Building a Collaborative Culture

And how to handle inevitable conflict in any organization

A few years ago I took a great leadership development course on how to take conflict in the workplace and turn it into collaboration. Much of the content was based on the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), “a conflict style inventory, which is a tool developed to measure an individual's response to conflict situations.”¹

Though I know I run the risk of sounding cheesy in posting this (“Conjoined Triangles of Success”, anyone?), I found it was quite effective at isolating the prerequisites that drive any truly collaborative organization. In short, organizations (or better yet, organizational cultures) that are able to turn inevitable conflict into constructive collaboration have two key features:

1. High care for others, AND

2. High care for oneself

Without those things, it’s easy to fall into other approaches to settling conflict, like competition, compromise, accommodation, or worst of all, avoidance. Here’s a graphic to illustrate the point:

One thing I think everyone can agree on is that collaborative cultures are most likely to generate outsized impact. They attract top talent, foster their development, and tend to achieve goals set by leadership. But by filtering for individuals who care for themselves and others, founders have a unique opportunity to reliably and repeatedly build cultures that favor collaboration over competition and address conflict head on rather than avoid it.

Looking at our own portfolio, the cultures we view as the most collaborative have leadership that show their clear care for themselves and others. Be ruthless in setting that strong foundation of individuals that bring those two key things to the table.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas%E2%80%93Kilmann_Conflict_Mode_Instrument