The Tribe Report 9. The Collaboration Issue | Page 22

INTERVIEW

DEFINING COLLABORATION
INTERVIEW WITH MICHELE SHAUF, PH.D.
BY STEPHEN BURNS
Michele Shauf is the director of corporate learning and
development at eVestment, which provides data and
intelligence to the institutional investing community.
Her Ph.D. is in semiotics, which she describes as the
study of how human beings create, interpret and
exchange signs in structured ways. Prior to joining
eVestment, she served as Learning Strategist for Invesco
and as a professor of Communication and Information
Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also
co-edited the book Computers, Ethics, and Society.
TRIBE: HOW IMPORTANT IS COLLABORATION IN THE
WORKPLACE?
SHAUF: Almost anything of any significance in a company
requires cross-functional, cross-departmental collaboration. If
you do things in a siloed, autonomous way, there are destined
to be problems down the road. Collaboration is mandatory.
TRIBE: HOW DO YOU FACILITATE THAT COLLABORATION?
SHAUF: Wherever there is a need for information flow and data
sharing, there has to be a collaborative spirit, and ideally a
collaborative culture and habits in place to facilitate that.
But I just don’t think most companies have collaborative DNA
after they reach a certain maturity level. There’s definitely
a tipping point where the emphasis becomes more about
maintaining the status quo and keeping things running, as
opposed to collaboration which is really, at the heart, generative.

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TRIBE: WHAT’S DRIVING THE NEW AGE OF COLLABORATION?
SHAUF: Technology and data. To really get a complete picture
of things there has to be clear and free flows of information
and data. And that requires certain cultural structures, but
it’s more complicated than that. There are technologies and
downstream impacts; just operational reasons why people
have to work together to make it all happen.
TRIBE: WHAT SORT OF TECHNOLOGIES HAVE YOU USED
SUCCESSFULLY IN THE PAST?
SHAUF: The classic example is the intranet. Then there’s the
standard conference call, advance shared-desktop webinars, or
using some sort of interactive functionality like instant polling.
You can use those basic business tools really successfully for
global collaboration.
At Invesco we actually conducted global brainstorming
sessions in an effort to brand some new technologies we
were implementing. We were able to use those very basic
tools, certainly not the most advanced social media suite, but
we had to use them in very structured and thoughtful ways.
TRIBE: SO YOU CAN USE BASIC TOOLS, BUT YOU NEED A
COLLABORATIVE CULTURE FIRST?
SHAUF: I think just opening up a space for collaboration is kind
of the first step. And then being able to facilitate it.
Collaboration is one of those things that everybody thinks they
know what it is, but actually there is a lot of disagreement on