What Do You Want On Your Pizza?

"(Collaboration) is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results."                                                                                                                                                                 - Andrew Carnegie

It’s Friday at 6:30pm and you're just leaving the office. You worked through lunch for the third time this week because the LaSalle marketing campaign you're working on for a client in the UK is nearing its deadline and you're nowhere near where you want to be. The only time they have available all week to meet has fallen smack dab in the middle of the time you’d ideally ( though not consistently or even frequently) try to grab a quick salad (I said 'ideally' ) , warm up last night’s left over chicken parm or, when things get tough and the body, mind and spirit are craving a quick hit of dopamine, you head to the nearest drive-through to grab a supersized number 4 with a diet Coke scarfing that down during the 8 minute drive back to work. Bottom line- you're now f’ing starving (certainly not by any medical definition but as described by middleclass Americans across the country about 3 hours after consuming our last meal or snack). Like a countless number of times throughout your life, here again pizza is the answer.

If you order on the walk to the car, it will be Grubhubed to the family home by the time you pull in the driveway. Grease and cheese, peperoni, sausage, and mushrooms with garlic sauce and thin crust amalgamating in a homeostatic elixir. A stronger and more reliable mood regulator than any prescription SSRI on the market today. You're just a “complete my order” button tap away from relief.

That’s when you remember- you have a wife and three kids .... a family.... to consider. 

Your wife recently brought home a brown and white long haired guinea pig named Possum for your 11-year-old daughter. A quick Google research on the part of your daughter uncovered that in Switzerland it's illegal to own one guinea pig considering it cruel due to the deeply social nature of the species. She wonders how many other animals have the same need for a robust social life and for her part, proclaimed herself a vegetarian because "friends don't eat friends". True enough-but what's the point of a pizza with no meat??? 

In defiance of their shared DNA, her brother, 2 years older, will ONLY eat meat on his pizza. His coach told him that protein builds muscle and that there is a lot of protein in meat. The result has been a diet that would constipate a T-Rex and one that excludes vegetables of any kind while consisting of anything that once had a face and, much to his sister's dismay, friends. 

Your wife likes garlic sauce and mushrooms, buuuuuuut it has to be from Papa ‘whoever-the-f’s’. When you go to place your order, there are about 15 different 'Papas' to choose from. Panicked and down to your last 12 calories to burn, you can’t recall which 'Papa' is the right gotdam 'Papa' . You know that choosing the wrong 'Papa' undoubtedly ruins the pizza , your Friday night and maybe part of the weekend as your wife bristles intermittently at his lack of scope and depth of your knowledge of all things her-related. 

Then there is the 5-year-old to consider (it’s small but it still needs food). Earlier that same week you saw it eat dog food that dropped out of Casey’s (the family’s black lab) mouth. That in mind, at-a-glance seems like you should be able to sneak any actual human food past it without a problem. But you learned a long time ago never to underestimate the refined nuances of a preschooler Purina-eaters pallet.  

So, how do you get this group of diverse, self-interested, agenda-driven, hungry miscreants (AKA, your loved ones) what they want while at the same time getting yourself what you want and while ensuring that everyone’s unique and very specific pizza predilections have been duly considered in a way that makes them feel heard, included, and valued?

More importantly - how the F$#% do you get a gotdam pizza before you lose consciousness !?!?!?

Organizations and employees across the country face the “pizza” questions all day every day.

How do we consider and leverage the diversity of thoughts, feelings, experiences and , of course, personal and professional agendas and KPIs of the group and still get things done before we all starve to death? (or miss a product launch deadline, delay systems upgrade for the 5^th time, destroy employee morale and engagement, lose 6% market share etc.)     

The way companies, leaders, PMPs, work groups, employees etc. respond to the pizza question is among the most reliable indicators of employee engagement, operational agility, employee retention and outcomes. From higher employee satisfaction rates to lower turnover, increased revenue and innovation, to market share – the better organizations are at working together - the better organizations are.

However, if the spoken and unspoken rules of engagement, the “how’s” and “why’s” of collaboration, are not well defined and understood, if accountability to those rules and expectations and to one another is inconsistent, collaboration quickly becomes a black hole of a time and resources. At its worst, the very word stands as a monument to corporate rhetoric and hypocrisy more readily associated to disharmony, contention, sunken costs and sub optimization than it is competitive advantage. Businesses become lethargic, frozen in place by administration, non-value-add communications, travel, endless emails, personal agendas and meetings scheduled seemingly for the sole sake of scheduling the next meeting.

The spirit and intention of collaboration (to share and leverage the experience and insight of relevant members of the organization towards the best interest of a specific and tangible objective) can be subjugated to an increasingly insidious, implicit ( or clearly communicated ) need to gain consensus and maintain an outward appearance of inclusion, harmony, active listening and empathy as the consideration and satiation of personal feelings begins to take precedent over group, project and organizational objectives and progress thereof.  If you’re often left scratching your head ( or saying 'what the f', 'why the f', who the 'f' etc.) wondering why your organization, department or team take so long to get things done while everyone is still smiling- chronic collaboration and ruinous empathy (Kim Scott) may be the diagnosis.

Like so many other potentially good things in life (alcohol, exercise, money, social media, drugs, money, power, cell phones, AI...pizza) collaboration is not innately good solely based on the want of it, presence of it or the good intentions behind it. Collaboration requires constant attention, refinement, communication, accountability, and investment from everyone involved. It requires individuals to prioritize their commitment to the group above their commitment to themselves .

Most importantly (and most often overlooked), healthy collaboration requires that the goals and objectives of everyone involved align not only within the defined collaborative space (in the group’s pursuit of the initiative at hand) but also within their respective day to day work, departments, business units and among their leaders.

If the finance team is seeking to collaborate on a project with the supply chain and manufacturing teams to reduce on hand inventory levels of the widgets they make but manufacturing is being told by their VP that they need to keep producing more and more widgets in order to hit their department specific KPIs collaboration between these teams has already failed before the PMP hits 'send' on the project kickoff meeting notice .

Below are a couple of ground rules to consider when asking for, leading, participating in or promoting collaboration at work... or ordering a pizza . 

• Ensure that external goals (individual, department, organizational etc.) align with the goals of collaboration. Don’t ask or expect people to work in the interest of one KPI or strategy that competes with an existing one or one that works against their own interest (remember Laozi’s lessons). Competing goals are almost certainly indicate the existence of organizational silos and more deeply rooted dysfunction. These are landmines, unseen and unexpected, buried just below the surface of what appears to the untrained eye to be an otherwise clear and well-traveled happy path towards meaningful collaboration. Seek, find and dismantle these through candid conversation with senior stakeholders and team members before the collaboration starts.  

• Clearly define “best interest”. When cross functional teams collaborate, the best interest of the project and the role the project plays in support of the best interest of the organization (not the individual, not a single business unit, not a secondary political agenda…) must be clearly defined. From the outset this will act as the group’s 'North Star' throughout the collaboration and even beyond. As an added bonus, when decisions get tough, referring to the definition of “best interest” can help us make those decisions clearer, faster and more consistently.

• Include the right people… and only the right people. Many organizations seem to have forgotten that inclusion (Oxford's definition , not the DEI version) is not the goal of collaboration; it is just one of many tactics employed to help support the attainment of the best possible outcome. Unpopular as it may be to say to think or say right out loud- the truth is often unpopular. Effective collaborators share core competencies including ( but not limited to) active listening, written and verbal communication, adaptability, accountability ( self and others), EQ, initiative, open mindedness and an ability to have the difficult conversations that invariably result from collaborative efforts. These are functionally and technically capable employees - though not necessarily experts. These are highly engaged , respected, credible and trusted members of their teams, departments and the organization. If the presence of any one of these characteristics is debatable or missing entirely -  think twice.  

When seen as a goal (collecting as many people from as many places as possible regardless of their potential contribution, experience, knowledge, or even interest just so the organization's leaders feel good about themselves) inclusion is time consuming, expensive, frustrating, disengaging, counterintuitive to the agility and progress of any group effort.

Psychologist Max Ringelmann’s research tells us that there is a tipping point between inclusion (the number of people involved) , individual effort and ROI thereof. This phenomenon is aptly and unimaginatively called the Ringelmann Effect and says that less can be more where inclusion and collaboration are the subjects. A single representative from each affected or contributing department or team works well when the right people are included.

Collaboration is like sex and sense of humor - we all think we're great at it and no one has the heart to tell us otherwise. Instead we all just smile politely at one another and wait patiently for it to be over.   

Bottom line is that collaboration is a competency comprised of a complex aggregation of other competencies. Everyone is not by default of having detectable heartbeat , capable of collaboration.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

• Don’t look for, expect, or require consensus. Collaboration does not mean consensus. As illustrated by our protagonist’s (you) efforts to order Friday night dinner for the family, the potential to achieve consensus on even the most basic of decisions decreases accordingly as group size increases. This is where the definition of 'best interest' (aka North Star ) can save the day for us yet again by reminding everyone where they are going and why , guiding conversation, debate and decision making. 

That said, prepare the group from the start, there should be no expectation of or even need for consensus. Decisions will be made that people don’t agree with when they align with "best interest". 

THAT is when the TRW and REAL collaboration begins and THAT is why Pizza Huts right-sized and delicious 'Personal Pan Pizzas' exist.