Target, the American retailer, went through a dramatic turnaround when CEO, Brian Cornell, took over in 2014. At the time, the company had some serious problems and their sales were plummeting. Analysts claimed that Target was doomed and ready to be crushed by the Amazon juggernaut.
In 2017, Brian Cornell announced a $7 billion strategic plan to transform the company’s competitive position. By August 2019, Target’s stock price had rebounded to an all-time high. Revenues for fiscal year 2019 jumped more than 7 percent over 2017’s results.
One of the most notable features of Target’s turnaround was the company’s launch of more than 30 new in-house brands in those 2 years. Their goal was to increase sales of Target-owned brands by $10 billion which required an avalanche of brand introductions unprecedented in retail industry history. Target’s Brand Design Lab were challenged with the mission of designing at least 10 new brands every year, with the timeline for each brand just 5 months or less. Failure was not an option.
Target’s Brand Design Lab had to change their ways of collaborating in order to achieve outcomes no retailer had ever achieved before. They found their solution in a new form of deeper collaboration that is called co-elevating collaboration. Driven by the company’s audacious goals, Target’s teamwork yielded transformative outcomes through fast and faithful execution of this formula:
Transformative outcomes = Radical inclusion + Bold input + Agility
Radical inclusion
It refers to a commitment to true diversity of voices and inputs in the collaboration process. It’s all about unlocking and extracting uniquely powerful ideas and perspectives by embracing snd engaging a much broader, wider team. This approach drives breakthrough ideas and innovations throughout the organisation by attracting employees viewpoints from the widest possible range of departments and areas of expertise.
"We believe you can only create a great product with a diverse team. One of the reasons Apple products work really great is that the people working on them are not only engineers and computer scientists, but artists and musicians" - Tim Cook
Bold input
It is the gift you receive when you encourage candid and courageous feedback from a radically inclusive team. When team members can engage openly in back-and-forth conversations, they debate what’s working, what isn’t, and what they should do more or less of. All ideas are brought together to be filtered, sorted, debated and decided upon.
Agility
It is the method for putting radical inclusion and bold input into motion as a continuous iterative step function until we get it right. By breaking project cycles into shorter sprints and checking in more frequently, teams sharpen their focus on achieving short-term outcomes that drive the pace of change forward. This methodology is commonly referred as “scrum”. When applied to other disciplines, agility makes it possible for transformative breakthroughs to emerge over weeks and months, rather than years.
"When you have the right team members working as partners in a collaborative, inclusive, and agile work environment, you can expect great things" - Dick Johnson
Disruptive change demands this kind of authentic co-elevating co-creation. We all need to go higher together to find breakthrough solutions, whether on small individual projects or huge initiatives. Whatever your title, whatever the size of your team, your job is to bring more people in, help generate larger, more impactful ideas, and fond ways to execute faster. It all starts with a process that fundamentally changes how you and your teammates think about, organise, and execute on collaboration.
Recontracting: the essential first step
I have seen in many teams how true co-elevating collaboration can’t take hold until all the old habits of second-rate collaboration are laid on the table with their shortcoming exposed. When launching a new project, in one of the first meetings, if not in THE first, we need to take stock of all the historical routines and work-culture norms that had previously prevented you from generating outstanding results.
That’s the first first step in a process called “recontracting” by Keith Ferrazzi.
The aim of recontracting is to ensure that bold input keeps flowing strongly through all the stages of iteration. Everyone comes together and agrees to engage in a new social contract of behaviours that support co-creation. It’s easy after all, to check the boxes for team diversity yet fail to get the value of inclusivity. The real challenge is sticking to processes and practices that will give us access to the team’s wide diversity of voices and contributions.
Recontracting sets group expectations for how we will behave through the collaboration. And what makes it so valuable is that we raise the bar for high performance while agreeing to accept each other’s faults when we fall short. When we remind ourselves to have empathy for each other’s habits and rituals, it becomes easier to commit to supporting each other in forming new ones.
Make candour compulsory
Before we start collaborating on a project, we must first be ruthlessly candid with ourselves: “Do we trust each other? Do we feel safe sharing our boldest, most critical ideas openly?” These are the foundational questions we must confront if we expect to maintain candour moving forward.
We will most likely have work to do around candour with our teammates before diving in with them. It’s not necessary to be the official team leader to in order to initiate the recontracting conversation. We just need to care enough about our teammates and team outcomes to take the plunge and advocate for more candid and transparent collaborations.
Having said that, the key obstacle to candour on most teams and in most company cultures is a lack of psychological safety. People must feel safe and secure in their positions in order to risk speaking out and sharing their ideas openly. Amy C. Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, and leading researcher on the subject, says people who feel psychologically safe tend to be more innovative, learn more from their mistakes, and are motivated to improve their team or company. They’re more likely yo offer ideas, recognise mistakes, ask for help, and provide feedback.
Most organisations don’t have that kind of candour culture, so it’s important to recontract for candour at the very start of every collaboration. However we also need to set the collective expectation for the team to grow psychological safety through deepening relationships and serving, sharing, and caring, then, on the back of this relationship, keep that candour conversation alive.
Check your emotions
Now it is time to prepare for conversations, thoughts, and ideas that may hit some nerves. Passion is understandable — even encouraged — in collaboration, but it’s smart for the team to discuss in advance how to work through any exchanges that grow overly heated.
Research around emotional contagion shows that we automatically synchronise our emotions with the facial expressions, voices, postures, movements, and behavioural cues of the people around us. Raised voices of course are easy to recognise, but many people express their emotions more subtly — they cross arms, scowl, turn down their mouths, or turn their bodies away from their teammates. In doing so, they risk arousing the same emotions in others and derailing the team’s progress. One slip can start a spiral.
The team might recontract from the start that each team member will take responsibility for monitoring the emotional climate in the room so that it nurtures innovation and creativity. Another approach is to agree that anyone can interrupt an emotionally charged exchange that risks intimidating people by calling out, “Red flag”, at which point the team agrees to step back and obverse their behaviour.
It’s taken me years to learn theses skills, but now when I find myself getting upset, I’ll take a break, walk around for a bit, even ask to reschedule the meeting. I’ll do anything to keep my emotions in check so I don’t risk impeding the team’s forward progress.
"The art of co-elevation lies in guiding the process and knowing when to be flexible and when to be a decisive leader " - Roel Louwhoff
Celebrate changing your mind
One great topic of conversation in recontracting is our common human frailty when it comes to changing our minds. We resist doing it — which is exactly why we must commit in advance to remaining open to this possibility all throughout the collaboration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. In a collaborative environment, try embracing the idea that you may be wrong. If it turns out to be true, you’ve learned something, and that’s a cause for celebration.
If you hear an opinion or an idea you dislike, try to see it from the other person’s point-of-view. Recognise that you are unlikely to be sure you are right until you are challenged by the robust input of others. When everyone recontracts to accept that even a great idea can be improved or perfected by bold input from others, it’s much easier to keep an open mind.
This is why I always try to stay open to the broadest, boldest input, no matter how much you I may disagree with it at first. I recommend approaching each new collaboration with the assumption that even with our best prior thinking, we are still at 30 percent of the final answer, the rest has yet to be co-created. Bold and agile thinking of this kind is what separates abundance mindset to scarcity mindset on your team and throughout the organisation during times of disruptive change.
"Real commitment to co-elevation principles gives rise to the kind of open, safe environment that energised people to take on big challenges and do their best" - Keith Krach
All the skills of co-elevating co-creation represent new and important employee competencies. In the new work world, our ability to master our area of expertise isn’t worth much if we can’t use it to collaborate at this kind of rapid pace. Target’s CEO, Brian Cornell sums it up perfectly: “Constant collaboration is at a new premium. It’s no longer about hiring great talent. It’s about hiring talent that will make the team great”.
