create a 24-hour healthcare delivery service produces far greater value than travel savings.

 

Considering the obsession with marketing real-time video as a travel replacement, you might think hotels would be lukewarm about videoconferencing and telepresence. But there was nothing tepid about Mary Casey and Bob Hermany’s view of Cisco TelePresence as they announced on Tuesday Starwood’s roll out of public TelePresence rooms. The first two Starwood properties to offer TelePresence are the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Australia and the W Chicago. You can view the announcement video here. Incidentally, Mary is Starwood’s vice president of global corporate sales and Bob is Starwood’s senior vice president of operations.

 

Starwood will also install Cisco TelePresence at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, the Westin Los Angeles Airport and the Sheraton Centre Toronto during 2010. Later, the hotel chain will adopt TelePresence at properties in San Francisco, Dallas, Brussels and Frankfurt, among others. In my October 15, 2008 post, I wrote that Cisco and its partner, Tata Communications, were introducing public TelePresence rooms and that the first hotel chain to participate was the Taj Hotels.

 

During a TelePresence call linking several global locations, Sean Hunt, a Starwood executive who manages the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney positioned Australia’s first public TelePresence room as both a travel benefit and alternative. “The problem is we’re isolated from the rest of the world, so this is a great alternative to long-haul travel.” The point is that rather than replace travel, TelePresence lets somebody outside Australia who may never have taken the flight get face-to-face with colleagues and partners.

Aside from marketing and public relations advantages, there are potentially tangible benefits for hotels that adopt TelePresence. Besides renting rooms at rates that can approach $500 a day, hotels can charge $500 an hour for TelePresence. That’s the rate at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. Australian dollars, of course.

Smashing Silos

My current collaboration column for BusinessWeek.com called “Smashing Silos” describes how to reduce Silo Syndrome. You can read the column here.

Collaborating with Salespeople Provides Unfiltered Information

Hierarchy dies hard in many organizations, so breaking down barriers among levels can prove particularly challenging.

 

Team members must feel it’s culturally acceptable to engage senior leaders on the fly, and likewise senior leaders must feel culturally comfortable reaching out across the organization to connect with front-line managers, factory workers and salespeople. This gives leaders access to real-time, unfiltered information. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I write about the Dow Chemical Company’s collaborative culture and the collaborative leadership approach of Dow CEO Andrew Liveris. In a compelling interview by Susan Daker  in the Monday, January 25 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Andrew describes how Dow taps its salespeople for real-time intelligence about customer needs.

 

Wisely, Dow recognizes that the role of salespeople goes beyond addressing customer needs and closing deals.  Dow salespeople collaborate with Research & Development and senior leaders to ensure that products meet customer needs. This may sound like a no brainer, but countless salespeople from many companies have told me that marketing, R&D and senior leaders have little interest in their customer insights. In such organizations, an “us and them” attitude develops between salespeople and management. And therefore the organization loses opportunities to gain real-time intelligence that would otherwise create value.

 

For years, salespeople have been underutilized. After all, they’re the eyes and ears of an organization. They can also be an early warning system for market shifts and product issues. Good salespeople understand their customers’ businesses, challenges, and industry trends. Isn’t that information important to R&D and senior leadership? Absolutely! In fact, companies pay dearly for similar intelligence and information from consultants and researchers.

 

In a collaborative organization, senior leaders reach out to salespeople for unfiltered, real-time information and input into decisions.  Salespeople, in turn, engage and collaborate across leadership levels and across functions, business units and regions. Presence-enabled tools enhance this by letting people find each other and collaborate in real-time, enabling salespeople to share intelligence with senior leaders, R&D and others. But tools can only enhance and extend collaboration. For salespeople to contribute to product development and strategy, the organizational culture must support informal, spontaneous interactions regardless of level or title.