What this is about
Those in the middle of the work mainly see their own part. A cooperation therefore needs, alongside the work itself, some form of support: someone or something that keeps the whole in view. This phase runs in parallel with the day-to-day work and ends only when the cooperation ends.
The guiding question
Who sees the cooperation as a whole?
In every cooperation there are people who know their own contribution well, and nobody who sees how all the contributions fit together, unless this is deliberately arranged. Yet the weak points of the whole lie between the contributions: in handovers, in questions nobody feels responsible for, in two parts that are each good on their own and do not fit together. Supporting a cooperation means creating a vantage point from which the whole can be seen, and returning to it regularly. That may be a person, a meeting or a body, and often it is all three.
What helps now
Coordination as a task in its own right. Coordinating a cooperation is work and should be named, allocated and, where appropriate, paid as such. The coordinator does not have more say than the others but a different job: following up on commitments, securing handovers, asking what is missing. The role can rotate, but it should never be vacant.
Regular review. Besides working meetings, it takes occasional meetings whose subject is not the work but the cooperation itself: what is going well, what is sticking, what has changed. A review every few months is often enough. It is where unease can be voiced before it hardens into a conflict, and where it becomes clear whether the cooperation needs to develop.
An outside view. Those involved can never quite see the whole from outside. It is therefore worth arranging an outside view before it is needed. In a company, this may be an advisory board that advises management and mediates between shareholders. In cooperations without their own bodies, it may be a trusted person who looks at the cooperation once a year, or a mediator on call whom the participants named together at the outset. Such a mediator is quickly available, knows the cooperation in outline, and does not have to be found at the very moment when the parties can no longer agree on anyone.
Documentation as memory. A cooperation that records its decisions and the reasons for them can remember itself. This helps newcomers, stops the same questions being renegotiated again and again, and provides common ground if a dispute arises. A short record of decisions, kept where everyone knows to look, is enough. Reliability matters more than completeness.
The typical mistake
The typical mistake is to confuse support with surveillance. Coordination then turns into a control function, review into performance appraisal, and the advisory board into a supervisory body to which one must justify oneself. The participants start defending themselves against the support instead of using it. They speak openly only where the support serves the cooperation and not one side.
Online
Online, support is easier to set up and easier to neglect. Easier to set up, because an advisory board or a review can meet live online without travel, and a mediator from another city is as available as one nearby. Easier to neglect, because people do not run into each other in the corridor, and the unease one might read in faces on site can remain invisible online.
A review online therefore needs a clear format. It works well if everyone writes a few sentences asynchronously beforehand and the live online conversation then builds on them. That way, those who are reticent in conversation are heard as well.
Tools that measure activity are no substitute for support. They see movement, not cooperation. Documentation, on the other hand, almost produces itself online when decisions are recorded in the shared workspace rather than in private messages. More on this under Meeting online and Good practice. What makes a cooperation succeed is described on The click and its conditions.
Law in this phase
- Shareholders and management: an advisory board (Beirat) is barely regulated by statute, so its tasks, rights and composition must be set out carefully in the articles or partnership agreement.
- Resolving conflicts: how negotiation, mediation, arbitration and the courts fit together, and how a mediator can be agreed before any dispute.
- Shareholders among themselves: which information rights and duties of loyalty the members of a company owe one another, even where nobody formally supports the cooperation.
Next
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