managers in different functions or different business units seem surprisingly reluctant to work together
Jealousies, misunderstandings and enmity seem more common than collaboration
Why does collaboration fail? There are lots of reasons. Collaboration can be time-consuming. It creates risks for the participants. Competing objectives can be hard to resolve
"Competing objectives can be hard to resolve", well, this is what happens when you try to create a culture of collaboration within an overarching competitive environment.
Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome.
actions are interdependent
committed to a single result
joint decisions
cautious about taking unilateral action
someone with the authority to resolve disputes
Team members may dislike
each other
But with a good leader they can still perform.
Collaborators face a different challenge
they often also have competing goals
the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities
collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences
collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.
a collaborative relationship
is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.
my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team.
The Tyddyn Teg cooperative has eight members and some lovely volunteer helpers. We share a commitment to the importance of quality local food and the challenges of sustainability in the twenty first century. We see ourselves as part of the global family of small farmers and aim to become a practice based centre for research and education for sustainable local food production.
Our primary objective has been to maintain vegetable production and meet the needs and expectations of our veg box customers. In this we have had a great deal of help and advice from John and Pippa (who were the previous owners of the farm). We are also supplying vegetables to Moelyci Shop and Dimensions Shop in Bangor.
Our aims over the coming years are:
Expand and improve our vegetable growing
Develop the Farm to support WWOOFing
Create new spaces for events
Open opportunities to have a small scale restaurant/cafe on the farm
Establish a luxury camping business where people can come and stay
Provide a living wage to every member of the cooperative