Moving to a single vision
It is easy and quick to identify the differences and points of pain in the interactive/traditional agency relationship and process. Unfortunately, most companies do not work hard enough to identify the similarities and common interests from which joint solutions and a single vision exciting to both parties could be built. A vision that is so exciting that all concerned will forget their differences and focus on the benefits of improved collaboration. As they work to expand their shared vision and common interests, they somehow, without any more effort, start overcoming the cultural differences and their collaboration issues. The areas of conflict start to shrink and will continuously shrink until they turn into a well-functioning team and very collaborative partners.
Improving your working relationships
Here are five steps you can use to improve the working relationship between your interactive unit and your traditional agency. You will need an independent adviser, who is perceived as unbiased, to work with you and facilitate the collaboration improvement efforts.
Step 1: Define the collaboration problem
Do you need to improve collaboration, or are you instead looking to improve cooperation, or maybe coordination? Or should you totally integrate the two groups?
Cooperation is an informal relationship without a commonly agreed mission, structure, or plans. Each organization retains its authority and only shares information. On the other hand, in coordination, there is a more formal relationship and understanding of the mission that must be accomplished, but each organization will still retain its own authority. In collaboration, it is more formal, with clearly defined and agreed roles, responsibilities, process, structure, mission, and plans.
The extreme form of collaboration is to demand that the interactive and the traditional units be totally integrated. In that form, each side loses its identity and autonomy to become one combined unit with one mission. The respective functions and capabilities are then housed in specific departments that collaborate with each other to achieve the mission.
Step 2: Measure where the collaboration problems are coming from and how big they are
You do this by collecting data on the collaboration issues from each of the units and key stakeholder groups.
Step 3: Analyze the root causes of key problems identified
Typical root causes may include:
- No collaboration agreement between the parties. There is no clarity around what acceptable behavior is.
- No clear and documented joint working processes. No clear handoffs (from whom and to whom are work and information flowing?). No clearly defined inputs and outputs between the two groups.
- No clear roles and responsibilities have been defined and agreed; hence, people get into each other's territories.
- No clear authority and ownership of the processes, the inputs, the outputs, the key decisions, and key client relationships.
- No common language and tools for working together. No shared learning, no common culture and/or shared values.
- No measurement of collaboration performance. No tracking and monitoring of compliance.
Step 4: Implement a joint collaboration agreement with an agreed-upon process
This should be followed by instituting practices such as measurement and tracking of collaboration performance, compliance issue identification and resolution.
Step 5: Control performance of your collaboration improvements
This involves continually monitoring compliance, rewarding great adherence, and encouraging continuous improvements through training and carrot/stick incentives. Senior leadership and executive management on both sides must "walk the talk" and properly support and enforce the collaboration agreement and process for the improvements in collaboration to stick.
Conclusion
The traditional/interactive relationship continues to experience many of the same problems as the agency/client relationship. However, the interactive agency cannot easily dump its traditional agency partners. Improving collaboration is a way to heal dysfunctional relationships so you get happy interactive agency employees who love their work within the agency.
Unfortunately, if the relationship problems are not addressed expeditiously, the quality of interactive work will eventually degrade. The cost of producing stand-alone interactive or joint online/offline integrated campaigns goes up significantly due to miscommunication and turf wars that result in poor alignment with the brand and strategy, significant false starts, rework, waste, and non-value-added activities. In addition, key employees may leave, and word can spread that the company is not a good place for interactive talent. The danger here is that you may start losing your interactive projects and stop winning new ones, a bad position to be in given the growing explosion in interactive demand.
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Ben Nneji is president of SigmaWorks Group.
