Building a Highly Collaborative Team, Part 2

by Marvin Kemp, AIA, CSI, CDT

This is Part 2 of a blog about a collaborative team-building event I attended on October 8, 2013. Please read this post for the opening thoughts and action that occurred in the morning on the day of the event. This post will continue with what occurred following lunch.

The afternoon was spent in both small group discussions and large group discussion combined with reporting on the small group work and reaching consensus in the large group discussions. The afternoon opened with a large group discussion of the desired team working environment. The CM is hoping to build a true "co-location" environment where CM staff, design assist contractors and architects and engineers all work together in the same space. The problem is that the A/E contracts do not envision that level of effort until construction starts and I do not believe the CM has configured their co-location space with the infrastructure necessary to make that level of involvement available and efficient. Providing desks, wifi and coffee does not equal a successful co-location space. Moreover, contracts must be in place to ensure all parties understand their involvement, equally assess and accept risk and professional licensing concerns are eased.

At the collaboration event, we discussed behaviors that contribute to a healthy and collaborative working environment. The moderator was careful to call them "behaviors" to keep the conversation general enough to be useful and to differentiate immediate actions from long term behaviors. Things like bringing enthusiasm and cheerfulness, truthfulness, listening, consistency and accountability were discussed. Additionally, all parties must be respectful of each other but mindful of the delivery method to avoid honesty that is too brutal and might become hurtful. Team members should also come to discussions with solutions and not just problems.

The environment all would like to see has give and take in all situations. The "I win, you lose" type of attitude is not welcome nor healthy to the team. Members should be assertive with regards to their thoughts and ideas but not too aggressive. At the end of the day, the team should have fun and be "jocular not jugular:" all should watch out for sarcasm.

Confidentiality is also of critical importance. What is said in the room and among the team must stay in the room and among the team. That's why I'm being careful in authoring this blog. I want to describe the discussions, but not call people out or relay their attitudes or frames of mind. Twice, the moderator went around the room and asked if each team member, individually, accepted the idea of confidentiality. He waited for each member to verbally acknowledge their acceptance, similar to the flight attendant waiting for verbal acknowledgement from someone sitting in the exit row of a plane.  All of these behaviors were noted on flip charts and then pinned to the wall for all to review during the rest of the session and beyond.

Similarly, the team discussed behaviors that indicate regression or the team moving away from collaboration and returning to how things were in a non-collaborative environment. Team members not making meetings and missing deadlines indicate the metrics used to measure team success are trending in the wrong direction. If team members begin to suspend trust and poorly communicate or begin to point fingers, the team is regressing in their behaviors.  If there is an absence of fun and if team members avoid one another and frequently pull out contracts to review their scope, the team may be regressing. Understanding unhealthy behaviors is just as important as understanding the healthy behaviors teams should engage in so that all can embrace the healthy and avoid the unhealthy.

The first small group session was spent identifying current or anticipated issues the project team is facing or may face. The moderators split us into groups, making sure the groups were sufficiently diverse. For example, the first group I was in contained one engineer, two members of the owner's group, one member of the CM group and two design assist contractors but from different firms. There were three groups and three architects in the meeting, so we were split up in all groupings.

As our group discussion began, we tried to move beyond the usual issues of "budget," "schedule," and "quality" broad picture statements, although each of those ideas appeared in the overall discussion of the issues facing our project. We tried to get more specific to the nature of this project and the culture that has already begun to take form. Concern was expressed over the protracted funding schedule from the legislature, concern over the contractual arrangements of the design assist contractors and coordination of design and construction efforts by the A/E team, design assist team and CM staff.

Not so shocking, all three teams identified the same issues. Not shocking because the groups were painstakingly organized to maximize the interaction among all team members. Each team contained members of the A/E team, owner's team, CM staff and design assist contractors. Once you start to think beyond the usual or generic problems that all projects face and get into the nuts and bolts of the project at hand, I would expect all three teams to identify similar issues. Sure the wording was slightly different and they were in slightly different order but they were essentially the same issues.

Once we returned to the large group setting, each smaller group presented their thoughts and the rest of the team was allowed to ask questions.  As there was much consensus on the issues, the only questions were clarification of thought and terminology. The groups presented their thoughts on flip-chart pages that were pinned to the wall. This made locating commonalities easy: the moderators used red markers to circle or place asterisks next to common themes on the group pages.

At this point, the groups were shuffled and the discussion continued with the idea of prioritizing the top three to five issues and beginning to think about how to address each of the top three issues. This session was not as successful as the first for several reasons. Many of us chose to take a break for rest rooms and phone calls so the sessions were a bit late starting. Next, the groups were interchanged, so their members had some ramp up time, same as in the first break out sessions. Lastly, the prioritization discussions required more discussion than the issue listing so the session was more about finesse and than brain-dumping, as the first session had been.

This time, each group had a slightly different priority listing but three rose to the top. Coordination between A/E and design assist contractors, the protracted funding schedule and the contractual arrangements of the design assist contractors were clearly on everyone's mind. The initial solutions offered were all over the board and not clearly defined. The questions were more numerous and generally focused on specific ideas related to proposed solutions.

My group for this second break out included two senior members of the owner's team, the project executive from the CM, one design engineer and several members from various design assist contractors. While the project exec from the CM was vocal, the senior owners were not. I think they were trying to listen and learn. I bring up the group make up because of what happened in the third break out session. 

The moderator wanted the third session to feature the same groups as the second session. However, the most senior members of the architect of record, CM and owners team broke out into a separate session to discuss a decision making matrix thus leaving my team short three members. The remaining members split up and joined the other two groups to discuss real solutions to the top three issues. This proved to be a good start which left several action items for the owner, CM and A/E. I don't think the moderators expected concrete decisions to come out of this session as they were not surprised that we left with action items.

The discussion of the decision making matrix was interesting on two levels. The matrix was set up with five levels. Many of the people listed on the matrix were in the room and did not seem to agree with their slotting in the levels, even though those slots were set by senior project staff and in some cases, the person’s employer. The Level I slot is for the most senior, executive level people in each organization. Level II is reserved for the project manager level people and Level III for one step below that. The second thing that made this discussion interesting is, to my way of thinking and considering my project and team knowledge, Levels IV and V have no decision making ability: they are too far down the chain and quite frankly, not given the authority by their respective firms. This is evidenced by the owner and CM groups leaving these levels blank in their columns. Only the A/E team firms and design assist contractors had names in these slots.

I’m not sure what will become of this decision making matrix. It was stated that all decisions should be made at Level II and Level III, but the culture has already been set that this will not occur. The folks listed in Level I are too powerful and too entrenched in the process. The culture has already been set that these folks are the ultimate decision makers and they frequently insert themselves into decisions that could be made at a lower level. I am a strong believer in the power of project or corporate culture. Once a cultural moray, whether positive or negative, has been set on a project, it is incredibly difficult to break it. An example is meeting culture: if the meetings are allowed to start late, few will arrive on time as they know the meeting will not start on time.

The session came to a close with a discussion of next steps. The dominate view of partnering sessions in the introductions of the morning was that the “one and done” events do not work. Either immediately or over time, the participants return to their unhealthy behaviors. All team members need to be reminded of the importance of team work and collaboration. It was agreed that for follow up meetings, monthly was too often and quarterly might be too infrequent. It was decided that the team will reconvene every two months across the next six months, which are critical months in the overall project schedule. After the first six months, the meetings will be held quarterly. The follow-up meetings will be shorter: probably three to four hours initially and then maybe only two hours as time goes on.

I took a couple of things away from this day. At some point, someone from the contracting team asked about integrating additional team members into the collaborative environment. This session included all key members of the A/E team, owner’s team and CM team but only four of the trade contractors who will actually be contracted to build the building. What happens when the masons and other skin contractors as well as the interior fit-out and finish contractors join the team? That was the parting shot of the whole event that was left unanswered. Some noted, and I agree with this, that the behavior model we created starts at top of each firm and filters down through all team members. If the leaders can maintain the collaborative spirit, the rest of the team will fall in line.

The quote of the day came from the PM for the architect of record. He said, “this is a large, complex project. You either run away from it or you run to it. Today, we all agreed to run to it.” I hope that is the case. Only time will tell.