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Nearly a month ago Elisa, Lisa, and I had the opportunity to sit on a panel for a group focused on collaboration in the workplace. Yes, people find collaboration so important--and so difficult--to achieve at work that they take the time to gather and discuss it. They wanted to know how we'd applied collaboration to build BlogHer. Unfortunately we were told we didn't have all night.
As we entered the room and eyed the chairs, Lisa made a suggestion, "Why don't we put the chairs in a circle? While this wasn't the "normal" way the group's meetings were run, they gladly moved their chairs. We sat at different points of the circle, explaining aspects of BlogHer, and answering to the best of our ability the question on the minds of many in the group, "How can you run a business based solely on collaboration?"
We hear the "C" word thrown around as a corporate ideal. Training and development programs aspire to helping workers interact "cross functionally," which is really a nice way of saying working consciously, with other areas of the business in mind. And yet most companies are run with the an unspoken hierarchical dynamic: I tell you what to do, then you tell the person under you what to do, and so on. No one has any real visibility other than what the person above them wants and what the person beneath them did or didn't do.
Many companies don't achieve collaborative workplaces because they are difficult, and they scare people. They require a loosening of control and the big "T" word: Trust.
In the spirit of the BlogHer Conference taking place this week, I'd like to offer up my thoughts on collaboration--the good, the bad, and the surmountable.
Last year Elizabeth Albrycht of Future Tense blog asked me to do a write up on my experience with BlogHer; it ended up being a four part series on the benefits of feminine leadership. I'd been working with Lisa and Elisa for three months at that point and felt like I was on career Ecstasy and had yet to come down. I sat in front of my computer every morning, amazed at the things that women were making possible--rides, sessions, sponsorships--and all simply because we'd asked for their help. We had no money, no track record, none of the traditional corporate requirements to getting something done. But we valued all inputs, and that ended up being the special sauce.
A light turned on in my head last year that hasn't shut off: It's all about the community and leveraging all opinions, even the ones you don't agree with. I learned to turn off the judgement I placed on ideas and evaluated them based on two key criteria 1) The willingness of the person offering the idea to make it happen and 2) The pertinence of the idea to the community. (Note: Not the pertinence to ME, but to the community. So many subjects that may not have been personally interesting to me were winners at BlogHerCon '05, and some that I thought were not important to me ended up being the most illuminating, such as the MommyBlogging panel.
So now here we are, one year later. I'm not floating on the same cloud of exhilaration. The highly collaborative model which excited me so much last year has become my reality, and like any relationship, I can now experience its ups and downs. I can still say that collaboration is the best and only model from BlogHer, I can also provide qualified feedback on its potential pitfalls.
After showing the collaboration group how much we'd accomplished by leveraging the women's blogging community and co-creating BlogHer with them, we were asked several really good questions:
1) But how can you really get EVERYONE's input? Is that more lip service than a business philosophy?
2) How can you get anything done without a single leader? Where does the buck stop?
These questions had to be answered after last year's conference. We needed to expand the event to include more sessions and more people, but that also meant taking in more input, and taking more time to absorb that input.
I won't lie: It takes longer to make things happen when you go through the exercise of asking a community/your customers/your audience for their opinions and suggestions, and it takes even longer to implement those ideas. But, using BlogHerCon '05 as my example, the breadth and quality of the end product is entirely reliant on this process. You can't shortcut it, and--though
