How often do we find our accounting and finance team members sitting quietly in their cubicles without saying one word to each other through an entire day? We hope that team collaboration is happening to solve problems and develop new ideas. Do we want these normally reclusive, but dedicated individuals to talk to each other? Is it beneficial? It sure is beneficial.
I have seen too many accounting and finance team members try to solve problems alone due to the team culture. I have been there myself. Do we want a team of individuals or a team that solves problems together?
I believe we can create a culture of team collaboration encouraging the sharing of information and group problem solving. It takes leaders communicating the expectation and setting the standard for how it can be accomplished. How many times have managers stressed that a team member is solely responsible for specific metrics? Business metrics often have multiple relationships with other metrics across multiple teams.
When I worked in the Pentagon, my team was graded on the accomplishments of the group. Individuals were judged by their attitude and contribution to the group effort. Our desks were aligned so that we could swing our chairs toward a table placed in the center to quickly discuss a problem. My team was designed for constant collaboration. I acknowledge that not everyone is able to conform to such an open space and open environment.
I already hear you saying, “Who has time to implement this?” As leaders, we must seek and create time savings for our accounting team members and financial analysts. Task management with daily and weekly deliverables along with new tasks can quickly exhaust the time available. Talk to your CFO and business owners to explain the long-term benefits of the vision to build a more collaborative team.
Steps to Developing More Team Collaboration:
- Hiring process. Communicate with HR that you want to find candidates who fit a team problem solving environment. Be patient to find people who fit the vision for a more collaborative work style. You must always weigh technical skills against the soft skills necessary to be effective team members.
- Leading and training your team. Communicate your expectations in weekly face-to-face sessions and annual performance reviews. How does one metric affect another? Communicate that we share credit on a team win. Encourage speaking up when something is wrong. Coach team members to handle criticism. Team members must shed the fear of mentioning an idea that no one will support it.
- Discourage the lone warrior. Team focused solutions take advantage of the knowledge and experience of all team members. Some people do prefer to work alone, but encourage working together. We must be successful or fail based on the team’s collective performance in understanding the financial impact in totality.
- Creating the right office environment. Your office space is not a library. You should be talking more. The trouble you are having with a metric may be solved by getting a specific piece of information from someone else on the team. If it takes more than a few minutes to solve a problem, then a conference can be used to discuss further.
- Time savings. We need to become more efficient in our processes and prioritize new tasks. How much time is wasted on old financial models that have a lot of routine steps such as dropping data and adjusting formulas? This is not analytical work. Your information systems should be providing as many pre-formatted reports as possible that answer routine analysis.
- Communicate. Talk to everyone about the vision to build a more collaborative environment. Influence your teams and the leaders at all levels of your organization the importance of your long-term vision.
Your business cycle will affect how you implement this within your team. If you work for a company that is constantly chasing short term results at the sacrifice to long term growth, then you must address bigger issues. The transition time to train and enforce more time driven concepts may be lengthy due to the business cycle, but it is well worth the investment.
“When you need to innovate, you need collaboration.” – Marissa Mayer
How can you create an environment for better team collaboration?
Please comment or email me at comment@stephenmclain.com.
Copyright 2018 – Stephen McLain
