CASE STUDY: Collaboration

A social housing organisation (a not-for-profit ‘company’ set up to take over the management of housing stock from a council) was being tasked by government to develop collaborative working with 7 other social housing organisations in his area, in order to share costs, leverage buying power and raise the quality of housing management.

The CEO was concerned that the other organisations had different styles of management and might have lower levels of capability.

The INPACT assessment confirmed that the company (“Company A”) had a management culture that was predominantly Pragmatic/Aligned, moving towards Empiricist. ‘Pragmatic/Aligned’ means that the way the organisation is managed had achieved a close alignment of the needs and aspirations of the staff with those of the organisation. ‘Empiricist’ means that information about the outside world (in this case, the tenants) flows across departments as well as up and down the management hierarchy. Because it does not suffer delays or distortion from passing through departmental ‘silos’, the information is timely and accurate, which means that management decisions are well-informed and effective.

Assessments of the other companies indicated that most had a predominantly Structuralist management culture, where rules and procedures governed how the organisation worked, but in a bureaucratic way that leads to ‘silos’. This hinders the sharing of ideas and knowledge across the organisation and the adoption of new ways of working.

Company A had a level 3 process capability, moving towards level 4. Level 3 is ‘defined process’. Level 4 is ‘Managed process’. That means that the organisation was in control of its systems and processes. They had been able to introduce some standardisation across the organisation and staff were achieving a good level of efficiency.

The other companies had a mix of level 1 (ad hoc process) and level 2 (repeatable process) – each group were doing things in their own way, with a distinct lack of compliance to any standardised processes. The contrast was significant:

Company A had a very strong customer and social focus – helping their tenants is why they come to work. This was less evident in other companies, although this varied, with some of the smaller companies showing a closer relationship to their communities.
We did not find any evidence of silo working or tribal tensions in Company 1, but the others all had tensions and distrust between members of the team which were disrupting efficiency and information flow.
Operational managers in Company 1 knew that their staff would come to them for help, so left them to deal with day-to-day problems. This left them time to concentrate on planning ahead and dealing with non-routine issues that needed their expertise. The same could not be said about the other companies. In one case the level of distrust was high enough to cause concern whether they could function at all.
Most of Company 1’s processes were computerised and standardised across the organisation. The best of the other companies had introduced some computerised systems, but we noted instances of staff working around the system to achieve results and no attempt was being made to improve the system.
Staff in Company 1 were fully consulted if changes were needed – in fact most of the improvements in the past year had been suggested by the staff, who were then encouraged to put their ideas into practice. We did not see any evidence that this was happening elsewhere. In two of the companies a strong command and control culture meant that people were told when changes were planned but they had no real input to the change process.
Trust was high in Company 1 and information flowed across the organisation as well as up and down, with no distortion or delay. Everyone had direct access to the CEO if there was something they wanted to discuss or alert him to. The silo culture in the other companies meant that groups tended to keep information to themselves and only communicated upwards by means of formal reports. The CEOs were visible in all of the companies but none operated a similar open-door policy.
The CEO in Company 1 had brought in consultants to harness good practice from other industries to help him develop a sharing culture. Some of the other companies had used outside consultants but only to set up IT systems and re-engineer processes.

Conclusion: the CEO was right to worry about the difficulty he was going to face in developing meaningful collaborative relationships with the other companies. In particular, any attempt to bring in shared services, using standardised processes, would founder on their lack of capability. Any collaborative projects would run the risk of being unrealistic in terms of benefits, timescales and the level of resource allocated to implementation.

If you are facing this situation, you might be interested to find out what actions we recommended to put in place some of the cultural and process capability foundations needed to enable successful collaboration.

Take a look at INPACT for Collaboration and Shared Services and then contact us.