The most helpful foundation for high performing collaboration (with examples)

Discover how defining a clear vision of winning can unify teams and drive success, transforming individual efforts into a collective triumph

If you make a bet with a friend, it's a good idea to define what winning the bet looks like in advance. That way you avoid conflict, confusion and chaos throughout and at the point of settling the bet.

Sounds pretty intuitive, right?

But somehow when it comes to work, I've seen countless leaders and teams struggle to define what winning looks like.

Don't get me wrong, of course people talk about goals and objectives, but it's often broken down to the level of what deliverables and outputs are required to get the next bit of validation or approval from your boss, or their boss, or their boss. You get the idea.

The problem is that an unclear and fragmented vision of winning will fracture focus across a team.

Everyone on the team will revert to figuring out their own personal vision of winning so that they can anchor their progress to something more concrete than what is offered by the leader of the team, and have at least a personal sense of being directionally correct.

If they're unable to grasp a collective vision, they'll still want to know if their work is meaningful and heading in the right direction, and their interpretation of this could be divergent from others in the team.

If you're trying to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, this is a sure-fire way to kill that ambition.

If you do want a team to collaborate in a way that feels naturally holistic, integrated and intuitive in how each part of the team complements and supports the other, then here's what you need to do.

1. Make some time (or request some time if you're not the decision maker) to pause and take a step back with everyone. Whilst I’m a big fan of short, sharp and well-structured workshops, this is one you may want to do a bit more leisurely. If you can do it in person, do that and bring drinks and snacks.

2. Take stock of all the goals, objectives, key results, etc. you have at various levels of the work you're doing, and acknowledge them. This can just be a look through wherever you have them written down and a quick discussion together to collectively nod and remember how smart you all were when you came up with them.

3. Now, ask everyone in the team to individually write down their answer to this question: "When we get to the end and win this bet, how will we know that we've won?"

   Don’t offer any more instruction than this, but if someone asks, "What do you mean by "bet" here, what bet"? Then the bet you've all made - in very simple terms - is that this project is worth it and you'll succeed. If you happen to have a design hypothesis for your project, then that could be your bet.

4. Next, ask everyone to show their cards, so to speak. In person, this could mean everyone writes their vision of winning on a large sticky note and sticks it up on a shared wall space. Virtually this could be done using a collaboration tool like Miro, Trello, Notion, Retrium, etc. The point is to consolidate everyone's input before you synthesise into a clear, unified vision of success, and give everyone a chance to read out loud what they came up with.

5. At this point you can offer some specific feedback to everyone so they can refine their vision if they’d like. The kind of things I’d look out for are:

   1. make the vision practical and concrete, not lofty and purely inspirational (examples provided lower in this article)

   2. think of the vision as a snapshot at a particular point in time in the future when you can stop and check a list of things that tell you that you’ve won

   3. the vision could be between a sentence and a short paragraph, but should be broader than just some version of “we delivered deliverables x, y and z on time.”

6. Now you’re at the point of reviewing the individual visions collected previously and identifying the common themes. It's essential to distil these varied perspectives into a single, coherent statement that captures the essence of what winning looks like for the entire team.

   This is not about consensus building through infinite discussion. It’s about facilitating convergence and synthesis (yeah I know, fancy words, but I’ll explain in a moment) of everyone’s views and getting to a point of general buy-in.

   You need 2 things for this: (a) a tie-breaker - someone who has the relevant authority to make a call to move things along if the group gets stuck and starts spinning wheels, and (b) a skilled facilitator. If you don’t have one in your team, find someone from outside. It helps if the skilled facilitator and/or tie-breaker is also a half-decent writer.

   Focus on simplicity and clarity in this vision of winning statement. It should be easily understood by all team members and serve as a constant reference point for the project's direction. This unified vision will guide decision-making, prioritise efforts, and provide a benchmark for evaluating progress.
   

   Now as promised, here’s some de-jargoning for you, in the context of workshops:

   "Convergence" refers to a phase or process where ideas and discussions are narrowed down and focused, aiming to reach a clear, unified outcome.
   
   ”Synthesis" involves combining various ideas, perspectives, and pieces of information gathered during the workshop to create a cohesive understanding or solution that captures the essence of the group's collective insights.

7. Make sure you write down this vision not just somewhere, but everywhere! You want it to be super clear to everyone in the team what they’re working towards, with a level of specificity that is useful to determine at regular intervals if the team is on the right track, and a level of openness that various people and pieces of work across the team can find a sense of alignment with this vision of what winning looks like.

Examples

There are several famous companies who’s mission or vision statements get widely shared to inspire others. And I find a lot of them very inspiring myself. The challenge is that these are often not easily translatable to people working on programs and projects within organisations.

For example, when we look at SpaceX's vision of “enabling people to live on other planets”, it's incredibly ambitious and can captivate the imagination. But for someone working on a specific project within a large organisation, it might be hard to see how their daily tasks contribute to such a grand vision. Similarly, Microsoft's aim to “empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more” is hugely motivating but, let’s be honest, also pretty massively broad and vague. An individual team member might struggle to connect their work on a software update or a customer support query to this overarching goal.

In fact, if they don’t have a more relatable vision to anchor themselves to, the organisation’s grand vision can actually be demoralising and disengaging for Support Officer Level 2 or Project Manager #16 on Initiative XYZ.

So here are some examples of what a statement could look like that descries what winning looks like at a team level:

• The new software update was launched in the first quarter, receiving overwhelming positive feedback for boosting small business productivity by over 40%.

• Customer satisfaction rates soared to 98% within just four months following the introduction of our new support protocols, drastically cutting down resolution times and elevating user proficiency with our software.

• Our project delivery times were slashed by 30% within the year, thanks to streamlined processes and enhanced team collaboration, significantly boosting our project success rates and client satisfaction.

• Our team successfully implemented zero-waste practices in all operations by the mid-year, surpassing the company's sustainability targets and setting a new standard for environmental responsibility in our industry.

You don’t have to write in past tense, by the way, this is just my personal default preference. Here are some more examples written in present tense.

• The team's innovative marketing campaign drives a record-breaking product launch, with sales surpassing targets by 50% in the first month, firmly establishing our brand as a market leader.

• Our engineering team redesigns the manufacturing process, reducing production costs by 20% while maintaining product quality, resulting in a significant boost in profit margins.

• The new community outreach program becomes fully operational within six months, directly benefiting over 1,000 local residents and earning widespread acclaim for our corporate social responsibility.

• The public health department's vaccination drive reaches 90% of the target population within three months, significantly reducing the incidence of the disease and setting a new standard for public health initiatives.

• The city council's waste reduction initiative leads to a 30% decrease in landfill waste, thanks to community recycling and composting programs, enhancing the city's sustainability efforts.

• The education department's literacy program achieves its goal of increasing reading proficiency among primary school students by 25%, contributing to higher overall academic performance in the district.

Here are some more examples, written in future tense this time, answering the same question: What does winning look like?

• The environmental economics division will implement a pioneering natural capital accounting program, aiming to integrate ecosystem services valuation into national economic planning within the next two years, leading to more sustainable development policies.

• The transportation department's initiative to expand public transit will increase ridership by 50% over the next five years, reducing traffic congestion and lowering carbon emissions, contributing to the city's green mobility goals.

• The municipal government's affordable housing program will provide homes for 5,000 families within the next three years, drastically reducing homelessness and improving living standards in the community.

• The coastal management authority's new barrier reef protection plan will restore 50% of the damaged coral reefs in the region within five years, enhancing marine life conservation and supporting sustainable tourism.

Finally, here are some examples for shorter time horizons in months instead of years:

• The department of public works will complete the installation of energy-efficient lighting in all public buildings within the next three months, reducing energy consumption by 30% and lowering operational costs.

• The community development team will launch a series of job fairs in the next two months, aiming to connect over 500 job seekers with employment opportunities in the local area.

• The water management authority will implement a new water conservation campaign by the start of the next season, aiming to reduce municipal water usage by 15% through public education and the promotion of water-saving technologies.

If you have an example you’re willing to share, whether it’s real or made up, please add it in the comments.

In wrapping up, just as defining the terms of winning a bet can steer a friendly wager away from disputes, establishing a clear vision of what winning looks like in our projects and teams can transform the way we work together towards our common goals. Remember, every team member's contribution is a piece of the puzzle in this grand bet we're all part of — the bet on our collective success.

Moving forward with clarity of purpose and a shared vison of that success is the most helpful foundation to building collaborative high performance; and in my opinion the real success lies not just in winning the bet, but in how we elevate each other and our collective mission in the process.

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P.S. Just one more thing. Behind the guidance in this article is a principle that has served me well in life, well beyond the world of work. If you ever find yourself at the cross-roads of making a decision, or embarking on a new adventure and feeling overwhelmed by the uncertainty of where it may lead, just pause and ask yourself, “What would winning look like?” Sometimes a light turns on immediately, sometimes you need to spend some time journaling. But it’s very worthwhile.