Collaboration

This is the time of year when companies are finishing their budget processes. Leaders and senior managers have signed up to ambitious targets for 2025, and many will quietly be wondering how they will deliver on them. Mid-junior managers and staff will almost certainly have no idea what is coming down the pipeline: they’re hanging on for the year-end party!

When 2025 opens, leaders and seniors may (out of habit) be looking for logical changes in process and policy to drive growth. Humans tend to repeat the approaches we know, even though they often disappoint.

But the real secret to making progress lies in the behaviour of employees. Collaboration, Coordination, and Cooperation are all used to describe effective teamwork. However, they are not the same, and when we interchange them, we dilute their meaning and diminish the potential for creating energetic workplaces.

• Collaboration is working together to create something new to support a shared vision.

• Coordination is sharing information and resources so each party can accomplish their part in executing a mutual objective. It is about implementation, not creating something new.

• Cooperation is short-term and transactional. It doesn’t require a vision because it is task-based. As most employee interaction happens this way, it’s easy to see how matters affecting performance become disconnected.

Collaboration is especially valuable in a network environment, where people are not physically working together, and resources may include external partners. In this situation, leaders must foster a culture of willing interdependence if they wish the business to innovate.

Rolls-Royce is a 118 year-old company, that has prospered by not relying on ‘the way things have always been done’. The current focus is on pivoting to Clean Energy and Digital Innovation. They have decided this requires a fundamental change in employee behaviours in two key areas:

• Rolls-Royce’s employees, particularly in engineering and manufacturing, have to embrace new concepts like electric propulsion and small modular reactors (SMRs) for clean energy, requiring them to rethink traditional design paradigms.

• Transitioning to a broader energy and digital solutions business means employees needed to collaborate effortlessly with teams from new sectors like nuclear, renewable energy and digital technology.

As CEO Warren East puts it: "For Rolls-Royce to succeed, we need our employees to embrace continuous learning, take bold steps in driving innovation, and work collaboratively across industries to tackle the challenges of a sustainable future."

In order to support these changes, East is reshaping company culture, talent development and reward and recognition programmes. Rolls-Royce realises that the biggest gains can only be made by unlocking to potential of human collaboration.