# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
SINGAPORE - The different ways Singaporeans have given back to society during the pandemic was the topic at a panel discussion at the Temasek Trust Conversation on Tuesday (Nov 3).

These include distributing thousands of care packs and the setting up of a new radio station tailored to the needs of senior citizens - keeping them engaged and entertained, and helping them to bridge the digital divide.

The discussion was hosted by philanthropic group The Majurity Trust executive director Martin Tan.

The panellists were Asia-Pacific lead of the Internet giant Google's charitable arm Marija Ralic, Mediacorp chief executive officer Tham Loke Kheng, Ninja Van Singapore co-founder and chief executive officer Lai Chang Wen and Vintage Radio SG co-founder and Radioactive managing director and co-founder Aloysius Tan.

Temasek Trust is the philanthropic arm of Singapore investment firm Temasek.

Mr Martin Tan noted that one of the trends in philanthropy is the idea of the power of the collective - collaborative philanthropy where different partners come together.

Doing so will not just help to reallocate resources more efficiently, but also help to enlarge the pie for beneficiaries.

The various speakers shared about the ways their organisations have played to their strengths in helping the vulnerable and those in need amid the Covid-19 pandemic here.

For example, Mediacorp as a national media platform was able to put out public education in the various languages, as well as helped to raise funds for those with disabilities through the Mediacorp Enable Fund administered by SG Enable, said Ms Tham.

Ninja Van as a logistics company tapped its nationwide network of doorstep delivery fleets to physically take care packs to those in need.

It also collaborated with other partners who were more well-placed to raise awareness of the initiative, such as creating social media campaigns - demonstrating the spirit of collaborative philanthropy, said Mr Lai.

The topic of collaborative philanthropy was also discussed in a conversation with Temasek International executive director and chief executive officer Dilhan Pillay Sandrasegara, hosted by The Straits Times editor and editor-in-chief of the English/Malay/Tamil Media Group at Singapore Press Holdings Warren Fernandez.

Mr Fernandez said that it is through bringing partners together to tackle a complex issue and devise solutions that these solutions can be implemented on a larger scale and at a quicker speed.

Mr Pillay said one issue during this Covid-19 pandemic that Temasek tackled was the issue of transporting Covid-19 patients.

The team at Temasek, with partners such as SMRT, SBS Transit and other transportation companies and engineering company Hope Technik, managed to retrofit more than 50 vehicles that could safely transport the patients.

Mr Fernandez said that in partnerships, trust and empathy is important, to have a shared sense of purpose.

Mr Pillay added that relationships are a multi-year investment, and that as an individual organisation, "we don't have all the skills and capabilities required".

"We have to augment what we have with others. But what gets us together has to be reliability and trust," he said. A common sense of purpose is also important, he added.

Mr Pillay also elaborated on Minister-in-charge of Social Services Integration Desmond Lee's call for a culture of regular giving to be cultivated, which would be a way of ensuring adequate funding for programmes at social service agencies.

"Generous giving is not about the amount but what you can afford to give... I think for us in Singapore, many of us have been a beneficiary of the system we've had in place, this is a good time for us to give back," he said.

Technology is also an enabler for regular giving, making it easier to do so, he added.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Collaborating with others to do good enables partners to reach out to more, says panel

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SINGAPORE - The different ways Singaporeans have given back to society during the pandemic was the topic at a panel discussion at the Temasek Trust Conversation on Tuesday (Nov 3). These include distributing thousands of care packs and the setting up of a new radio station tailored to the needs of senior citizens - keeping them engaged and entertained, and helping them to bridge the digital divide.

# data[].attributes.body
https://hbr.org/2020/07/7-strategies-for-promoting-collaboration-in-a-crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Big Cheese Photo/Getty Images

We've made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the importance of effective collaboration for long-term commercial success. Particularly in a crisis, organizations need to pull together experts with unique, cross-functional perspectives to solve rapidly changing, complex problems that have long-term implications. The diversity of experience allows a group to see risks and opportunities from different angles so that it can generate new solutions and adapt dynamically to changing situations.

Research shows, however, that anxiety makes people more risk-averse in a crisis; as a result, they are less likely to seek out differing perspectives. They tend to fall back on actions and solutions that have worked in the past - what researchers call "threat rigidity." The desire to try to bring things under control can also lead to a go-it-alone mentality. And as resources (finances, job opportunities, even physical supplies) dry up during a crisis, people often focus on self-preservation. As a result, collaboration across an organization can break down. Our research on the 2008 financial crisis, however, shows that collaboration leads to sustainably higher commercial performance. In this article, we offer seven actions that leaders can take to foster collaboration.

We collected a decade's worth of data on collaboration and financial performance across dozens of organizations, including professional service firms, financial institutions, and health care organizations. In interviews with some of the subjects, we asked open-ended questions about how they handled work during the crisis. Very different collaboration patterns became obvious. The exhibit below shows the outcomes for one law firm, which were typical across many of the companies we studied.

Records from project and financial databases showed how partners worked before, during, and after the crisis and their relative performance outcomes. To control for outliers, we excluded the partners with the highest and lowest performance historically and those in groups that were likely to flourish during a downturn, such as the bankruptcy and restructuring practices. We separated the remaining 400-plus partners into deciles based on the proportion of their work conducted with other partners versus on their own. Then we plotted their respective revenue generated during the period.

The results were stark. The most highly collaborative workers - the top 10% - grew their business during the crisis and continued that upward trajectory afterward (see the green line). The performance of the middle group (second and third deciles) declined slightly during the crisis, but their revenues started to recover within a year (see the yellow line). People in the third group (the bottom 70%) hunkered down and dramatically reduced their collaboration with others. They guarded their clients and hoarded work. The revenue generated by this group contracted during the crisis and still had not recovered five years after the recession had ended. We saw a similar pattern in other kinds of organizations.

Why did people work this way? As uncertainty and stress increased during the crisis, the highly collaborative people evolved their approach to developing business and executing work. They expanded their network across functional and industry silos and increased the number of colleagues they worked with. They were willing to pitch in on others' projects. They talked about how, as the crisis evolved and pressure rose, they teamed up with trusted colleagues to identify and pursue new opportunities - even when it meant getting less personal glory on a project-by-project basis. As a result, they ended up working on a wide variety of clients or projects, essentially spreading their bets across different kinds of opportunities. It's not that they hit only home runs; it's that they had more at-bats, and they played different positions as needed.

The self-focused, uncollaborative people took a wholly different approach. They erected walls around their projects, pushed colleagues away, held their business and clients closely, and hoarded work. As a result of their self-interested behavior, their network diminished. They had no "tribe" to help bring them into existing opportunities and to identify new ones. In one health care organization, for example, when grant funding started to dry up, the loners suffered because they weren't involved in enough different kinds of research initiatives to keep money flowing into their labs.

The obvious conclusion: The degree of collaboration during a crisis has a huge impact on whether companies and individual employees thrive.

Here is some advice for how leaders can promote collaboration:

1. Encourage naïve questions and constructive challenge. At McKinsey, where one of us (Heidi) once worked, this was called the "obligation to dissent": It's not only accepted but expected that people challenge each other's assumptions and offer new ideas. This means that nobody feels like she risks looking foolish by asking teammates with different functional backgrounds from hers to explain their thinking or define a technical term. Involving people with a wide variety of skills in an effort to tackle novel and complicated problems can help the group collectively see potential risks or solutions that would elude individual experts - especially when they are encouraged to be inquisitive.

2. Watch out for hoarding behaviors. Be imaginative about data sources that might show you behavioral patterns inside your organization: Nearly all leaders with whom we have worked have been surprised that they have access to various kinds of data that can show collaboration patterns (e.g., project management databases used to track grant funding or product development, CRM systems that show sales pipelines).

If such data isn't available, use pulse surveys to capture people's self-reported actions; a well-designed three-question survey can be completed in just a few minutes and reveal places where individualistic behavior is starting to creep in. For example, it might ask those surveyed the extent to which they agree or disagree - on a to-5 scale (1=strongly disagree; 5=strongly agree) - with these statements: 1) The group has a shared sense of purpose; 2) there is a high degree of trust within the group; and 3) colleagues regularly take credit for the work of others.

3. Connect with the front lines. Make direct contact with people down the hierarchy so you have unfiltered information about people's actions and states of mind. (This is especially critical when people are working remotely.) Such interactions can help leaders understand how employees are coping, identify areas where risks of go-it-alone behaviors are more likely, and establish linkages among people so that they are better able to support each other. Arlene Zalayet, an executive at Liberty Mutual who has 1,800 employees in her department, recently began holding 18 check-ins a month by video with groups, including entry-level workers. In one of these town halls, an administrative worker shared how Covid-19 was affecting her African-American community, sparking an important discussion about the value of the company's diversity efforts and what it would take to support different kinds of workers through this crisis.

4. Reinforce the business's purpose and goals frequently. A belief that their work fulfills a higher purpose motivates people to think and act in a more collective fashion - to be more open to collaboration. Clearly understanding the business goals helps people see how their own knowledge contributes to - but doesn't fully satisfy - the complex needs of the business. Leaders need to lower employees' sense of uncertainty and boost their confidence to reach out to colleagues. So even if your message hasn't changed, you need to repeat it because the world has changed and employees need to know that the existing direction still holds.

5. Get team members to reflect on their preferred ways of working. This includes the leader. When you're under stress, you're more likely to retreat to your comfort zone, so it's crucial that you think about what kinds of behaviors come most naturally to you. When the pressure builds, are you more likely to pick up the phone to commiserate and brainstorm with a colleague or to hole up and go it alone? As part of this process, revisit that behavioral assessment you completed last year. And get others' perspectives. For instance, ask people with whom you've been sheltering what they've observed you do when you're stressed. As team members becomes more aware of their typical styles, they can start to figure out how to use those tendencies to work more effectively as a group.

6. Play to your strengths. Rather than trying to change your natural tendencies - which is almost impossible during the stress of a crisis - focus instead on consciously using your style to improve collaboration. If you are naturally drawn to working on teams, then use your enthusiasm to foster an esprit de corps - for example, by calling out when the team has reached even a small milestone. Boosting engagement and morale isn't "soft work"; it leads to quantifiable gains in productivity and other "hard" business outcomes. We saw this firsthand with Gillian, a senior manager at one of the Big 4 accounting firms we recently advised. She deliberately builds team members' confidence and trust in each other's competence by highlighting their expertise, calling out ways their knowledge helps to achieve the team's goals and then widely sharing team-based success stories. If you share Gillian's teamwork orientation, just be careful you don't overdo it and join many teams at once. Be selective and focus on the highest-priority projects.

If you're inclined to work independently, you can use that tendency to improve teamwork by helping drive execution. Sameer, a finance director at a software company that we studied, has been nicknamed the "teamwork tsar" because he's the one most likely to point out when working as a group is worth it and when independent work will be more effective. His go-it-alone preference is a healthy counterpoint that keeps the team focused on the task when others might get bogged down in seeking consensus or when group discussion leads down an unproductive rabbit hole.

Leaders need to appreciate that it doesn't take a single type of person to boost collaboration; they need to draw on the diversity of behavioral styles and coach each team member to play their own part in boosting cross-silo working.

7. Champion collaborative leaders and teams. Many leaders undermine their talk about the importance of collaboration when they focus praise exclusively on individual employees for hitting a sales target or working overtime. While recognizing individual effort, also acknowledge the team that helped make the person a hero by calling out the specific actions it took to provide support and the ways all of its members accomplished a goal together. Especially when employees are working from home, leaders should emphasize the role of supporting players by mentioning family members' role in making it possible for workers to be productive.

At some point leaders should examine and address organizational structures such as compensation and incentive systems and hiring practices to see whether they support or undermine a culture of collaboration. But obviously, that will probably have to wait until the crisis has passed. In the meantime, try applying the seven strategies. By promoting cross-silo collaboration, your organization is more likely to survive the current hard times and thrive when they're over.

If our free content helps you to contend with these challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
7 Strategies for Promoting Collaboration in a Crisis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We've made our coronavirus coverage free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic highlight the importance of effective collaboration for long-term commercial success.

# data[].attributes.headline
Tele-conference is increasingly becoming the norm. Being able to communicate well with others ensure tasks can be completed successfully.

# data[].attributes.subject
Tele-conference is increasingly becoming the norm. Being able to communicate well with others ensure tasks can be completed successfully.

# data[].attributes.headline
We are a business hub with expats which come from several different nations. Learning to collaborate well will ensure that things can be communicated properly to recipients of different cultural background.

# data[].attributes.subject
We are a business hub with expats which come from several different nations. Learning to collaborate well will ensure that things can be communicated properly to recipients of different cultural background.

# data[].attributes.headline
More online work needs to be done be it locally or internationally. AN example, would be collaboration between trainers helping technicians in other countries thru Zoom or other media.

# data[].attributes.subject
More online work needs to be done be it locally or internationally. AN example, would be collaboration between trainers helping technicians in other countries thru Zoom or other media.

# data[].attributes.headline
Most of us are working online. Thus, collaborating digitally online is an essential task.

# data[].attributes.subject
Most of us are working online. Thus, collaborating digitally online is an essential task.