We Need to Teach Collaboration for an Office-Less World
By Holly A. Bell
Cheating vs. Collaboration
Earlier this month we heard about a cheating scandal at Harvard University in which students worked together on a take-home exam they were expected to complete independently. As a professor I have a couple of concerns with this. First, while I understand the honor code (although ironically the exam was in an “Introduction to Congress” course), I wouldn’t give my students a take-home exam and not expect them to work together. Why not give an in-class open book, open note, open computer exam if independent work is required?
Sarah Green articulated my second concern very well in an article for The Harvard Business Review, entitled “Cheating at Harvard, and in the ‘Real World’”. In the ‘real world’ of work, no one operates in a vacuum. We don’t call this ‘cheating’, we call it collaboration and we do a terrible job teaching students how to collaborate. When you find a problem you cannot solve you use all your resources, including other people. Would it have been ‘cheating’ to contact a family member who happens to be an expert in the field rather than your Harvard classmate? Probably not. Yet collaboration with classmates builds life-long connections and identifies strengths in others that might be helpful to all involved throughout their careers.
Office-Less-Ness
To further emphasize the need to learn collaboration skills, there is a growing trend in the workplace toward virtual collaboration across great distances. The Wall Street Journal published an article earlier this month on Web-services company Automattic Inc., an office-less company with 123 employees working from their homes in 26 countries, 94 cities, and 28 U. S. states. While they do have an office in San Francisco that is used occasionally, they primarily communicate via Skype meetings, Internet chat, and phone calls. If a physical presence is required they simply fly somewhere in the world to meet.
Bill Poston, founding partner of another office-less company, Kalypso LP, suggests working in this type of environment requires comfort with ambiguity. This is a characteristic we see in entrepreneurs and I suspect the optimism, self-motivation, high internal locus of control, need to succeed, and other characteristics of entrepreneurs would also come in handy. This workplace need creates additional challenges for higher education and the way we should be teaching.
Holly A. Bell is a business professor, author, analyst, administrator, and blogger who lives in the Mat-Su Valley of Alaska. You can visit her website at www.professorhollybell.com.
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Collaboration image courtesy of Kookkai_nak