As we dive deeper in being the solution for our clients as the outsourcing entity, our clients are indirectly asking us to understand the dynamic of collaboration within their internal teams. Understanding collaboration allows our team to manage and build stronger relationships between our team and our clients. Team collaboration is becoming the hallmark of how corporations are creating the environments their employees are best succeeding. As a corporate partner to our clients, we seek to add additional benefits of team collaboration through modeling it through our communication style, multi-functional team, idea sharing, and ensuring the empowerment of all team members.
Benefits to team collaboration include increasing revenue, bringing additional validity to the team collaborating, and customer excellence. In the March Harvard Business Review, it highlights the important facts of when senior managers won’t collaborate. Collaboration of multi-functions in any industry on any team is not a choice but should be a mandate. Research shows when firms mandate team collaboration by function, higher margins are attained, it inspires greater client loyalty, and the team gains a competitive edge. Collaboration does become difficult as you look at the wages earned on the team. Wages may be decreased; however, the question becomes is there a greater overall benefit to the client and the team involved that usurps individual wage earnings.
Professional services firms, including commercial real estate, have a powerful competitive edge if they dig deep enough to bring the complexity of the work that needs to be done for the client to the forefront. Complex works means seeing beyond the real estate in our case and involving partners from multiple specialties. We can remove the obstacles or lower the barriers to collaboration and land higher value work by not putting an emphasis on individual income and focusing more on the outcomes of greater revenue as a whole, per client. Eventually, everyone will win.
According to the article, Caldwell Partners’ CEO asked all partners to name a potential client and to identify a colleague they could work with to try to win that account. The leadership fostered an environment of pairing up according to expertise, seniority and function. The article also suggest, “when hiring, leaders need to resist the temptation to bring in high performing but selfish partners, who might be a toxic influence and instead seek candidates who have a track record of working across boundaries.”
As we change the environment, the landscape of how we call on the client will change. In turn the client will see the change and respond more openly and feel the trust needed to grow in relationship and business transactions. Collaboration is one of many strategies that lead the professional services firms to that point of execution.
Lisa Gardner is the co-founder of OMS Strategic Advisors LLC.
